Julie Smerdon

Julie Smerdon Facilitator • Speaker • Writer. Helping people stay grounded when everything changes. Weekly essays at The Long Game on Substack

Nearly thirty years working with groups, from elite athletes to corporate teams to everyday humans navigating what's next. My mission is to support yoga teachers and serious students on their journey to use yoga as a tool for living.

There is a story about an old martial arts master sparring with a much younger student. The student kept trying to knock...
22/09/2026

There is a story about an old martial arts master sparring with a much younger student. The student kept trying to knock him over, but the master couldn’t be moved, and from the outside, he barely seemed to move at all. When the student eventually gave up and asked “How did you do that?” the master explained that he wasn’t actually still. He was using a constant dance of minute adjustments in position, made so continuously that no single movement stood out.

In physics, equilibrium happens when all the forces acting on something cancel each other out. No single force dominates; it’s the perfect amount of effort in every direction, all at once. That’s closer to what balance is than some mystical still point we finally arrive at once we “get it right.”

Tomorrow is the equinox: the start of spring here in Australia, and of autumn north of the equator. Equinoxes are points of balance between light and dark that we often associate with equipoise and symmetry. But in reality, light and dark are only balanced for a split second before they tip in the opposite direction. So even in nature, balance is more than a single act of holding everything in place; it’s a living awareness, a lifetime of small shifts made again and again to meet whatever life is showing us. The equinox is nature’s reminder that for the briefest moment things can be equal, but then the dance begins all over again.

After being self-employed for most of my working life, my own dance with balance has led me to take a part-time job! I’m about to start working for Aesop. This isn’t a step backward or away from my Wednesday class, my retreats, or the work I’m building with speaking and facilitation. It’s one of those adjustments, my way of steadying things while the bigger work keeps taking shape underneath.

I think we sometimes imagine balance as something we achieve once we’ve got life figured out. When the bank account looks good, our routine is set, and we feel certain about where life is heading. But I don’t think that’s how it works. Balance happens in real time, even *or maybe especially* when things feel unbalanced. It’s the willingness to make the next small adjustment without waiting for the ground to feel stable first.

So as we step into whatever this next season holds, my plan is to keep dancing and making small adjustments that steady me as things on the outside change.

Photo - Pete Longworth

Last weekend I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, a former Shri member. It was great to see her and hear about...
15/09/2026

Last weekend I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, a former Shri member. It was great to see her and hear about life with her teenage daughters, and it was fun to hear about their boyfriends and antics. When she had finished her update, she asked me how I’d been. I answered, “Good! Busy.”

I’m NOT actually busy right now.

I caught it right as it came out of my mouth. Aside from the fact that I had just lied to a friend, what bothered me was the importance I clearly put on busyness. Being busy makes me feel valuable and needed. It signals significance.

For a long time in our culture, the opposite was true. The wealthy had the freedom not to work. Free time meant you had enough money, land or position to be exempt from the physical work required to live. For everyone else, life was hard. Long days, physical labour, raising families, feeding them, keeping a household running. Simply staying alive was a full-time job.

Sometime between then and now, what a good life looks like flipped completely. Busy went from the mark of someone working to stay alive to being an indicator of value and importance.

Admittedly, when my week is full, I move through it better. I’m sharper and more organised. I like being busy. Give me some space in my day, and I don’t relax into it. I flounder a bit, unsure where to put my attention first. It’s about time management, sure. But it’s also about feeling needed. A full calendar tells me I matter to someone, that I’m useful for something. Deep down, I know that’s not true. But catching the lie as it left my mouth that day drove the point home and led me to write this today.

Before work gave me a sense of purpose, being a mother did. There was never any question about whether I was important. As my kids grew up, my role in their lives changed, and my work started to fill some of that space.

For twenty-five years, work has given me a different kind of purpose. Teaching, facilitating, creating community, being in a room with people- it isn’t just what I do; it’s one of the things that makes me feel most alive. I miss it, and I’m excited to see what form it takes next.

But I didn’t say any of that to my friend that day. I said “Good! Busy.” because it was easier. Busy is still the word that, to most people, means things are going well. I’d like to find a different word for a full life that isn’t built around proving I’m needed.

So if you ask me how I am and I reflexively say “busy”, call me on it. I promise you’ll get the real story.

I’ve been doing some Fiji retreat admin today, which has made me VERY ready to be back here. 🌴We already have a gorgeous...
10/09/2026

I’ve been doing some Fiji retreat admin today, which has made me VERY ready to be back here. 🌴

We already have a gorgeous group coming in 2027, and there are still places available 7-13 August, Ekka week here in Brisbane.

