I subbed for my regular Sunday morning yoga class today. When I was thinking about what to teach, I came up with the theme of “three.” It just seemed to bubble up as I planned, kept coming up, repeating and insisting itself. I looked up a bit about the meaning of three — divinity, order, unity, wholeness. It’s a sacred number in many religious traditions.

There’s been research that deep breathing triggers a relaxation response in the body. As little as three deep breaths can do the trick. When our lizard, reptilian brain is in a state of fight, flight, or freeze, three deep breaths can instigate a shift back to our natural state of calm, relax us back into our inherent wisdom and compassion.

Yoga can also be translated as “union,” the unification of body, mind, and heart — our three “selves.” Three also made me think of “ready, set, go.” Ready is setting our intention, set is getting together our props and tools, gathering what we need, and go can either be literal movement or energetic, or it can be surrender, as in “ready, set, let go.”

It was a really fun class. We moved through poses in sequences or series of three, paused to take three breaths throughout, and circled back to that notion of unification of body, mind, and heart as we practiced. And the most magic thing that I only realized just now? I had three students.

Yesterday, I officiated a wedding. Earlier in the day, Eric went to the grocery store. He wanted to buy me a corsage, some flowers to wear, but as it was a grocery store, there wasn’t anything like that, so he bought me a bouquet for my desk instead.

One of the things I said during the ceremony was marriage isn’t a commitment you make just once. Rather marriage allows you the opportunity to choose that person again and again. This can happen in moments of joy, such as on your wedding day, looking at your partner and feeling overwhelmed by love, knowing this is your person and you are hers, and choosing to commit publicly and legally to your partnership. This choice also happens in some of the darkest moments, when things are hard. Over the course of a long marriage, there are many opportunities to choose. You commit yourself to this person over and over again.

In this month’s issue of Sun Magazine they shared a beautiful poem, A Marriage by Michael Blumenthal, that feels especially true to me.

You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner’s arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.