Sarah Platt-Finger has spent her life listening to the body. As a master yogini, author, speaker, and Director of Chopra Yoga, her work bridges ancient yogic science with modern conversations around healthspan, longevity, and meaning. Her teaching is not about performance or aesthetics, but about remembrance.
On this episode of The Healthspan Collective podcast, Platt-Finger reflects on how yoga becomes a technology for inner intelligence, offering not just physical vitality, but a way to live with balance, presence, and resilience across every chapter of life.
Movement as a Gateway to Consciousness
Long before yoga entered her life, movement was already shaping her inner world. “Gymnastics was like my yoga,” she reflects. “It was a way for me to steady my mind, but also to alter my consciousness.” As a child who spent more time upside down than upright, movement offered relief from emotional intensity and mental noise.
Her first encounter with meditative arts came later, during college, through a class called Chinese Meditative Arts. “Three and a half weeks of doing these meditative practices transformed me,” she says. At a time marked by self destructive patterns and a “troubled relationship with my body,” the experience of calm was entirely new. “To actually feel at peace and a sense of quiet in my body, it was like nothing I had ever experienced.”
Following the Inner Yes
Platt-Finger’s path into yoga was not strategic. It was intuitive. “There was always a voice inside of me that kind of drove me,” she shares. That voice led her overseas to Taiwan, then back to the US to pursue yoga teacher training at twenty five. When faced with a choice between a traditional career and teaching yoga, the answer came from her body. “It was like, yes to the yoga,” she says. “It was divine right action.”
That concept, known as kriya shakti, became a guiding force. “Something comes to you and you don’t think it through, you just know it to be right,” she explains. Her life unfolded through these inner cues, each one leading her deeper into practice.
Finding Home Through the Practice
The moment that changed everything came in her first ISHTA class. “I came out of that class and I was like, this is my home,” she recalls. “This feeling that I have in my body of returning back home to a space that’s always there.” After years of searching for belonging across continents, home revealed itself as an internal state.
That experience became the seed of her life’s work. “What I wanted to offer and share with other people was finding a home inside of themselves.” Through ISHTA, the Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra, and Ayurveda, she and her husband helped preserve a lineage that honored breath, meditation, and embodied awareness at a time when yoga was rapidly becoming fitness focused.
Yoga as a Science of Longevity
For Platt-Finger, yoga is inseparable from healthspan. “Our bodies are an expression of consciousness,” she explains. “Nothing is fixed. Nothing is static.” From a tantric perspective, the body is a field of intelligence, constantly reshaping itself.
This understanding reframes longevity as balance rather than optimization. “The risk is that we can become too rigid,” she says. “Yoga is commitment with surrender of the outcome.” Healthspan, like yoga, requires consistency without attachment, effort without control.
She emphasizes that the body already knows how to heal. “The body has its own intelligence that we don’t even have to interfere with.” The role of practice is not to force change, but to clear obstruction so that vitality can flow.
Small Practices With Deep Impact
One of the most powerful insights she offers is that yoga’s return on investment comes from consistency, not intensity. “The gifts of yoga are not so much in intensity, but in consistency,” she says. “Doing a little bit every day is money in the bank.”
Yoga, she explains, is meant to leave the mat. “When you’re standing in traffic, can you take a breath,” she asks. Simple practices like humming can shift the nervous system. “It tones the vagus nerve and lengthens your exhale.”
For driven individuals prone to burnout, she offers a clear prescription. “If you move fast, your yoga practice should be slow,” she says. “You give yourself exactly what you need to not fall over.”
The Body as Infinite Intelligence
When asked what she wishes all women knew about their bodies, her answer is unwavering. “It is a field of infinite intelligence,” she says. “It knows more than your mind does.” From cellular regeneration to emotional resilience, the body is constantly working on our behalf.
Yoga, in her view, is simply the art of remembering. “If you can breathe, you can do yoga,” she says. “It’s not about mastering poses. It’s returning back to the source of who you really are.”
Closing Reflection
Sarah Platt-Finger’s work reminds us that healthspan is not something we chase, but something we allow. Through embodied awareness, balance, and trust in the body’s wisdom, longevity becomes less about extending life and more about inhabiting it fully. This is the heart of The Healthspan Collective, honoring the intelligence within, so we can live each chapter with clarity, vitality, and meaning.
