Why the Life You're Meant to Live Is Hiding Inside the One You're Trying to Escape
Jane Oppegaard, Founder and Director of Happy Little Yogi, specialises in helping children find their peaceful, happy place. She has supported schools across Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire with yoga and well-being programmes since 2009, and leads the accredited Happy Little Yogi Flow Teacher Training Programme and newly launched Business in a Box.
You already know something needs to change. You have known for a while. You go through the daily motions, the commute, the meetings, the inbox, yet somewhere underneath the routine there is a quiet voice that keeps whispering, "Is this really it?" Maybe running side by side with that voice is another, your health, quietly asking for attention too.
You've been carrying more than your fair share for longer than you want to admit. You feel depleted, frayed at the edges, defeated, but somewhere beneath all of that is a yearning to do something truly worthwhile. To pour your energy into something that builds people up rather than burns you out.
I know that feeling. I've lived it. And what I discovered on the other side changed not just my life, but the lives of the children and families I now get to serve every day, because sometimes the life we're searching for isn't somewhere out there waiting to be found. The clues have been quietly gathering inside the life we've already lived.
When your body becomes your teacher
At 28, I was finally given a name for something I had carried my whole life, scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that had been there all along, quietly shaping the way I moved, worked and endured. The diagnosis came with no surgical solution. The curvature wasn't severe enough to warrant the risks of an operation, but it was significant enough that ignoring it wasn't an option either.
What no one told me then, and what I had to discover for myself, was that my body wasn't simply a problem to be solved. It became a doorway into a journey of self-discovery.
Around the same time, I was navigating grief that almost broke me. Within two years, I lost both of my parents. My mother died after a five-year battle with cancer. My father, her devoted soulmate, died eighteen months later.
What do grief and chronic pain have in common? For me, they both had a way of asking the same question, "What are you going to do now?" I could wait for someone to come and fix everything, or I could begin looking for a different kind of answer.
The medicine that changed everything for me
I found it entirely by accident while watching a documentary about Madonna, the pop icon! Her yoga teacher appeared on my TV screen, and something in me stopped. She radiated a quality I had never encountered before, deeply calm, yet fully alive. Her energy was soft and radiant, yet there was an unmistakable strength and resilience about her that reached me even through the television screen.
She moved in ways I had never seen in a yoga class. I ordered her book and DVD immediately. What I discovered was Kundalini Yoga, a practice unlike anything I had tried before, bringing together movement, breathwork, meditation and sound. For me, it became the medicine I had been searching for.
Within six months, the pain I had lived with for much of my life began to ease. Within a year, the progress felt undeniable. The benefits I was experiencing were significant enough that staying committed no longer felt difficult, and each small step seemed to bring another improvement.
By year four, I realised I was no longer living as the pain-filled version of myself. My pain was no longer restricting my movement or defining me or my life.
Here is what I learned
I share this not simply as a story about my body, but because the experience taught me something much bigger about change.
For me, transformation didn't come through force, sheer willpower or gritting my teeth and pushing through. It came through consistent, gentle and intentional practice. I began to understand the importance of breath, movement and simply showing up repeatedly, with patience and trust.
Each practice became a quiet promise to myself, I trust my body. I trust this process.
One of my teachers once told me, "Age is measured by the flexibility of the spine." Those words have stayed with me throughout my journey.
If your life feels rigid right now, stuck, heavy, as though movement in any direction is impossible, I want you to consider this, that rigidity doesn't have to be permanent. It can be a starting point. And sometimes, that is exactly where transformation begins.
What children know that most adults have forgotten
After eight years of practice, I finally trained as a Kundalini Yoga teacher. By then, my husband and I had adopted three children, and my 5 a.m. yoga sessions, sneaking downstairs before the rest of the house woke up, didn't always go to plan. The children would often follow me.
And then something remarkable happened. The practice that had helped me heal my back and rebuild myself after grief began to have a profound effect on my children too.
In particular, my daughter, a little live wire, stood out. From morning until night, she was constantly on the go, bursting with energy and rarely still. Yet whenever she wandered into my yoga space, something magical began to happen.
This little girl who rarely stopped moving would settle quietly beside me and begin singing along to the meditations. There was no need to persuade her, explain what we were doing or ask her to sit still. She simply joined in.
As I watched her, I began to notice something extraordinary about the way children respond to these practices. They don't need convincing. They don't question whether they're doing it correctly. They simply experience it, as though they're reconnecting with something they already know.
I've often wondered whether meditation comes more naturally to children than we realise. After all, a baby spends its first nine months in the womb, surrounded by warmth, rhythm and sound, simply being. I like to imagine it as their very first experience of meditation.
Perhaps that is why children can respond so beautifully when we give them the opportunity to slow down, breathe and reconnect with themselves. That realisation became the seed from which everything else grew.
