My yoga journey began in 2005. I had trained as a ballet dancer for many years, pushing my body into shapes that it was honestly not terribly comfortable in, losing my toenails, taping my bloody toes and shoving them back into pointe shoes, and one day I felt a tweak in my lower back during class. Unlike my previous injuries, this one didn't fade within a few days, and I was forced to take a few months off dance. In an effort to stay in shape, my mother suggested yoga, and she and I went to our first class at YogaWorks on Montana Ave. in Santa Monica. At first, it was SO hard to get used to these new shapes, keeping your legs neutral instead of turned out, realizing that ballet flexibility does not always mean everything is flexible, coming to terms that your legs of steel do not translate into being able to do a chatarunga. It was humbling to feel that loss of control after so many years of assuming I had near-complete power over my body's movements. 

    I did eventually go back to dance, but kept taking some yoga classes at YogaWorks. When I went to college and gave up dancing, I would try to get to yoga when I could at a local studio in Hyde Park in Chicago, but life was stressful and it was easy to seek consolation in the outer things in my life, my boyfriend, my friends, my music. And I want to be clear, these were and are all good things, but I was depending on others to make me strong and to calm me down when I was anxious.

Fast forward a few years. In the fall of 2014, I began graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana. I had just moved to a new town, in a new state, where I didn't know a soul, a city girl to the cornfields, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal to my first red state. And my boyfriend of two years broke up with me three days after I arrived. The day he left, I dragged myself to yoga. In my fragile state, my practice felt totally different. No longer self-identified as a dancer, I inhabited my body in a new way. While yoga is always humbling, the practice helped me identify the strength within myself. I threw myself into school, but I also threw myself into my yoga. Over the months, I found that there was this new corner of my brain, a small, calm place that I could go to when I was annoyed, or stressed, or sad. At first this corner was tiny, but it was growing, and it has continued to grow as I've kept practicing. As someone who has always been high-energy, high-intensity, high-stress, it felt and feels miraculous to cultivate this inner calm, a new source of strength.

    Asana is a physical practice, and yoga has changed my relationship to my body, not just my mind. Ballet, much as I loved it, coupled with growing up in West Los Angeles, served mostly to give me a deeply unhealthy relationship to my external body, where my sense of self-worth came from being skinny, the number on the scale, or in the tags in my clothing. As I practiced yoga, there was no one telling me to look in the mirror and compare myself to the dancers around me. Instead there was only encouragement to keep my thoughts on my own mat, to observe and respect how I was feeling that day, to cultivate self-compassion. Perhaps this seems trite, but for me this was radical. Every day, I felt blessed that my body was there for me, that it was stronger than I realized, more resilient.

    And, it really was stronger. I forced myself to stand naked in front of the mirror every morning and feel proud. Little bits of muscle definition slowly came in. I could touch my toes. My body was beautiful because it could do things, and if it couldn't do something today, maybe it could another day. That is perhaps the greatest gift that yoga has given me, to be patient with myself, which allows me to become more patient with others. To develop self-compassion so that compassion can flow out too.  

    Please don't misunderstand me; this journey is never over. Some days are better than others. My weight and strength might fluctuate, some days it's really hard to look in that mirror, to feel appreciative. But yoga has helped me acquire the skills to be more gentle with myself. I never thought I could do a push-up or a handstand (or wait patiently in a line for that matter). I decided to become a yoga teacher so that I could help others experience the good things I have. When I teach, my goal is for my students to feel welcome, wherever they are on their yoga journey. No matter what size one is, or level of fitness, I believe doing yoga can help the body and soul to thrive. Yoga isn't magic, but it's an old and damn good system for cultivating calm and strength. Inside and out.