Written by: Isabella Libreros, PR & Communications Assistant at Arco Design + Build
For much of Jacqui Bonwell’s life, helping others came naturally. Learning how to extend some of that same care toward herself took a little longer.
Long before Yoga became part of her work, Bonwell was immersed in Social Work. Her career began in Ireland and eventually brought her to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where she worked directly with families navigating circumstances that were often complicated, painful, and impossible to neatly resolve. At one point, she recalls carrying a caseload of 26 families while serving as legal guardian to 14 children.
She entered the work wholeheartedly. Perhaps, in hindsight, too wholeheartedly.
“I had a big heart, but I had almost, like, no fuel to help it sustain long term,” she says. “I was so much output and not enough input.”
Bonwell had spent years learning how to show up for other people. What she had not yet learned was how to sustain herself while doing it.
Eventually, her body demanded her attention. Years of stress, little sleep, poor nutrition, and the emotional weight of crisis work culminated in a diagnosis of ulcers. Bonwell is careful not to characterize those years solely through their difficulty. She remembers witnessing extraordinary resilience, too – moments of humanity she describes as beautiful enough to make you cry. But eventually, the stress became greater than what she could continue carrying.
That diagnosis became a turning point.
Yoga entered her life initially for a practical reason: she needed help managing stress. And for someone accustomed to moving at “100 miles an hour,” slowing down did not exactly come naturally.
“I went into crisis jobs because I function really well in crisis,” she says. “I can help you. I can’t really help me, but I’m good at other people.”
Over time, however, Yoga offered Bonwell something she had been missing: a way to turn inward.
Today, after years of teaching, training, speaking, and mentoring others, much of her philosophy returns to a deceptively simple idea: we cannot continually give from a place of depletion.
That lesson feels particularly relevant in a culture Bonwell sees as increasingly overstimulated. We are encouraged to multitask, consume, react, and remain constantly available. Somewhere within all that noise, she believes, we have become disconnected from ourselves.
“I think that we’re just over-influenced and overstimulated,” she says. “I think that we’ve pulled away from ourselves, and I think that we’ve been somehow convinced that peace comes in things that are outside of us.”
For Bonwell, the answer isn’t necessarily eliminating stress. It is learning to listen to what stress might be communicating.
“I think I’ve come to see stress, instead of as bad, as just good information.”
Sometimes that information is simply telling her that she is trying to do too much at once. Her response is to return to practices that ask for the opposite: one breath, one movement, one point of concentration, one thing at a time.
It is a philosophy she passes on to her students—affectionately known as her “birds.”
Bonwell describes them collectively as her flock, but she has never wanted them to remain permanently in her nest. Teaching, to her, means preparing someone well enough that eventually they no longer need you.
“I need you to take this to the streets,” she says. “I need you to go out, and I need you to create your own flocks, and I need for you to create your own nest.”
There is something fitting about the metaphor. Her career may have changed, but the instinct behind it never really did.
When Bonwell left Social Work, she struggled with the decision. Helping people had been deeply intertwined with how she understood purpose. Eventually, she realized she didn’t necessarily have to abandon that part of herself.
“If I was going to teach Yoga, then I was going to use Yoga as Social Work.”
Service remained the thread.
But her understanding of service had changed. Giving everything away until nothing remained was no longer the goal. As Bonwell puts it, service cannot come “at the point of depletion” – because then it stops being honest service.
That tension between holding on and letting go, moving and remaining, is also woven through her books, Migrations, 2019 and Holy Shift, 2026.
Organized around Seasons and Sutras, the books grew from sentiments Bonwell had gathered from teachers, contemplations and her own journals and epiphanies. They include the very words and ideas that had helped hold her together during different chapters of her life.
“I think the books have tiny pieces of glue to keep you intact as you go through different seasons,” she says.
The title felt particularly appropriate coming from someone whose life has moved through so many forms of the same underlying purpose.
Bonwell has sat beside people experiencing profound loss. She has witnessed addiction, crisis, fear, and circumstances that can make another side feel impossible. But she has also witnessed people reach it.
That experience shapes the kind of hope she wanted to put into the book. It isn’t about pretending painful things aren’t painful. In fact, she is explicit that she has little interest in “toxic positivity” or bypassing what hurts.
Instead, the books offer a quieter reminder: seasons move.
“Not to see them as so permanent,” she says of difficult periods. “They will move. They will migrate.”
Perhaps that is also why Bonwell speaks about surrender differently than we might expect.
Saying yes to everything sounds beautiful in theory, but she doesn’t pretend every experience deserves an enthusiastic yes. Sometimes openness is enough.
“I don’t always like the lesson,” she says. “But I have no choice. So I surrender to divine order in a way because what am I going to do other than fight against it?”
For Bonwell, seeing life as a teacher has made closed doors feel less like failures and changes in relationships less like endings that must always be resisted. Sometimes they are simply redirection – a “divine pivot,” as she calls it.
It is a perspective earned not by escaping difficult seasons, but by moving through enough of them to recognize that they rarely remain exactly as they are.
So what does she say to someone who looks successful on paper, yet privately knows something in their life feels out of alignment?
Her answer is immediate.
“Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it. Get out of your head. Return to your body. Breathe. Move. Go outside. Make room.”
For someone who once tried to think, work, and give her way through nearly everything, the simplicity of that answer feels significant.
Maybe coming back to ourselves isn’t another thing to accomplish. Maybe it begins by becoming quiet enough to notice that we have wandered away.
And then, little by little, finding our way back.
To learn more about Jacqui Bonwell, her teachings, upcoming classes, retreats, workshops,and her involvement with the Nantucket Wellness Festival, visit jacquibonwellyoga.com