I’d originally planned to end the earlybird pricing in June, but I’ve decided to keep the earlybird rate available for everyone. I’d much rather make it a little easier for people to experience the magic of this private island paradise than play around with deadlines and countdowns.

So if you’ve been thinking about Fiji, perhaps this is your nudge...

https://juliesmerdon.com/fiji-yoga-adventure/

When my kids were in high school, their school held “Back to School Night” every year. Parents came without their kids a...
08/09/2026

When my kids were in high school, their school held “Back to School Night” every year. Parents came without their kids and were handed a copy of their child’s schedule, then walked through a shortened version of the day, one class at a time.

A normal school day started at the ungodly hour of 7am and English was the first class on my daughter’s schedule. Her teacher introduced himself and started by telling us what he did on the first day of every school year.

It was genius.

He’d let the students file in, and that first-hour group was always half asleep. As they filed in, and even after they sat down and looked at him expectantly, he wouldn’t say a word. He’d sit at his desk at the front of the room and stare straight ahead, not moving, not looking at anyone. After the bell rang, he’d stay there a little longer, then he’d stand up. He’d slam his books down on the desk. He’d hurl a piece of chalk at the board and throw assorted things at the wall and onto the floor. On his way out of the room, he’d kick the rubbish bin and glare at whichever student happened to be sitting closest to the door. Then he’d leave the room, slamming the door behind him. He’d leave them sitting there, alone, for a couple of minutes. Then he’d come back in and ask them to write about what had just happened.

He told us that every single year he got thirty different stories. And the student sitting closest to the door always had the darkest version.

Facts are facts. There’s not much room for negotiation there. But we tend to talk about the things that happen as though there is one true version, surrounded by a collection of imperfect interpretations. That teacher gave those kids an experience of something much more profound. He was teaching them the power of perspective.

He demonstrated that thirty students could sit through the same two minutes and come away with thirty different accounts of what had happened. Nobody was wrong, and nobody was lying. But where they were sitting on that day shaped what they saw, and the story they told about it.

To this day, it’s still one of the most masterful tools I’ve seen a teacher use. What I took from it wasn't really a lesson; it was a starting point for a habit that I’m still working on: Remembering, more often than I actually do, that my perspective is never the only one in the room.

Years ago Layne and I ran away for a weekend down to the hinterland outside Byron Bay. Our little cottage sat high on a ...
25/08/2026

Years ago Layne and I ran away for a weekend down to the hinterland outside Byron Bay. Our little cottage sat high on a hill in a macadamia orchard, and the view from the veranda stretched all the way to the sea. The minute we arrived on the property, we both felt a deep, immediate sense of settledness. We had a plan: base ourselves in the hills and go to the beach and explore the area around Byron with our Border Collie Winnie. But the moment we stepped onto the veranda and looked at that view, neither of us wanted to go anywhere else. So we didn’t. We made a trip to Byron to get food, but for the most part, we stayed on the hill and walked, rested, read, ate, and enjoyed each other.

One afternoon we went for a walk through the orchard. We rolled out my yoga mat and lay in the grass talking while Winnie chased birds and her Frisbee. It was a beautiful time of connection for us. As we lay in the clover, Layne told me how he had spent hours as a kid looking for a four-leaf clover but never found one. He had dragonflies following him around all weekend and we looked up what that meant. I told him about a time when students told me after a class I taught at a festival in California that I had had five hummingbirds flying around me while I taught, and we looked that up too.

We talked about us. We were sixteen years in at that time, and oh how far we’d come! One particular conversation came up from years earlier, when my stubbornness had nearly damaged something between us. I remembered how hard it was to just sit there and let him tell me how he felt, without defending myself or fixing it or leaving the room. And I remembered what it felt like afterwards, once the discomfort had passed and I could put what he said into practice.

Just as we were getting ready to leave, he looked down and in that very moment plucked a 4-leaf clover from the ground. It was pure magic.

We didn’t say much; we just looked at it, and then at each other.

Nearly 10 years later, that afternoon has stayed with both of us. We still marvel at the randomness of Layne looking down and plucking that clover out of the ground after all those years of looking for one. We smile when we think of Winnie frolicking so happily around us (RIP, sweet girl).

Not long after, a friend of mine painted a watercolour of the clover. It still sits on our bookcase all these years later, a reminder that magic is everywhere if you slow down long enough to let it appear.

We stayed on the hill. We’d stayed with each other. And that afternoon, we stayed in the clover long enough for Layne to look down and find something he’d been searching for since he was a boy. Maybe the real magic was in staying.

