My Yoga Journey
I started practicing Yoga somewhere around 2011, I was 29 y/o. I was completing my four years of Anesthesia residency in Miami. My life basically consistent of equal parts brutal work and brutal partying. I remember wanting to find a replacement for ballet (which was my life’s passion up to that moment) and also a way to exercise and stay skinny (living in Miami it was hard to not get caught up with my physical appearance). My first yoga class ever was outdoors by the bay under a huge gazebo. It was packed with all sorts of people and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. From there, I continued to go to occasional classes in Miami and then Boston, where I moved to complete a subspecialty in Anesthesia for pregnant women in 2012. At that point, I still questioned if yoga was for me and thought that I was definitely not good at it and not strong enough; at least I was flexible from my years dancing.
It wasn’t until I moved to New Orleans in 2013, for my first job, that I really started practicing more consistently. Slowly but surely, I stop looking so much around me during class for who was doing what. I stop comparing myself so much and I started having this sense that yoga was more than just doing all these difficult poses and chaturangas and looking good at it. I had these really brief moments where I could feel myself experiencing something that was beyond a physical practice of movement; something intangible but beautiful.
I slowly started learning the poses in Sanskrit and getting this curiosity to learn more about Yoga. I remember practicing side by side with my husband at the time and how he would spent so much time looking at me and correcting my “alignment” in the poses. I would feel so self-conscious, embarrassed and angry. I had no idea how much I would grow through this practice and how one day I would so clearly see that yoga is not about how a pose looks but about how it feels. It is definitely not about performing but about having a practice that welcomes you just as you are and allows us to use breath, movement and stillness to go within and learn so much about life and about ourselves.
After I got a divorced in 2018, I started feeling a calling to participate in a yoga teacher training. I completed my first 200hr yoga teacher training that year and as I’ve had heard from so many, it was life-changing. There is a difficulty in finding words to describe why is such a transformative experience but I can say that a big part of it is the connections you create and the vulnerability and intimacy that you experience. Even though I had wanted to complete this training, I never really saw myself as a teacher. I had huge impostor syndrome and also never really saw myself as a really good yoga student (how can I teach if I can’t do arm balances or inversions?). I taught some small group classes at home (mostly friends) and then stop teaching until the pandemic came. I continued my regular practice and with it a lot of unconscious learning and change was happening. When the pandemic started, I found refuge in physical activity and I started teaching yoga, gentle stretches and meditation online from home. I still felt so inadequate as a teacher and had no trust in my capabilities.
Eventually I quit my job as a doctor in Louisiana and went to live on the road for almost a year. On November 15th, 2021 I came to Denver to visit friends and ended up staying here for good. I was unemployed and terrified of going back to work as a doctor. I was looking for something else that could give my life meaning or perhaps a new and different way to work in Medicine as well as with my life passions. I heard that inner voice calling me to go deeper into Yoga again, so I decided to complete a 300 hour Yoga and Psychology teacher training. I believed this was a good fit as it combined mental health and the science (more Western side) of it with the yoga (Eastern) more spiritual side of things. During the training, I felt a clear calling to have the courage to start teaching again and so I decided to auditioned for yoga teaching jobs in Denver. On April 14th, 2021 I taught my first class and during that first month I taught a total of 40 classes. I was scared but excited and I was loving it. I started teaching in just one studio but quickly had 2 other teaching jobs. It was exhilarating to do something not for the money but for the love of it. I enjoyed creating weekly music playlists, working on my sequences and finding intentions to contemplate during class. I was still unsure of who I was as a teacher and if I was any good at it for that matter but I had a sense that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing in that moment. I enjoyed so much creating community in the studio and participating in so many different yoga-related events.
In June, I also started working again in the hospital. I found a part-time job that allowed me to have a lot of autonomy, flexibility and time off. It was a really scary transition but a successful one. So as of today, I’ve been teaching yoga for about 8 months, 6 of which I’ve been also back working as an Anesthesiologist. I’ve taught 135 classes and feel so very proud of myself. More important than numbers, I’ve met so many fantastic people and make lots of authentic beautiful connections. And I think, I’ve help some people with my teaching in one way or another.
Last week, I made the difficult decision to step away from teaching all my regular classes and to take a break from teaching Yoga at least for some time. I do plan to stay as a substitute teacher so I can stay active in the community. This decision might seem sudden or confusing but my intuition was telling me that I needed to go back to the roots, to the basics, to the beginning. I need to remember what Yoga is to me, I need to recover the spirit of my own personal practice and perhaps redefine why I wanted to teach Yoga in the first place. When I quit my medical job and went on the road, I had bits of revelations of what I wanted to do to make this world better in my own small way. I wanted to combine my life sufferings (childhood trauma, depression, mental health struggles) with my life passions (yoga, dancing, movement, travel) into some sort of project that would help make a change even if just for a few. I wanted to be more active in the field of mental health, to share my experiences and help others that way. I want to remember those intentions and that calling because I truly think is important. I truly feel that it matters and that so many, like me, need support. So many, need a voice to advocate for them, when they can’t. So many need to be listened to, to find compassion and loving kindness. So I am hoping that this break will help me find some time for myself to heal from my most recent episode of the blues and will also allow me to reinvent myself and my contributions to this world.