To help me bring my energy back to my family, all of my current teaching is on hold. Join my mailing list to receive updates on future offerings. In the meantime, please feel free to enjoy my 107 class recordings on my YouTube Channel .

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Glenwood park Sunday morning yoga

My whole life I struggled with PCOS and had irregular periods. When I was 30 I went on a life changing yoga retreat in Costa Rica. This set me on a path to discover better health and nutrition. At 35 when my periods started to become regular again, I decided I wanted to try to have children. My husband and I tried to get pregnant for 4 years. I found out at age 41 that I had stage 1 uterine cancer and I had to have a full hysterectomy.

Thankfully the surgery resulted in them catching the cancer and likely saved my life. I really wanted my body back after that, so I rejoined the gym near me, LA Fitness, as soon as I could and while there I went to a yoga class with a plus size teacher that sort of blew my mind. She turned the lights down, turn on classical music and I allowed myself to cry throughout the whole class. It was so healing and wonderful and I was just so inspired by her. Since she had a body similar to mine, I felt the class was just for me. She gave me a vision for seeing myself as a yoga teacher. I've always loved yoga. So I kept going to the gym and even paid more so I could bring friends as guests and that got me there more than ever, since I'm so very social and it was like: hey let's meet at the gym for yoga, dance, water aerobics, etc.

After not being able to have children, my husband and I got inspired to adopt a child from foster care. We started to go to trainings and counseling and I cleared my schedule to make space in our home and life. I also realized that my self care wasn't nearly where I needed it to be to care for a child. How could I expect to care for a child when I wasn't really caring for myself?! I set up a yoga studio in my garage, which is now where I teach my math class remotely. But as I was doing yoga on my own in the garage, I felt alone and like I really didn't know that much about what I was doing. I was just practicing what I had learned in the classes I'd taken, but something was missing. Through couples counseling we realized we weren't ready to adopt, so then I saw this opportunity to go to yoga teacher training. I had the time and I figured it was just for me to learn and grow my own practice. I didn't really have the intention to teach at that point. It just felt the perfect window of time to help myself prepare for bringing a child into our home. A skill that I could learn for myself and my community.

So October 2017, I joined the 200-hour Yoga Conservatory at Yoga Refuge. It was a remarkable and life changing experience! I'm so happy I did it. After training I thought, well I might as well practice teaching so I can develop that skill. My main goal was to make yoga a part of my lifestyle, a habit, a practice, and to build community. I went back to my gym and I got hired to teach yoga and ended up back in that same room with the amazing teacher I'd had there and who inspired me to see myself as a yoga teacher. I taught there for 2 years. I got to bring free guests and got a free membership. My brother came to my classes every Sunday for two years to work out and take yoga. As a plus size teacher myself, showing up in my bigger body to be the yoga teacher at the gym was very challenging to my inner critic. But I feel like representation is so important and I tried to offer lots of variation on poses to allow for a balance of effort and ease and to meet the needs of a very diverse class. That's what I really loved about the gym, the diversity of levels, bodies, experience, etc.

But then Covid-19 hit and the gym closed. I took it as a nice little teaching break. I started to take zoom classes and loved the fact that I didn't have to leave my house. We got our 14 year old girl Electra from foster care and are about to adopt her. The gym reopened, but I didn't feel comfortable going back with these new mom commitments. The summer 2020, I started to teach yoga in the park to two neighbor friends with girls Electra's age. It was so lovely! See my weekly offerings above to join a live class.