From Yoga to Supply Chain: Finding Rhythm
The essence of supply chain is flow—and the wisdom of flow was learned in the breath. How do we find spaces to breathe among complex nodes?
There is a moment in every yoga practice when the breath and body finally stop fighting each other. The inhale lifts, the exhale releases, and suddenly the pose that felt impossible becomes—not easy, exactly, but possible. Sustainable. There is a rhythm to it that cannot be forced.
I think about that moment often when I'm mapping out a supply chain. The language is different—lead times, SKU rationalization, vendor MOQs—but the underlying principle is the same. Flow cannot be forced. It has to be designed.
When I first crossed from the studio to the warehouse floor, I brought the wrong tools. I brought urgency. I pushed on nodes that needed space, squeezed timelines that needed breath, and wondered why friction kept appearing in unexpected places. The system resisted me the way a body resists a pose it isn't ready for.
The shift came when I started asking a different question. In yoga, we don't ask 'why won't my hip open?' We ask 'what is holding it closed?' The answer is almost never the hip itself—it's tension somewhere else in the chain. A tight IT band. A collapsed arch. A breath held three poses ago.
Supply chains are the same. The stockout at the retail level is almost never caused by the retailer. It's tension held upstream—a supplier minimum that forced an over-order six months ago, a freight consolidation that made sense on paper but added three days of invisible waiting. The problem and its origin are rarely in the same place.
What yoga gave me was a practice of tracing. Of following the thread of tension back to its source with patience, not panic. Of trusting that the system wants to flow—and that our job is to remove what's blocking it, not to push harder on what's already stuck.
The supply chains I'm most proud of now are the ones that breathe. They have slack built into them—not waste, but deliberate space. Room for the unexpected freight delay, the sudden demand spike, the supplier who needs two extra days. Space is not inefficiency. Space is resilience.
Finding rhythm in business, I've learned, is less about control and more about attunement. You have to listen to where the system is tight, where it wants to move, where it's holding its breath. And then you have to give it permission to exhale.