In June I marked seventeen years living in Australia. In the process of moving across the world, my youngest daughter Sa...
18/08/2026

In June I marked seventeen years living in Australia. In the process of moving across the world, my youngest daughter Sarah and I found ourselves living in a space that was between lives. Tim and Mallory were already at university in Brisbane, and Layne had gone ahead of us with a container packed with all our stuff. But Sarah and I stayed back for two months, camping in our empty house so she could finish out the school year. We had none of the trappings of our old life, and we hadn’t begun the new one yet. We were neither here nor there.

That kind of in-betweenness has a name. It’s called a liminal space, from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. We know the word subliminal, meaning below the threshold of consciousness. Liminal is the opposite; it’s the space at the threshold itself, the waiting room between what was and what is to come.

I think we move through liminal spaces throughout our lives. Our twenties, wondering what adulting is supposed to feel like (I vaguely remember this). Our thirties and forties are full of thresholds. Job changes, first babies, relationships beginning or ending. And our fifties, when the first whiff of bigger change starts to creep in.

Now I’m finding that in my sixties I’m at multiple thresholds. My kids are grown, partnered, and building their own lives and families, as they should be. Crossing that threshold has been a slow, sometimes emotional journey from being the centre of their worlds to sitting on the sidelines. Still loved, just no longer part of the framework in the same way. And, of course, I’m still trying to figure out what’s next for my career.

There’s a researcher named Dr Lisa Miller; she was on my podcast a while back. She wrote a book called The Awakened Brain, one of the best bridges between science and spirituality I’ve come across. She uses the metaphor of red doors and yellow doors. A red door is something you want so badly that you'll do anything to force it open. A yellow door is one that opens instead, almost always in a place you weren't looking. Her red door was years of unsuccessful infertility treatment. Her yellow door was a stranger on a bus telling her she looked “like someone who would adopt kids from all over the world”. She adopted internationally, fell pregnant during that process and ended up with ‘twins’ who weren’t biologically related to each other!

Yellow doors, when you walk through them, tend to hold more than you ever thought possible.

In the six years since the studio closed, I’ve bashed on a lot of red doors, mostly trying a version of teaching in different forms and in different spaces. I wanted so badly for one of them to be the work that could carry me all the way through, because I’m not remotely done. Some days, though, I do wonder if anyone will hire me at my age. Still, I’m not ready to retire, not emotionally or financially. My energy is still high, and I have years of hard-earned wisdom to share.

I’m done bashing on red doors; I’m pretty sure there’s a reason they’re so hard to open. These days I feel like I’m slowly walking a hallway, cruising past the red doors, and looking for the yellow one I know will eventually be there. I’ll know it when I see it.

What doors, red or yellow, are you looking at right now?

A few years ago, not long after I’d changed bookkeepers, I sat down for our second meeting to go over cash flow forecast...
13/08/2026

A few years ago, not long after I’d changed bookkeepers, I sat down for our second meeting to go over cash flow forecasting for my business, a busy, urban yoga studio. My new bookkeeper reformatted my cash flow spreadsheet and went through it in more detail than I knew was possible. In a meeting with her, she presented it to me, and the bottom line had changed considerably, in my favour.

Yoga studios are not generally cash-rich, and mine was no exception, no matter how it may have looked from the outside. But it had been a decent year, so a closer set of eyes finding more money than I thought I had wasn’t impossible. It was just a wonderful and unexpected surprise.

The effect it had on me was unreal. In my mind, new doors seemed to open everywhere. I felt proud. After years of feeling like a failure at the business part of the business, I felt successful, finally. That feeling wasn’t contained to the business either. It spread into how I felt about almost everything in my life.

But…there was a mistake in how the spreadsheet had been converted from one format to another. A big mistake. In the time it took to read the email explaining this, I went from feeling proud and successful to frustrated and powerless.

The only thing in my life that had changed was a number on a page.

That spreadsheet wasn’t the only time a number determined how I felt about myself. It’s a pattern I know well by now, one that started well before I owned a small business. And it’s surfaced in my life again, this time with a different trigger.

In Hindu philosophy, myths are metaphors for life. The story of Lakshmi is one I’ve always been drawn to. Lakshmi represents value, good fortune, and prosperity. But the abundance she represents isn’t limited to numbers on a spreadsheet. Lakshmi also represents wealth in areas like relationships, wisdom, character, and health. Her story is the one I return to when I need to be reminded that abundance is so much more than a bank balance or bottom line.

I know that intellectually. But knowing something and applying it to my life is not the same practice, and applying it to my life is a practice I’ve had to return to again and again.

I’ve taught yoga for nearly three decades, and I can’t picture a version of my life without some form of that in it. But it isn’t providing what it once did, and I’m genuinely not sure yet what comes next. Maybe more teaching, just shaped differently. Maybe part-time work alongside my beloved Wednesday evening class. Maybe something else altogether, a full-time role I haven’t found yet, or can’t picture from here. I’m trying to stay open and look at what life is showing me. In moments like this, my instinct is always the same: to look straight past all the abundance in my life, head into scarcity thinking and punish myself.

