Had to write up a lil somethin-somethin for my teacher training application. And I noticed I have not posted anything worthwhile, in a while.

So here is a little something. A little bit about me. And my yoga. And yes, it is my yoga not yours. You can have your own.


I was on a stationary bike sweating out of my pores as my legs pumped and pumped out rotations, one after the other. I was over my hour mark, going on hour two, as my training for triathlons was at its peak intensity. My mom came out of the workout room to come find me, to see if I was done my workout. She had been inside the other room, taking a yoga class, which I had always made fun of her for doing. "That's not a workout, Mom. That doesn't count. It's stretching. It's like, a compliment to a workout. Not the real thing." I told her this over and over, belittling the practice, having never even stepped on a mat myself. I was a triathlete. I did not need yoga. I needed intensity. I needed sweat. I needed hours on the bike, hours on the road pounding my legs into the ground, or my body in water swimming laps and laps.

Today she came out of the room with the yoga teacher, who came up to the bike I was working away on. She started talking to me. Telling me how yoga would be a great addition to my training. I laughed her off, as I often did my Mother, and kept peddling away. I was not done my workout.

Eventually I decided to appease both requests of my Mother and the yoga teacher by taking class one Sunday morning. It was a joke of a sort. I thought I was better than everyone else. I ran, biked, and swam. I did not 'stretch' or do this yoga thing.

I practiced that day with a room full of older adults, I was the youngest in the room, being seventeen and in my last year of high school.

I laid in savasana. I did not get it. I could not just lay still. I did not see the point. What was the workout? I was not even sweating. I thought it worthless.

And then I went back the next week.
And I decided to go back the week after that.
And then I noticed my endurance was improving in my triathlon training.
And so I kept going back.
It became less of a joke.
It became an addition to my training.
But only now, today, has it become my own practice.

I had been an athlete my whole life, and had recently been swallowed by the endurance sport of triathlons. Amidst the intense workouts and adrenaline rushes, an eating disorder and poor self-image also accompanied it. In essence, my training and endurance workouts were nothing more than a good cover-up for exercise anorexia, a purging of a sort, a punishment so to say.

But yoga was, well, something different.
It was not punishing.
It was healing.
It is healing.

Yoga, which once started out as a supplement to my endurance training has now become MY practice. I have owned my time on the mat. Making every minute one of soul-searching and wound-healing.

As cliche as it may sound, yoga has changed my life, perhaps even saved it.

I was set to embark on a teacher training at Sonic Yoga this past summer, but fate interceded and I was not able to follow through as planned.

In the early summer, I was having pains in my knee while resting in child's pose. I was training for up and coming triathlon races at the same time. I kept pushing through the pain, until finally
I had to see a doctor.

It was found that I had a benign tumor behind my right knee, near my femur bone. The tumor is believed to have formed from a tear in my MCL that went unnoticed (I have become dangerously tolerant of pain from my years of endurance punishment put on my body through exercise). It formed where the ligament tore from the bone, allowing a home for the cell-mass to grow, attach, and eventually even fracture part of my femur bone.

I spent the summer in a leg immobilizer, on crutches, off my bike, off the streets, out of the water, and off the mat. The last of which caused me the most pain.
I believe I was meant to spend this summer immobile, not training. My races were cancelled. My training stopped. But my yoga practice deepened. I was not on the mat, but I was in my head, in my mind, in my soul.

The teachers I looked up to most, who have guided me along this way, all told me the same thing: you are about to learn the most important lesson of yoga-to be still, to be quiet, to be inside the mind; that is the real yoga.

It has been the most difficult lesson for me to learn, to accept, but it has become the most necessary. Still it is a struggle, believing and accepting that the real yoga is a practice of the mind and soul, not so much the body. But I am working, I am striving, I am struggling, and I am healing. On and off the mat, my life has become a practice.

I only know what yoga has done for me, given me. And words cannot explain the gifts I have received from yoga and all of my teachers. I can only hold this sense of immense gratitude for the practice and these gifts I have received. And I hope I can give back. By teaching. By sharing my practice. By becoming a teacher myself; guiding others through not only a practice on the mat, but a practice off the mat, in life and in oneself.