I began to realise that if we could teach children these simple tools while they were young, we could give them something many of us spend our adult lives searching for, the ability to recognise what we're feeling, find calm within ourselves and trust our own bodies.
That became my life's work.
The question you're quietly asking yourself
If you're reading this, you're probably not simply curious about yoga. You might be someone who has spent years in a career that pays the bills but costs you something harder to quantify. You might be a parent, a carer, or someone who has put everyone else's needs ahead of your own for so long that you've lost track of what you actually want.
Or maybe you're someone who feels a genuine pull towards working with children, towards something more meaningful, towards a life that doesn't feel like a trade-off between security and purpose. Here is what I want you to know, purpose is not always found. Sometimes, it is built slowly and deliberately from the exact material your life has already given you, including the painful parts.
My chronic pain pointed me towards healing. My grief pointed me towards presence. My children pointed me towards the next generation who needed these tools. Your path will look different from mine, but perhaps the clues are already there.
The next chapter: A business built from the inside out
Imagine waking up on a Monday morning actually looking forward to the workday ahead of you. Work that fits around your life rather than asking your life to fit around it. Work where you can choose the schools, nurseries and communities you want to serve, knowing that what you are teaching has the potential to stay with a child for years to come.
Perhaps you simply want to qualify as a children's yoga teacher and begin sharing these tools alongside the work you already do. Or maybe you're ready for something bigger, a meaningful business of your own, one that gives you greater freedom and flexibility while allowing you to make a genuine difference to children's lives.
That is why I created The Happy Little Yogi Academy. After more than 17 years of teaching children and working within schools and nurseries, I have brought together everything I've learned into two pathways.
You can train in the Happy Little Yogi Flow, gaining a specialist children's yoga qualification accredited by Yoga Alliance Professionals, along with the knowledge and confidence to begin sharing these tools with children.
Or, if you have a bigger vision and want to turn your qualification into a business, you can choose the newly launched Business in a Box, combining the teacher training with twelve months of coaching and support to help you take what you've learned out into the world and build something of your own.
You choose how far you want to take it. For some, becoming a children's yoga teacher is the dream. For others, it's just the beginning. Whichever path you choose, the reason behind it remains the same.
Our children are growing up in a world where the pressures they face extend far beyond exams and qualifications. They need tools to help them understand their emotions, connect with their bodies, use their breath and find their way back to themselves when life feels overwhelming.
That is what the Happy Little Yogi Flow is designed to give them. And every time I train another teacher, those tools have the potential to reach another classroom, another school and another child.
I started this journey in my living room with a DVD, a spinal diagnosis and a grief I didn't know how to carry. Twenty-seven years later, I know something I couldn't have known then, the tools that help you heal are sometimes the very tools you're meant to share.
The next Happy Little Yogi Academy programme is in February 2027. If something in my story has stirred something in you, perhaps it's worth listening to. Whether you feel called to become a children's yoga teacher or dream of creating something bigger, I'd love to invite you to discover which pathway might be right for you.
One thing you can try today
If nothing else, take this with you. The next time you feel overwhelmed at work, at home, or simply inside your own head, just pause before automatically reaching for your phone, another coffee, or the next thing on your to-do list.
Sit comfortably with both feet on the floor. Take a few moments to notice your breathing. Then gently close your right nostril and breathe slowly through your left nostril for a short period of time, without forcing the breath.
Notice what changes. Notice your breathing. Notice your body. Notice whether your thoughts begin to slow.
For me, the breath has become one of the simplest ways to pause, reconnect, and create a little space between what is happening around me and how I choose to respond. It costs nothing. It can take just a few minutes. And it is a practice we can share with children too.
That is where change really begins, not with one enormous leap, but with a small moment of reconnection. The life you're meant to live may not require you to become someone entirely new. It may simply be asking you to recognise the value in everything you've already lived through.
If this resonates with you, if you feel ready to take what you've lived through and explore how it could become something that lights you up while serving others, the first step can simply be a conversation.
You can find out more about The Happy Little Yogi Academy and our children's yoga teacher training and business programme here.
Read more from Jane Oppegaard
Jane Oppegaard, Director & Founder of Happy Little Yogi
Jane Oppegaard is a leader in children's yoga, meditation and mindfulness. Diagnosed with scoliosis at 28, she found Kundalini yoga and meditation, and it changed the course of her life. She has since dedicated her work to helping children find calm, resilience and their own peaceful place, and also supports adults living with back pain. She is Founder and Director of Happy Little Yogi, delivering yoga and wellbeing programmes in schools across Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire since 2009, and leads the accredited Happy Little Yogi Flow Teacher Training Programme. Her mission is empowering children to self-regulate from a young age, teaching them to breathe, tune in with their body and be mindful.
