How becoming a Yoga Teacher Pulled me out of Grief and back into Myself.

The first notion to become a Yoga teacher came to me as a fleeting thought back in the summer of 2023. I was still at Atlas, I had been done with graduate school for almost a year and I was starting to feel the itch to learn. However, at that time the thought was just that, a fleeting moment in time, I was busy trying to build the coaching business for Atlas and had another coach working under me- there were a lot of new work responsibilities I needed to focus on. So that is the direction I went with at the time.

Fast forward a summer and I've been working in my own studio space for 6 months, I'd left Atlas 9 months prior, moved the business into a shared garage space. That lasted for like 3 months before we found the permanent home for the business. Then getting settled into the space and finalizing all of the things that come with owning your own business (oh, ya and I was training to run an ultramarathon during this whole time). Again, yoga was not on the forefront of my brain AT ALL. In fact it hadn't crossed my mind since that fleeting moment the summer before.

Then, in July of 2023 I lost my dog, my first baby, the first thing in this world I loved more than myself. My Raz. I was crushed, she suffered at the end and it killed me. To breath in a world filled with her absence was so foreign to me. I truly didn't know how to do it.

A few months later my Father, my rock of a Dad was diagnosed with a terminal disease- Parkinson's. Again, my grief filled my body, my mind, it enveloped my energy. It took everything I had that made me, me. Everything, except the exact amount of strength I needed to heal myself.

However, shortly after, as her loss and the news began to set in, my broken heart felt the desire to learn again. This desire is a hallmark of my heart, but I had lost it in the grief and fear that now filled my heart. In this new desire to learn, I considered massage school, but it just didn't call to me, or make sense from a business perspective. Then, one winter day I heard it again, load this time, clear- YOGA.

So, I found a program (a few and picked one) and enrolled, It was only 500 hours, I could do it at whatever pace and it wouldn't interfere with my work schedule. I was nervous, hoping I hasn't just given my anxiety something to feed itself with.

Thus I began with the reading. My first day I read for probably 3 hours and took notes, and within the first 30 minutes it was so clear to me the overlap between the Hindus' belief in Yoga and the Buddhist's path to enlightenment. They are the same. This is significant for me because back the first time I battled a major depressive episode in my life (when I got sober back in 2012) I recovered through a Buddhist group. So, I knew, first hand, the powers that this lifestyle and this practice meant. I knew how transformative it could be.

Needless to say I was instantly obsessed- an exercise modality designed to enhance mindfulness and thus mental health. I mean THAT link exists behind the exercise I've been teaching my whole career, but it doesn't have this meditation piece built right in. There's not a path to anything but a stronger mind and body (which is pretty epic and essential). Yet with Yoga, there's this path of mental health, of living pure, of cultivating the things that saved my life during some of my darkest days.

Then, fortunately while I recovered from two surgeries before March of 2025 I had yoga as a way to still have physical movement in my life, and this mental path forward and this growing knowledge base of how to heal my body and my mind.

So, when yoga and I finally met each other head on in this world it changed things in my heart, and it is THOSE teachings I want to bring to every student that takes my classes. This is too beautiful of a practice to not be shared with the world.