I have a teacher named Jackie. She is always there when I am ready to practice. She practices with me when I just wake up and haven’t brushed my teeth yet, when I am in a hotel and only have a bath towel as a mat, in my living room, in my bedroom, and in my basement in my pajamas. She practices with me when I am excited to do yoga and makes my day even better, and she practices with me when I am in a bad mood and am only on my mat looking for something to pick me up.
She is always there for me. That’s the thing about her.
If you practice yoga at home, you have a Jackie. You know their voice better than you know some of your relatives’. You know their cues, their jokes, the exact way they conduct savasana. They arrive through a screen, and somehow they’re the most reliable presence in the room.
Last winter, Jackie came with me to Ireland. She had no idea.
My mother and I left for Germany on the twenty-ninth of November for a six-day trip to the Christmas markets. I was excited to drink hot wine in mittens on cold, snowy streets, shop for a wooden nutcracker for my mantle, and generally just have six nights of a sleepover with my mom in an Airbnb at Christmas time. We shopped for months for the trip. We compared coats, strategized on handwarmers we could put in our boots, and anticipated a very snowy Christmas memory.
Six days turned into six weeks. We never saw a single market.
We landed in Frankfurt, and before we ever left the airport, my mother was badly hurt. Instead of a hotel, we went to a hospital.
The two weeks that followed, I was in survival mode. I spent them trying to get my mother the care she needed and on calls with my insurance company, desperately trying to get us home safely. I had to find a place to stay, replace my lost luggage, and learn to speak with nurses in a hospital that didn’t speak my language. I had to navigate a city I’d never seen, on very little sleep, and try to keep her spirits up. I was taking taxis, shopping for food, and drinking German beer like it was melatonin. Then I got sick, I developed an ear infection so bad that one night I thought I was going to end up in the emergency room of the hospital I was visiting my mother in every day.
Eventually she reached a pain level where she could fly. Our insurance company was amazing. I learned the term ‘repatriation’ because they got her on a repatriation flight back to the United States, which involved the patient flying home on a stretcher in the back of the plane. They sent two nurses to accompany us on a commercial flight home and arranged for an ambulance to meet us at the airport to take her to her own hospital, where she knew the doctors and they all spoke English. It was a long two weeks. I remember treating each day leading up to our departure like a door on an advent calendar, I peeled open a little paper door in my brain each night, one day closer to home, and behind it was a box of toffifee that I literally ate on the daily.
The day of the repatriation flight, a multitude of things went wrong logistically, and we had to spend another night in Germany, this time at an airport hotel, where I joked with my mom and said, “Well, at least we’re finally having our sleepover.” The next morning we tried again. Another batch of surprises waited for us, and again a multitude of logistical issues delayed our departure and raised our stress level. We did, however, finally take off, and home was a mere eight hours away. Finally feeling like I could exhale, I put my ear drops in, settled into my airplane seat, put on my eye mask, and started to doze off.
An hour into the flight, my mother took a serious turn, one of the nurses woke me to tell me we were making an emergency landing in Ireland.
For the better part of thirty-six hours it was touch and go. The doctors worked to find out what was wrong, and there was a stretch in there where I understood, very clearly and for the first time, that I might lose her. Everything froze in me. A hundred hand warmers couldn’t have thawed my toes. It was the most scared I’d been since the first time I’d been that scared, only two weeks earlier.
Then they found it. They treated it. She lived.
I needed clothes again, because although we’d landed in Ireland, our luggage hadn’t. I needed to find a place to stay again, and it was closer to Christmas now, with not many options left. And although I had anticipated shopping on this trip, this wasn’t the kind of shopping I wanted to be doing, for the second time. My husband flew over to be with me. Then, once she was safely out of the woods, they moved my mother to a rehab center. My husband flew home to be with our kids for Christmas, and I stayed in Ireland, navigating another city I’d never seen, taking taxis and buses, trying to remember to eat protein instead of toffifee. I woke up with my hotel sheets drenched most nights and had to have them changed and send my pajamas down for washing. Christmas came and went. I had to plead with my hotel to let me stay through New Year’s Eve, since it was a sold-out night for them. I offered to stay in a broom closet just so I wouldn’t have to move to a new location yet again. They caved. I stayed.
