How Do We Pivot?
A Love Letter to Change, Clarity, and Community Flow
🌒 How Do We Pivot?
A Love Letter to Change, Clarity, and Community Flow
Osiris Booque | Autumn 2025
🗂️ Inside This Update
Nunchi and the Practice of Perception
The Veterans Administration + Ethereal Pivot
New Home Studio in Topanga
Flow Through Winter 2026 Applications Open
Ayurvedic Menopause Training: 3-Weekend Immersion
SCORE SBA Mentorship
Stewarding Home in Topanga
Affiliate Updates
Closing Reflection
🌀 The Practice Beneath the Pivot
Aloha beautiful community,
Sometimes the Yoga is in the staying. Sometimes, it’s in the letting go. And sometimes, it’s in the pause between both.
This season, two doors closed… my contracts with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Ethereal Yoga … each of which held deep roots for me. The lessons didn’t come in anger or shock, but in Nunchi, the Korean art of sensing the energy in the room, reading the field, and responding with grace. Nunchi teaches us to perceive without absorbing, to act without performing. It’s a reminder that awareness itself is a form of love.
So, I’ve been practicing presence not reaction. Sitting in what’s real. Not rushing to rebuild, but allowing the next form to emerge from alignment, not urgency.
This is Yoga Therapy off the mat.
💔 The Core, the Contract, and the Cut
The work I was doing inside the VA system was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t abstract wellness. It was holding space for pregnant Veterans, trauma survivors, and human beings navigating the invisible terrain between service and selfhood.
It was also the first job I ever genuinely liked. The first time in my life I felt happy about the work I was doing inside a system. As a Black man, to have a role that was independently sustained, respected, and rooted in community not just tolerated but needed, carried a weight I didn’t even know I was holding until it was gone.
To enjoy a job, to wake up wanting to serve, to be able to bring my full self into a federal space and see it make a difference … that was healing in itself. Which is why the loss hit so hard. When the government shutdowns began and budgets froze, Yoga Therapy, one of the few services addressing the nervous system and emotional regulation directly was quietly cut from the budget. No notice. No closure sessions. No time to transition my veterans. One week I was helping them breathe through the contractions of new motherhood and complex trauma. The next week, I was just… gone. It broke my heart because healing is built on continuity. On trust. On relationship. And to be pulled out of that flow, out of their lives, felt like a rupture that words can’t quite soothe.
There was also a deeper personal echo here. Last September, my father passed away. This September, this transition arrived. Two autumns in a row, life has asked me to start again. It’s almost poetic, like my school year always begins in grief and growth. The crazy thing is, I can’t even make a federal claim. Because I was a 1099 contractor serving a federal agency, unemployment benefits aren’t on the table. There’s no safety net for the healers who serve the system when the system itself shuts down. So I’ve had to apply every ounce of my own Yoga Therapy practice to stay steady. Breath by breath, body to back, getting back to back again. And still, through it all, the lesson keeps returning: the need for Yoga Therapy at the governmental level continually proves its own necessity.
Each shutdown, each bureaucratic delay, each “pause for funding review,” only exposes how much these systems depend on regulation and restoration, not just in policy, but in people. Yoga Therapy is not destined to stay a luxury. It’s infrastructure for resilience and until that truth is integrated into the governmental body, we’ll keep facing cycles of reaction instead of regulation, collapse instead of recalibration.
If you’re a veteran seeking tools for regulation, reconnection, or simply a space to breathe again this work continues, beyond the system.
I invite you to stay connected below.
🕊️ The Deeper Lesson When Two Structures Fall
This moment revealed something bigger: that the need for Yoga Therapy at the governmental level continually proves its own necessity. Yoga Therapy is not sustainable as a luxury and until that truth is fully integrated into the governmental body, we’ll keep facing cycles of reaction instead of regulation.
When the VA contract ended, I thought that would be the big fall of the season. But then came the second one, my departure from Ethereal Yoga. Transparency matters to me, and I want to share what happened with honesty and grace.
The studio shared that due to my lack of punctuality, arriving on time rather than early, and my scent of cannabis, I had crossed classroom boundaries. They also stated some ambiguous claims about professionalism but refuse to engage in restorative dialogue. I can hold that. That may be true from their perspective, and as a business owner myself, I respect anyone’s right to uphold a professional aesthetic for their establishment. That’s their temple to tend, and that’s cool.
But there are two deeper issues at play here, both of which point to the larger ecosystem of wellness work, labor, and perception.
⏳ 1. The Labor Question
At many studios, and I say this with love, there’s an either spoken and compromising or an unspoken expectation that teachers will arrive fifteen minutes early, stay fifteen minutes late, and hold all the unseen energy of the space in between.
It’s not unique to Ethereal; it’s a cultural norm in the wellness world and beyond.