I don’t have the tidy ending yet where I tell you I’ve sorted it out. What I do have is a faith in the intelligence behind the way life unfolds, and the support of a damned good man.

Oh and there’s still the spreadsheet story, sitting there as proof that abundance was never about a number.

Layne and I hadn’t taken a trip that was wholly and solely for us in fifteen years. Any other travel we’ve done in that ...
04/08/2026

Layne and I hadn’t taken a trip that was wholly and solely for us in fifteen years. Any other travel we’ve done in that time has been to visit family, or involved one or more of the kids, or was a quick weekend squeezed in between life stuff. I’ve done a lot of solo international travel for work during that time, and I honestly wasn’t sure how well we’d travel together for that long. We had two and a half weeks away, built around Sarah’s wedding in Scotland, with France on the back end. Somewhere in the middle of it I realised I couldn’t remember the last time it had been just us for this long.

In the early years, often a marriage is built around everything except the union itself. Careers, kids, money, the next move. You’re building something together, but the focus is outside rather than on each other. If you’re lucky, or maybe just stubborn, you’re still standing together twenty-five or thirty years in. There are plenty of things that can end a marriage that have nothing to do with two people no longer feeling suited for each other: illness, death, the wear and tear that happens over decades of living together. And admittedly, there have been a couple of moments over the years where one or the other of us considered throwing in the towel. I think that can be true of any long marriage. These days our kids are building their own lives and families, most of them farther away physically than they've ever been. Our careers have settled into something less stressful, more comfortable, and enjoyable. And with that shift, something interesting has happened.

I’ve been rediscovering the man I married.

I noticed him the whole trip. The morning we landed in Edinburgh, jet-lagged after twenty-one hours of flying, we had five hours to kill before we could get into our unit. Layne sorted it. After we had some breakfast, he booked us onto a tour bus so we didn’t have to think (or stand upright). We just watched the city go by and used that time to decide what we wanted to see while we were there.

Again in Paris. After a brutal drive down from the Brussels border, we arrived at our unit on a 40º (104ºF) afternoon. The unit was on the ground floor with no air conditioning, which is the norm in Paris, but it meant we couldn’t leave the windows open at night or while we were out. I’d booked it months earlier, never even considering that there might be a crazy heat wave. We were both hot and miserable, and I was really upset, mostly with myself. Once again, Layne sorted it. He gave me his cheekiest grin and said, heat wave or not, we’re in Paris, so let’s get out there and enjoy it! That buoyed my spirits and brightened the vibe, even though the temperature barely moved the whole time we were there.

That was the trip. Whenever something went ‘wrong,’ Layne was the foundation underneath, no matter where we found ourselves.

I’ve come to think home isn’t about the location. Maybe home is something you build inside yourself and carry with you, a foundation that goes wherever you go. For me right now that foundation has Layne built into it, but I know that won’t always be true in the way it is now. As I get older, I’m more aware that none of us gets to keep our people forever, and I’ve watched friends lose their person suddenly and far too young.

I felt as at home on a tour bus in a foreign city, or sweating it out in an airless Paris flat, as I do in our own house with the dogs at the door. We’ve lived in eight different houses during our seventeen years in Australia, and we haven’t owned a single one of them.

But it took walking around Scotland and France, with nothing to do but be together, to show me that home was never where we stood.

It was always just him.

16/07/2026

Ageing is a gift we should all hope to receive. It's wonderful to watch a man living vibrantly! None of the things he lists is about turning back the clock, each one is a choice, available to any of us at any age.

Also, 80 looks damned good on Ted!

✨ The Vibrant Pathway ✨ Registrations close 30 June!Join me for a 6 month mentorship programme for vibrant ageing. You’...
27/06/2026

✨ The Vibrant Pathway ✨ Registrations close 30 June!

Join me for a 6 month mentorship programme for vibrant ageing.

You’ll look at how you move, how you rest, how you nourish yourself, and the stories you’ve been telling yourself about what the second half of life is supposed to look like.

The Vibrant Pathway is for you if:
> You’re ready to embrace the wisdom you’ve earned and put it to good use
> You’re overwhelmed by the conflicting versions of aging well you see on social media
> You want a deeper connection and intimacy with yourself and the people you love
> You want to practise ageing on your own terms
> You want more than just another book that winds up on the shelf

Join our in-person cohort at SoHo Yoga commencing 25 July 2026. But don't delay - registrations close this Tuesday 30 June!

For more info and to secure your spot visit http://sohoyoga.com.au/.../the-vibrant-pathway-with-julie.... 🙏

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