04/14/2026
I want to tell you about Linda McGill.
She is 77 years old. In a span of 18 months she had a lumpectomy, a shoulder replacement, and two knee replacements.
She NEVER stopped her practice. Most people don't understand how that is possible...read on!
Linda found yoga at a work retreat in her early 50s. She was hooked. She continued, deepened, eventually did her teacher training.
Yoga — NOT just the movement, but the full eight-limbed system of breath, awareness, mindset, and presence — became the architecture of how she moved through the world.
Twenty-five years later she arrived at the hardest season of her life already holding something most people don't have — A NERVOU SYSTEM THAT KNEW HOW TO FIND ITS WAY BACK!
Each surgery required a pause from movement.
But you cannot pause from breath.
You cannot pause from the way practice teaches you to meet what is hard with curiosity rather than fear.
That part stayed with her through all of it.
When Linda came back after her surgeries she was a little stubborn about the chair. Of course she was. That is Linda. Grit and grace in equal measure, a humor that fills the room, and a willingness to find a way that I have never seen waver — not once, not through any of it.
What I noticed first was not her strength.
It was her curiosity. "Let's see what's possible."
That is the thing about twenty-five years of practice. It doesn't make you fearless. It makes you curious instead of afraid. It teaches you to ask what the body can do rather than brace against what it cannot.
That shift — from threat to possibility — is not just philosophy. It is nervous system science. And Linda has been practicing it, breath by breath, long before anyone named it that way.
Before each surgery she did prehab. Not to get stronger. To get regulated. Breath. Mindset. Learning to welcome what was coming rather than armor against it.
She said it simply: "If my body's not all tense and stressed about the surgery, I can focus that energy on getting better."
That is not positive thinking. That is biology. A nervous system that knows how to receive care heals differently than one braced for impact. The research confirms it. Linda lived it.
Today she tried pigeon pose for the first time since her knee replacements.
I was cueing something else across the room when I noticed her. She had just decided — let's see — and gotten there. Careful. Present. Reading her body the way she has learned to read it over a quarter century of practice.
I didn't say much. She didn't need me to....................................................................................................
I have to go back for a moment — because this part of Linda's story matters.
Years ago, when I had my yoga studio in Johnstown, Linda used to walk to class and walk home — but stop for coffee on the way. I had private clients who would see her there, radiant and completely herself, and they always said the same thing: I just want to be like her when I grow up.
Linda had a long, successful career. When it ended she didn't shrink. She became a jewelry artist. She lives creatively and richly — not in spite of everything her body has been through, but somehow woven right through it.
It's living well, she told me. It isn't aging.
This is what twenty-five years of practice builds. Not flexibility. Not the ability to do pigeon pose. The capacity to keep finding a way — through cancer, through surgeries, through the curve balls that come for all of us eventually — and to arrive on the other side still curious. Still showing up. Still you.
The surgery is not the magic fix. The practice is. The breath is. The returning, again and again, to something that knows how to hold you.
This is exactly why I built the BeWell Method™.
Because what Linda has — a nervous system that knows how to receive care, a body that trusts itself, a mind that chooses curiosity over fear — every patient deserves access to that.
Before surgery. After surgery. In the hardest seasons and the ordinary ones.
Little by little. Again and again.
If you have read this far, thank you! I will be having a webinar at the end April to expand on the BeWell Method. Keep an eye out for more details and I hope you can make it!
LLinda McGill you have been teaching me for ten years. Thank you for letting me share even a small piece of your story. 🤍