We call it seva, selfless service, and there’s beauty in that. But as the wellness field matures, we’re being invited to have new conversations about uncompensated labor. If a class is one hour, yet teachers are expected to be present for an hour and a half, that time deserves recognition and fair exchange. The same goes for mileage, commute, and the invisible costs of care. Yoga Therapists and at times Yoga teachers hold space for integration, nervous systems, emotions, life transitions. It’s sacred work. But sacred doesn’t mean unpaid. So this moment wasn’t about blame. It was about alignment. I account for transportation and transition time in my professional fees, not out of ego, but out of integrity. And in that way, the structure and I simply had different maps for what professionalism looks like.
🌿 2. The Scent of Stigma
The second piece, the scent of cannabis, opens another necessary dialogue. In spaces filled with palo santo, rosemary, sage, essential oils, incense, and perfume, the presence of cannabis still carries stigma. To me, this wasn’t about smell. It was about story. We live in a time where plant medicine, regulation, and spirituality overlap in complex ways. Cannabis has always been part of contemplative practice for many cultures, but in certain spaces it still triggers bias, even when unseen.
I don’t fault anyone for their boundaries. But I do believe we need to unpack how perception and stigma shape inclusion in wellness. Yoga Therapy is not just Yoga Asana. It’s not performance, not posture, not product. It’s a clinical, therapeutic field that brings psychology and embodiment together and therapy, by its nature, makes people uncomfortable. It stirs truth, evokes sensation, and calls the body into honesty. That discomfort is part of the medicine. So yes, I can people uncomfortable but hopefully it’s never without care. It’s because this work is real.
🧬 What This Really Means
Both experiences, the federal contract and the studio, are mirrors. They’ve shown me that my next evolution isn’t about fighting for space in old systems. It’s about building new ones where wellness providers are paid ethically, plant medicine is not demonized, and trauma-informed practice is valued as essential, not optional. This is what pivoting with integrity looks like. When the federal dollars dried up, many in our community reminded me, “That’s when you look for state funding or foundation grants.” They were right. The work continues, just in new containers. Here’s what’s emerging from the ashes of those contracts:
🧘🏾♂️ Flow Through Winter 2026 Applications are now open. Our signature eight week nervous system recalibration returns with the same roots and deeper soil.
🏡 Friday Night Yin Yoga Therapy Now hosted at my home studio in Topanga, with both in person and virtual options available.
⚖️ Veteran Discounts Now offered for all private and group sessions as a small gesture of gratitude and continued service.
As I keep tending to the roots, I’m opening more channels for support. If you have experience with funding, grants, or ideas on how to navigate these transitions, I’m listening. This is how community interfaces as the ecosystem, a place to brainstorm, share insight, and grow together.
🏡 New Home Studio in Topanga
I’ve officially opened my home studio space in Topanga, a quiet hillside spot for group and private yoga therapy. We’re beginning with the Friday Night Fireside Yin series themed around nervous system restoration and emotional recalibration, and Saturday afternoon upregulating classes for practitioners ready to rebuild energy and presence from within.
It’s not just abstract; it’s real. The students who truly wanted to show up, who signed petitions, who’ve stayed engaged, have begun attending classes at my home studio. Seeing them show up, invest their time, and bring their energy into this space reminds me why this work matters. It’s proof that when the ecosystem is nurtured, the community responds, blossoms, and becomes a living, breathing support network. Every chair filled, every hand raised, every shared story, it’s all part of the ecosystem we’re building together.
These sessions are intentionally small, part ceremony, part conversation, part deep rest. It’s the next evolution of my work, bringing the depth of clinical yoga therapy into a more personal, communal rhythm here in the canyon.
🧭 The Art of the Pivot
So, how do we pivot when the familiar dissolves?
We pause.
Listen before acting.We perceive.
Let nunchi guide awareness.We plant.
Root again, closer to home this time.
This is the season of discernment. Of shedding urgency and choosing integrity and that’s what this newsletter has always been about: not perfection, but process.
🧬 Flow Through Winter 2026 Applications
This winter’s program is about restoring your internal rhythm.
We’ll move through:
Awareness → Acceptance → Choice → Discernment → Truth → Truth in Action → Flow.
📅 8 weeks | Online + Replays Available
Each week includes:
Dharma talks + body-based practices
Gentle yoga therapy & breathwork
Live integration
Optional community check-ins
🌿 Ayurvedic Menopause Training
I’ve been up to a lot lately outside of getting double fired. I recently completed a continuing education program through the Ayurvedic Institute on The Ayurveda of Menopause, a three-weekend immersion designed for practitioners and women in transition. Every Saturday morning from eight to ten, I was deep in Ayurvedic philosophy, learning how to support hormonal balance, emotional health, and spiritual initiation through yoga therapy frameworks. Then on Sundays, I took another CEU program from the same institute focused on Polyvagal Theory and the Vagus Nerve, exploring the nervous system from both modern and ancient perspectives. So much to learn, and so much to integrate.
