The Slow Leak.

part of my job is to teach people to be at ease, to work through parts of their life that aren’t always easy through my yoga classes. Today when I finished teaching a feeling emerged that I didn’t want to name.

The feeling wasn’t tiredness, though I hadn't slept well and it probably didn’t help. Something lower. A real physical sensation, an ache in the bottom of my ribs, where they meet my breastbone, almost like heartburn. It crept into my jaw. A quiet, restless pressure.

I know this feeling. I've just never written it down like this.

It's loneliness.

There's a particular kind of loneliness, It doesn't arrive suddenly, it seeps in. One moment you're in blissful solitude, which you chose and value and need. And then quietly, somehow the crossing over on the other side of it. An uneasy feeling instead of a pleasant one. There’s a thing about solitude and loneliness, the line between them isn't defined like a wall. It's a slow leak and transition from one to the other.

Tokyo in summer doesn't help. The heat and humidity is oppressive in a way that's hard to describe if you haven't been here at this time of year. It keeps you inside. It slows everything down. The city empties of energy even as it stays full of people. And when your days lose their usual texture, the rhythms and routines and small human encounters that you don't even notice until they're gone, the quiet gets louder.

I've lived here for 29 years. I love this city. I also know what it is to never quite belong to it.

Being visibly foreign in Japan is a specific kind of invisible. People look at me and don't see someone who has spent nearly three decades building a life here, learning the language, raising a daughter, running a studio, becoming part of a community. They see someone who doesn't fit. After all this time, I still live in the gap between being a visitor and being home.

Most of the time I carry that lightly. In summer, when everything slows and the distractions thin out, I feel the weight of it more.

My daughter moved out last year. My husband works late. Some days the house holds a silence I haven't learned to be comfortable with just yet.

And here's the thing I don’t like to admit: when the loneliness comes, my first instinct isn't to sit with it. It's to fill the time. Because if I'm busy, I'm not lonely. And if I'm not lonely, I'm not ……… what? A loser? Someone who should have more friends, be more gregarious, have people falling over themselves to spend time with her?

That's the voice. Harsh, isn't it.? I wouldn't let one of my students speak to herself like that.

I lead a yoga community. I hold space for women who are burnt out, who have a complicated relationship with rest, who are trying to find their way back to themselves. I show up with strength and warmth and, sometimes, carefully chosen vulnerability.

But I can't share everything in that role. There's a loneliness in that too, the particular ache of being the one who holds the container, who doesn't get to put her own weight down inside it.

It's lonely at the top. It's lonely in the gap. It's lonely in the quiet house on a regular Wednesday in Tokyo.

I'm not writing this to fix anything. I'm not going to end with a breathing technique or a reminder about the koshas. I'm writing this because I think you might know exactly what I'm talking about, and I don't want you to feel strange for knowing all about it. I think it might be normal….. at least I think I may not be the only person in the whole wide world to feel this way.

The slow leak is real. the transition from alone to lonely is real. The jaw ache is real. The rush to fill time so you don't have to sit with the feeling that's real too.

And the voice that tells you you're failing at something other people find easy? That's the part that needs the most gentleness, just because it's there, and it's yours, and it deserves to be spoken to the way you'd speak to someone you love.

The way I'd speak to you, if you came to me with this.

The way I'm trying, today, to speak to myself.

If this landed somewhere true for you, I'd love to know. You can find me at setagayayogastudio@gmail.com — just reply and tell me you felt it too. That's enough.