If I hurried, I could still make the early yoga class. From my condo, it’s only a four-block walk to the studio where I cross the threshold from my outer world to the one within. The studio, in the heart of the city, has windows on three sides whereby light stretches through the room. When I arrive, I unroll my mat on the hardwood floor and am bathed in daylight. The flap of the mat’s far edge slaps the floor: my personal call to prayer.

Before I take my seat, I press incense powder, called Scent of Samadhi, between my palms and stroke it over my forearms and the tops of my feet. I collect my props (blocks, strap, and blanket), just in case: They sometimes come in handy as an aid to release my tight shoulders or elongate my hamstrings in particularly tricky postures. The scents of sweet and spicy sandalwood and clove root me as I sit cross-legged on the mat. At last I am perfectly still—until the moving meditation begins.

It is on this mat that I learn to let go absolutely, bodily. I let myself be fully present for the fifth sun salutation, and then the sixth, without anticipating whether there will be a seventh. Later, standing in a position named Revolved Triangle, I can see and feel the boundary as my hips fight to splay and my IT band (the thick band of fibers that runs from the pelvis down the side of each leg to the shin bone) screams its revolt. As I slowly and gently support my hips in alignment and refuse to engage the IT band in a fight, the pose blossoms. I take tender breaths and chant my legs into extension so that the fires yield to steam that softens, and my body glides into a deep, cleansing, and previously impossible twist. Revolved Triangle releases into Lunge pose, then I turn my back foot out and down and press the pinky edge of my foot and elongate out through my upper arm into Extended Side Angle. I’m careful to not let the gluteal muscles of my forward leg check out of the game, and knit and then rotate my rib cage up to liberate my trunk and shine my heart upward toward sky.

Then the choice to bind. Does it enhance the pose to twist deeper and farther? Does it enrich the posture to activate the core and draw inward to clasp hands around the body, thereby completing the bind, in Bound Side Angle pose? Can you expand within and beyond this bind while twisting and holding opposite limbs? And most important, can you remember to breathe all the while? These are the questions. This is the choice. The goal is always to breathe deep, sustaining breaths and to decipher which holds at which times will make the experience most nourishing.

Heart leading, I twist back my upper ribs and arm and extend my lower arm under my forward thigh—so difficult for me to maintain side body long as I maneuver my forward arm into position, but I try each and every time. I hold my hands behind me and pull: shoulders back, chest up and back. Extend backward and down through my back hip and foot, extend up and back through my chest and shoulders. Holding strong and long and letting go everywhere else: The wisdom to discern between the two is critical. Never forget to breathe. Always stay present to the gift of breath.

Some days the practice comes easily. Other days, my quads, already weary from yesterday’s run, quake from overexertion. That’s when my breath gets caught in my flank and squeezed in my chest. But force is never the way.

Here is where I learn to accept what is in the moment now in order to proceed reverently. Skip the pose and rest if the body needs that moment to replenish, if the breath requires it in order to flow seamlessly throughout the lungs. Pushing hard against contracted muscles will only cause the body to push back or tear. There is a maxim: We’re born bound, and we learn to free ourselves. One of my favorite yoga teachers puts it a different way: We are born free, and we choose to bind exquisitely.

It was for this reason that I found yoga soon after I moved to Philadelphia; it was for this reason that I’ve stayed with it. There is a saying that every new yogi finds her way to the mat in order to heal an injury. Sometimes the injury is sports-related, though most times it’s psychic—perhaps it’s a divorce, addiction, or sexual trauma that takes her out of her body as a way to cope when the trauma is too much to bear. After the acute phase of the trauma is survived, it starts to feel safe to integrate the mind and body again. Yoga is a way back to our whole selves. It rejoins the breath, the mind, the heart, and the soul, reuniting the broken pieces into beautiful postures that show us we’re rooted in something far greater than pain. The resultant “yoga butt” from regular practice is just a bonus.

On the heels of the New Year and the upcoming stepping down of the suburban site director, whose place I was expected to take, I realized that if I continued this administrative climb, this transition from my role as assistant medical director to that of medical director, I would simply be leaping from one hamster wheel to the next. Sure, I knew I could excel—I was good at my job; I was adept at the treadmill—but as Lily Tomlin says, “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” Now, four years out of residency, after two years at Andrew Johnson Hospital and then another two at Montefiore, I found that this realization had become crystal clear.

My calling is to heal; that is my truth. While medicine’s current version of hospital administrative work can be both interesting and valuable, it wouldn’t ever bring me closer to being a healer. Most administrative duties involve managing minutiae with the goal of maximizing profits for hospital systems. Second to that is minimizing financial losses. Somewhere far distant to both those priorities is patient care. And way beyond what the mind’s eye can see is consideration for the wellness of the providers who are supposed to deliver that care with excellence. I just couldn’t be a representative for a mission that was so divergent from my own—even if that meant walking away from the comforts of a higher salary and a better schedule.

I didn’t know how I would do it, but I knew I had to rededicate myself to my true path. I knew it meant committing the apparent résumé sabotage of quitting my job, but I also knew that a lack of dedication never yields success. Every part of my being craved alignment. My work, as with everything I do, is a reflection of myself. I practiced yoga to stay on the path. I ate healthily to support my physical body on this journey. I would start meditation to keep my spirit clear. I made it a point to mentor medical students and residents who were women and/or from underrepresented groups of color to make up for the woeful dearth of physician role models for these groups. Medicine still suffers from the same discrimination seen in other fields—women are typically not promoted, while underrepresented people of color are blocked from admittance in the first place. I knew that my emergency medicine clinical work had to focus on underserved populations, as this had always been the medicine closest to my heart. I also knew that my healing work needed to transcend traditional medicine and extend beyond the ER.

For me, the best path was to leave administration. For the time being, it was also best for me to stop working in academic centers for emergency medicine, which required similar bureaucratic demands and diverted me from my focus on being a healer.

* * *

—

I left Montefiore to dock at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Philadelphia. Just as I had encountered in my patients at Mercy and Montefiore, I met many heroes while at the VA. Victoria Honor was one of them.

She was steady in her chair, sitting cross-legged, each arm placed deliberately on an armrest, her fingers making soft imprints at the curved vinyl edges. Her grip was tight, her smile at ease. Her hair was parted down the middle, with one goddess braid on each side culminating in a thick rope of loosely kinked hair encircling her head. Springy rings of baby hair peeked out at the edges of her hairline. Her bright, almond-shaped eyes were free of makeup. Actually, she wore no makeup at all, save for lip balm that tinged the air with a hint of citrus. She looked about the same age as I was, both of us appearing younger than our years, but melanin has this effect. Her skin was a shade of moist clay muted by the ill-fitting midnight-blue paper scrubs that hung awkwardly around her shoulders and knees—they appeared to be at least two sizes too big, but they were the smallest we had for the psychiatric patients. This uniform wasn’t made for her.

She looked up when I rapped on the door. Leaning against the wall across from her, I asked why she had brought herself to the hospital.