After the new year, I started to come to. I had to find my way back to myself, I had to somehow feel like me again.
A yoga mat set up in a small hotel room in Limerick, Ireland January 2026, Limerick, Ireland One morning I went out into the streets of Limerick to find a store where a yoga mat might be sold.
I remember that morning so vividly. The streets were empty. The shops were just unlocking their doors. I found a sporting goods store, and I was the first customer of the day. They had exactly one kind of mat, cheap, aqua blue, fourteen Euros. It was all they had. I have never been so happy to walk out of a shop. I remember vlogging that morning on my phone, romanticizing the novelty of it all.
I carried it back to the hotel under my arm and set it by the chair. I didn’t roll it out immediately, I just sort of watched it there for the rest of the day. The next morning, I thought: it’s time. And I rolled it out onto the hotel floor.
Then I put on Jackie.
I chose a favorite: Good Morning Flow 2: Embodiment. Years ago, Jackie introduced me to a pose I had never done before. Maybe some of you know it: from tabletop, you extend one leg straight back, cross it over to the opposite side, keep your toes on the floor with your heel reaching back, and curve your body toward your leg so you look like a croissant. The first time I did it, I didn’t want to come out of it. It felt that good. It became the reason I returned to that class again and again.
I had taken the class so many times I could easily run all thirty-five minutes from memory.
But I didn’t. And I wouldn’t.
I knew the pose was coming. And when we finally arrived there, on a fourteen-euro mat, on a hotel floor in Limerick, it felt like the first time my body had unclenched since the whole thing began.
I felt genuine happiness. I felt relief like nothing I’d felt in weeks. I felt like I was home again, home in my body, not in my town.
Jackie talked me through it. In that country, in that situation, on that day. And she had no idea she was doing it.
I’ve been practicing yoga for fourteen years. I started in studios and went to every studio I could find, just to keep learning, different cues, different styles, different voices. Eventually I settled into practicing at home. I still go to the occasional retreat, but I’m what you would call a home yogi now.
About eleven years ago, long before COVID made online yoga mainstream, I discovered YogaDownload. I joined on a whim and never looked back. Over the years I found myself returning again and again to teachers like Christen Bakken and Pradeep Teotia. Then one day I found Jackie Mahrou.
I found Jackie on YogaDownload, and not even for myself. I had come home from my first yoga retreat, where I’d seen other women bring their husbands, and thought that if I could get my husband into yoga, he could come with me on one of these amazing trips. I wanted to introduce him to yoga, but I didn’t want to teach him myself, I knew it would be better coming from someone else. Jackie had a five-class beginner series, so one morning we set up two mats and I took the first class alongside him, ten years into my own practice, and learned more than I expected to.
To my delight, he liked it! Jackie’s gentle, inviting style is exactly what every new yogi needs. He did what he could, and she never judged him. When we moved on to more advanced vinyasa flows, we went looking for her classes specifically, because she took the same care with him there that she had taken in the beginner series, with him, and, it turns out, with me. Jackie became a constant presence in our home.
Her voice moved in. I hear her all the time now, in poses she isn’t teaching:
Pull your right hip crease back.
Notice what you feel in your body.
Look upon your body with compassion.
In June of 2025, I met her in person for the first time, at a YogaDownload retreat in Scotland where she was one of the two teachers chosen to host. It was like meeting a celebrity. Six months later, she was the only familiar thing in a hotel room in Ireland.
Some people will tell you a screen can’t hold a real teacher-student relationship. Those people have never unrolled a brand-new mat in a foreign country, alone, after the worst month of their life, and pressed play on the one voice that could make a strange room feel like home.
The mat doesn’t know the teacher isn’t in the room. Your breath doesn’t know. Your nervous system, softening on cue after all these years, certainly doesn’t know.
My mother came home. She did not come home unchanged, and there are things she will carry for the rest of her life, but she came home, and I don’t use that word lightly anymore.
I think I realized, more than ever, that home was never the place. Home is the feeling, the one where your shoulders come down and your breath goes back to its normal length and you recognize yourself again.
I found it four thousand miles from my house, on a fourteen-euro mat, on a hotel floor in Limerick.
Someone had to get me there. She has never set foot in my home. She didn’t know I was gone.
By LoriAnn Romanowski
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