I began practicing Ashtanga yoga in 2001. My first class was on the Thursday before September 11th at a slightly run-down yet beautiful loft space on the outskirts of Park Slope in Brooklyn. The tech bubble had begun its burst in March 2000, and I was in the thick of advising clients on how to sit still during the first major bear market of my career. I won't lie, there were times I wanted to quit. Instead, I started running and ultimately practicing yoga to help deal with the stress. During that first class, I discovered something in this style of yoga that brought me incredibly deep peace. I remember riding the train back to Manhattan that night feeling truly euphoric.

This practice has brought me so much more than that first euphoric high though. It has taught me patience and discipline. It has taught me to listen when something doesn’t sit right with me. And it has helped me to breathe and sit still rather than spinning out in panic when everything seems to be moving in the wrong direction.

These benefits haven’t all come easily or without a little pain and suffering. In my second or third year of practice I suffered a common yoga injury — a tear where the hamstring attaches to the sit bone. lt felt like such a setback at the time. I’d always had tight hamstrings but they had opened up so much in those first few years. So at first this injury was tough to swallow. But in the time it took to recover I discovered so many deeper lessons. I was able to focus on strength and flexibility in other areas of my practice. This experience of getting injured during yoga felt a lot like dealing with a market correction. It can be so painful and scary to see these backward moves, but they are also an inevitable part of growth and opportunities for even greater growth —downturns are when we double down. We don’t get higher returns without ups and downs along the way. And we can use these downturns as opportunities. Sure I could have stuck with more gentle yoga that didn’t have me pushing my physical and emotional limits, but I don’t believe that would have brought me the strength, endurance, and vitality that a more challenging practice has brought me.

This experience taught me an important lesson that would apply to both yoga and investing: sometimes when we get injured or face setbacks, we want to quit. When markets are down, we might feel like we want to get out to preserve what we have and not risk further losses, or to find "safer" investments. But staying disciplined and committed to a plan has shown the greatest rewards in both disciplines.

Over the past 28 years, I have seen staggering growth in the markets. $1,000 invested in the S&P 500 in 1997 when I first started working in finance would be worth almost $13,000 today (January 2025)! However, this growth didn't come without challenges. During that 28-year period, there have been four major bear markets:

The Dot-Com Bubble Burst (2000-2002): The S&P 500 fell by approximately 49%
The Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009): The S&P 500 dropped by about 57%
The COVID-19 Pandemic (2020): The S&P 500 fell by approximately 34%
Inflation and Interest Rate Hikes (2022): The S&P 500 declined by about 25%

The market has also experienced several corrections (declines of 10% or more but less than 20%) during this period, which are more frequent than bear markets. Remarkably, that 13-fold growth happened even with all of these pullbacks. And the times of greatest growth are almost always immediately following these downturns.

As an investor, if you sold when your investments were down, you likely would have seen only a small fraction of that growth or even losses. Similarly, the personal growth I have experienced as the result of a dedicated yoga practice over the past 20 years since that injury is on par with the growth I've seen in portfolios over that time. And it didn't happen by quitting or switching disciplines whenever I had doubts or setbacks, or by not practicing when it didn't feel rewarding.

Investing and Yoga are similar in many ways, but perhaps the most striking similarity is that both are like digging a well in search of water. You need to do your research (or find a professional who has done it for you) to show you where to dig, but then you keep digging until you find water. Digging one hole 5 feet deep and then giving up every time you hit a rock, only to try 10 other places (each with their own rocks in the way), is not likely to yield a source of water. But if you dig 10-30 feet deep in one place and work your way around the rocks, you've likely got yourself a well that you can drink from for a long time.

Of course, the parallels between yoga and investing don't end there. Both disciplines require you to diversify your approach, beware of greed and false prophets, cultivate patience, and embrace the world as it is in all of its imperfection. I’ll expound on all of these themes and others in future posts as I continue to show the connections between the ancient practice of yoga and the modern world of finance.

Just as that first yoga class in Brooklyn set me on a path of personal growth and resilience, so too can a thoughtful, committed approach to investing lead to financial well-being, greater confidence and clarity. The key, in both cases, is to keep showing up, stay focused, and trust in the process.