What struck me most in the Ayurveda of Menopause course was the teaching that as a woman approaches the sattvic, or balanced, state of post-menopause, the body naturally seeks to disperse excess heat. The liver becomes the vessel for this release of processing not just physical heat, but also the energetic and emotional residue of unexpressed anger. (below image credit of the Ayurvedic Institute)
What we’ve normalized in the West as “hot flashes” is, through this lens, the body’s attempt to integrate what has been suppressed. That landed deeply because beneath the physiology is a metaphor for something larger. The way women’s power, anger, and expression have been contained for generations. The body, in its infinite wisdom, releases what the culture has tried to silence. To witness that through Ayurveda felt like watching the nervous system and spirit come into reconciliation not rooted in pathology, but peace. I’m carrying that insight into my yoga therapy work with everyone, not just women in menopause. It’s a reminder that healing is rarely quiet; sometimes it comes as heat, release, or eruption. The practice is to let it move through instead of turning away.
🧑🏽🏫 Mentorship, Business, & Momentum
I’ve continued and expanded my mentorship through SCORE Orange County, building stronger foundations for all my work.
It’s powerful to be guided by mentors who have been leading at the level of true go-to-market mastery in their own fields and people who can speak the language of contracts, capital, and scaling, while I weave in subtle yoga cues and nervous-system awareness. Right now I’m locking in on accounting, infrastructure, and web development. It’s both exciting and humbling. The work stretches the artistic part of me that prefers vision, rhythm, and flow and invites it to integrate structure, systems, and sustainability. The artist mind, as we know, can get caught up in creation without always grounding in operation. But not this time. This season, the art is the structure. The creativity is the discipline.
If you’re an entrepreneur or healer looking for guidance like this, SCORE has been an incredible resource.
🏡 Stewarding Home in Topanga
Life as a home steward is wild. Between hosting travelers, teaching yoga therapy, and tending the land here in Topanga, I’ve learned that caring for space is a full spiritual practice in itself. It’s devotion with a broom, a prayer with a hammer, and sometimes a comedy of errors with a headlamp and gloves. Recently we had to evict a family of bats who decided the rafters of the house were their perfect sanctuary. Under wildlife protection laws, you can’t just remove bats, you have to encourage them to relocate, ethically, at the right time of year when they aren’t nesting. That meant late nights, gentle coaxing, sealing entry points, and learning more about bat behavior than I ever thought I would. Somewhere between research calls and guano cleanup, I started thinking about Batman, the billionaire vigilante with all his privilege and I realized that for all his gadgets and armor, he was honestly a pretty dirty dude. Covered in cave dust, guano, and ego.
And yet, that’s the paradox of stewardship and shadow work. Sometimes you’ve got to crawl through the guano to get the guidance. Tending this home has reminded me that stewardship is a living yoga. It’s about responsibility, reverence, and a willingness to meet the wild with patience instead of dominance. These walls have taught me how to listen, how to clean with care, and how to see maintenance as meditation. Every broom sweep, every guest, every unexpected bat is part of the practice.
If you or anyone we know is looking for a peaceful place to land in Southern California our Airbnb is Nestled in the heart of Topanga Canyon and perfect for travelers, creatives, and wellness seekers looking to unwind in nature while staying close to Los Angeles.
Whether you’re passing through, planning a weekend escape, or referring a friend or client, this space offers:
🛏️ Comfortable, private accommodations
🌲 Surrounded by nature with nearby hiking trails
🧘🏾♀️ Access to local yoga studio and wellness offerings
🔥 Open-air seating
🥬 Cafe + plant-forward snacks nearby
🌀 Ideal for solo retreats, writing getaways, or grounding after city travel
Come breathe, reset, and enjoy the magic of Topanga.
🛒 Affiliate Updates
👉🏾 Banyan Botanicals Nasya Oil
👉🏾 Focus + Cognition Formula
👉🏾 Stress Relief Support
💡 Closing Reflection
One door closes so another can open, but we don’t force it. We breathe.
We trust that the space between endings and beginnings is the practice.
The yoga is still happening. The therapy is still happening. The Yoga Therapy is still happening. The Music is still happening. The mission is still alive. The flow just found a new riverbed.
I’ve always had incredible success with community support and crowdfunding, and I know there will be more philanthropic opportunities ahead. But this pivot asks for a different kind of might … not louder, but deeper.
Right now, the most supportive thing you can do for yourself, for me, and for the continuation of this work is to sign up for Flow Through Winter.
Consider the state of the world. Consider the season we’re entering. Consider the certainty (not uncertainty) many of us feel about our devotion right now and let that awareness drop deeper into your body.
Join a group of practitioners from around the world who, to your surprise, might be a lot like you. It’s a fifteen-person container, and the first 4 spots have already been claimed by returning members who put down their deposits right away.
I’m not going to stop. not until…and even then I’ll still be felt.
Not because of my own strength or glory, but because of you. the people I live on through.
Thank you for loving me.
Thank you for loving God.
Thank you for loving yourself.
Nunchi
I’ll holla.
Osiris Booque, C-IAYT
VA Yoga Therapist |
Certified Yoga Therapist & Wellness Specialist | Osiris Yoga Therapy
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Flow Into Spring
An 8-week yoga therapy intensive with Osiris Booque, C-IAYT. Four live sessions exploring awareness, choice, truth, and action through Phoenix Rising methodology.
Sundays, March 22 – May 3 · 4 PM – 6 PM PST · 100% Virtual