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A side project that transforms years of teaching yoga into a digital library of simple rituals
Personal project
2026
Creator & Product Designer
Kali Botânica started as an in-person practice and grew into this digital product exploration. As a creator, I've been involved in everything from teaching and ritual curation to product design, and this case tells how observations from years of classes turned into this concept.
In 2016 I started teaching yoga and developing wellbeing rituals guided by Yoga, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine and self-regulation. Over the following years that work grew into in-person workshops and during the pandemic, into online sessions reaching college students and professionals across different fields.
And I noticed a pattern: many of my students lived through routines of high cognitive load, and even in class it was sometimes hard to create an experience that helped them get out of their heads and back into their bodies.
Outside class, they knew they needed to slow down, but taking care of themselves started to feel like just another task. Often, they ended up not engaging at all, scrolling on their phones even when they were tired.
And this pattern led me to a question:
Ritual and repetition
The answer started with something I already knew from my practice as a teacher: the difference between a routine and a ritual is intention. Breathing, stretching, writing are ordinary actions, until they carry a purpose.
A ritual turns a common task into something that helps make the invisible visible, and holds if the person keeps coming back to it.
Beyond discipline, repetition is what lets a gesture become familiar enough to work when the person is at their lowest point of energy. This was the thinking I used to restructure my classes, and the same thinking that guides this concept.
Onboarding. A short introduction to the concept
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Why three moments
If repetition depends on familiarity, and familiarity depends on simplicity, the structure had to fit into a few moments instead of a library of options.
I used the logic of cycles that already guided my in-person work, and that gives the project its name: Kali, the Hindu goddess who represents the transformation between ending and beginning.
From that logic came the three moments that organize this experience.
wake up
to start the day with energy
be present
to sustain presence throughout it
feel calm
to wind down at the end of the day
Each moment gathers practices of breathwork, mindfulness, and movement, always the same three categories, so the person only chooses the moment they're in instead of deciding between dozens of options.
Home. Tabs hold the three practice types, and each one shows a single ritual at a time, tuned to the person's time of day. The three rituals live in a slider rather than a feed to explore.
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From decision to interface
The same logic of less choice, more return guided the interface decisions. If the goal was to reduce effort, every barrier had to justify its existence.
That's why I removed vertical scroll, which invites exploring instead of acting. And why I kept the ritual library intentionally small instead of expanding it. And also why I dropped the login requirement I had originally planned.
The ritual flow
An exploration in progress
Right now I'm exploring microinteractions across all nine practices and how to take this concept beyond Figma by developing a first functional version.
Later on, I want to see whether the idea of ritual comes through clearly on a screen, whether people actually engage and keep coming back, and whether a ritual can be shared.
I'm also curious to explore what that looks like in a digital experience, and to test the hypothesis that started this project: that people need rituals, not performance, not more content, not more streaks.