The Horses, the Bottle, and the Future
The pain that has not yet come is avoidable: Yoga Sutra 2.16
There’s an ancient, cross-tradition metaphor dating back over 2,500 years that describes the mind as a kind of caravan.
Picture it: a horse-drawn carriage clattering down a dirt road.
There’s a team of horses, a set of reins, a driver holding those reins, and a passenger riding inside.
It’s not just a quaint image. It’s an anatomy of how the mind moves, and how yoga intervenes.
The horses are our senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Powerful, easily spooked, and quick to chase whatever glitters.
The reins are the reactive mind (manas), pulling the carriage at every shift of sensation.
The driver is the intellect (buddhi), the one who’s supposed to discern, to guide wisely.
And the passenger, quietly watching from within the carriage, is our True Self.
When the horses bolt and the reins are slack, the carriage careens into habit and fear. But when the reins are held with a steady hand, and the driver is awake, the carriage begins to follow the guidance of the True Self.
This is the work yoga calls us into. Inner alignment. And with this alignment yoga promises:
Yoga Sutra 2.16
Heyam duhkham anagatam.
The pain that has not yet come is avoidable.
It’s not promising an easy life.
It’s saying that pain arrives through past choices. It is set in motion by how we think, speak, and act.
When we’re not paying attention, the senses lead the mind, pulling us toward whatever is loudest or most immediately gratifying.
But when the mind is steady and clear, it begins to choose differently. Thought, word and action fall into a wiser rhythm, and that shift is what softens the road ahead.
Which brings me to addiction, one of the most vivid examples of what happens when the reins are frayed, the horses spooked, and the carriage left to instinct alone.
Addiction sets in when the system becomes tightly conditioned to chase something: alcohol, substances, food, shopping, scrolling. The driver clings to something that can never truly offer peace or clarity, but the chase continues. The horses gallop harder. The reins strain, and the carriage lurches off course, again and again.
The way through, at least in my experience, doesn’t come from white-knuckling the reins or willing your way into control. It comes from deeper remembering. From remembering who’s been riding in the carriage all along.
The True Self. Quiet but steady. Weary, maybe, from the bumpiness of the ride, but unshaken at its core.
This Self doesn’t yank the reins.
She waits.
She longs to guide the journey.
And this is where yoga becomes a lifeline, even before you stop drinking or numbing or collapsing into whatever habit you’ve learned to lean on.
Because every time you breathe with awareness… every time you come into your body… you call the horses into the barn.
You invite the True Self to step forward.
You offer the reins to something deeper. Something wiser. And it becomes possible, at last, to go somewhere new.
On the summer solstice eight years ago, I stopped drinking.
It came on the heels of fireworks, difficult conversations, and emotional carnage. But truly being ready came from a weariness so profound it became sacred. Weariness in my body. In my mind. And most of all, in the quietest part of me, the passenger inside. She was tired of being dragged down roads she never chose. Tired of wild horses stampeding toward the same old cliffs.
And for the first time, I could really hear Her.
For me, the way out of addiction began with surrender. I had to drop the reins for a while, because holding them tighter was only adding chaos. But in time, I reached for them again. This time it was out of fierce love for the one riding inside. The part of me I’d spent years neglecting.
The terrain ahead was still uneven. But I knew the direction of my life could change, if I was willing to guide it…one breath…one day at a time.
At first, the changes were surface-level. My sleep deepened, I woke up clear headed and lived the peace of ordinary days.
The deeper shift came slowly. The reins of my mind grew steadier with each passing month. The horses slowed. The driver, once numb, began to stir with imagination and intuition and creativity.
Exactly 1,000 days into sobriety, I was wandering the aisles of Target in harem pants and a gauzy top that definitely gave off I teach yoga and possibly grant wishes vibes.
A man looked at me and said, “Did you just come out of a bottle?”
It was a funny nod to I Dream of Jeannie, that old TV show where the genie lives in a velvet-lined bottle and emerges in a puff of smoke. He couldn’t have known the irony in what he said.
Because the truth is, I had come out of a bottle, a Chardonnay bottle.
But it was the daily practice of not doing that anymore, and listening instead to my True Self, that was gradually rewiring how I moved through the world.
That was the 1,000-day mark. And then 1,000 became 2,000. And that’s the sacred nature of change. It doesn’t arrive in a flash or a puff of smoke, no matter how much your outfit might suggest otherwise. It unfolds, one choice, one day at a time. It’s part discipline: following a path that realigns mind, body, and spirit. But it’s also something subtler. It’s about linking arms with your True Self and letting Her lead.
Now, zoom out.
Picture the planet filled with carriages, each drawn by its own wild team of horses. Billions of them. Each one traveling over its own terrain, shaped by culture, family, memory, trauma, weather, and time. Some horses are galloping. Some are limping. Some are tangled in reins. Some have no driver at all. It’s no wonder we crash into one another.
But that’s not a flaw in the system, each collision can jolt the system awake. The clashing of carriages teaches us how to steer. How to listen. How to discern. How to change course.
So does it matter if one person steadies their horses?
Yes.
It matters.
Because one less panicked, distracted driver shifts the whole field.
It softens the air in a kitchen. It changes the current in a boardroom, a classroom, even a capital.
This is how pain gets interrupted before it hardens into tomorrow’s suffering. Not with a grand gesture, but with the quiet return to ourselves. With steady hands on the inner reins.
Will it reverse a relationship unraveling right now? Will it stop a war already in motion? Unlikely.
But that’s no reason not to change. Because something does shift the moment we do.
Not the whole world maybe, but the way we move through it. The texture of our days begins to soften. And our ability to stay present inside of pain, without doubling it…
changes everything… in the future.