🦋 The Friday Flutter 🦋

July 24, 2026

Off the mat,

Outside the studio,

Up and down the cobblestone hills

Of a foreign city

With an unfamiliar language

But a common humanity,

Stretching myself not just in body but in mind,

Leaning into the comfort of the discomfort,

And breathing through it all,

Trusting the solution

Is already unfolding.

There is no truer practice

Of yoga.

Not the Retreat I Had in Mind

I came to Portugal for a yoga and narrative therapy retreat—my first as a member of the Yinsa team. I had my itinerary, my intentions, and my excitement firmly in hand.

Lisbon had other plans.

Within an hour of landing, I discovered that my passport and AirPods had been pickpocketed. Just like that, my plans dissolved into the city’s steep cobblestone hills.

Action Mode

I cried, but I did not spiral. With my dad 3400 miles but just a phone call away, I went straight into action mode.

What followed was two days of operating on three hours of sleep each night, running up and down the famously steep hills of Lisbon, navigating a foreign city with limited language proficiency, and wrangling a bureaucratic process not designed for the faint of heart.

I submitted a missing item inquiry to Uber. I made my way to multiple police stations, only to find them closed on a Sunday. The next morning, I went back to the airport to check lost and found. When my passport wasn't there, I filed a police report at the airport station. Then began the hunt for a place to take new passport photos.

The first shop I found, listed as open on Google, had a line of people waiting outside and no owner in sight. So I did what any self-respecting traveler would do: I got lunch. Across the mall, there happened to be a no-frills Punjabi restaurant. I ordered an aloo paratha that tasted like home and waited. When I returned to the shop, the owner was back. He did not speak English or Spanish very well, but I came to learn that his printer was broken. I walked another 20 minutes to the next place I could find. Ten minutes later, I had my photos.

From there, I spent hours gathering documents—including my birth certificate, my travel itinerary, and a digital copy of my missing passport—and filling out paperwork that is not remotely intuitive. I had at least twenty pages worth of material to print. The hotel staff, bless them, printed every single page and kept assuring me that there would be a solution. 

The next morning, I had an early embassy appointment. I was waiting for my Uber when, almost by accident, I opened Instagram to check something. Buried in my message requests was a note from a stranger: she had found my passport. It was sitting at a café near my hotel—a place I had never been.

Reader, it came home. 🦋

This Was Yoga

Here is the thing I keep coming back to: I did not get to attend the retreat. I missed the sessions, the circles, and the carefully curated experiences that I had been so looking forward to as a new Yinsa team member.

But I got the retreat.

Yoga is not only asana. It is not just the posture, the stretch, or the body shape. Yoga is learning to breathe when everything feels like too much. It is flexibility, not just of the hamstrings, but of the heart. It is leaning into discomfort and discovering that there is something solid beneath it. That you will not fall.

The Thread of Waheguru

But here is what made this ordeal something I will carry with me far longer than the inconvenience: the quiet, persistent, almost uncanny presence of my faith throughout all of it.

I am Sikh. In hard times, I turn to Sikh music, prayers, and ancient wisdom that reminds me I am held by something larger than myself.

On Sunday night, unable to sleep, I turned on a YouTube livestream of kirtan—Sikh prayer music—from the Golden Temple—the holiest temple of the Sikhs. The next morning, my Sikh Uber driver from the airport had kirtan playing in his car. We were two strangers, far from home, held briefly by the same thread. At the mall where I waited for my passport photos, the Punjabi restaurant where I ate lunch was also streaming the Golden Temple kirtan, giving me an even bigger taste of home. 

And then, the woman who found my passport — her husband was Sikh.

I should mention: there is an uncanny number of Indians and Sikhs in Portugal. Every other Uber driver I have had here has been Sikh. In the small town of Alvor, I had the same Sikh driver two days in a row. I have spoken more Punjabi here than any other language.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I choose to see it differently. I choose to see it as the Universe whispering reminders that I am not alone, that divine energy travels with me, that I will never be given more than I can handle.

The Practice of the Pivot

There is one more lesson I want to leave you with, and it is perhaps the most practical one: the pivot.

We make plans. Life intercepts them. And in that moment of interception, we have a choice: to grip the original plan so tightly that we miss what is actually being offered, or to exhale, recalibrate, and trust that the detour has something to teach us.

Lisbon was not the retreat I planned. It was something rawer, stranger, and more honest. It asked more of me than any yoga class could have. And somewhere in those hills, running on three hours of sleep with a stack of papers under my arm and the sound of kirtan in my ears, I found exactly what I needed.

This Week's Practice

Think of a moment when your plans fell apart. When life rerouted you without asking permission. Write about it. Not about what went wrong, but about what showed up instead. What unexpected kindness, surprising strength, or small miracle arrived in the middle of the mess?

Your detour has a story. Let it out.

Until next Friday, keep fluttering.

With Love and Light from Lisbon,
~Pavita 🦋