My yoga story
I.
At the beginning of each yoga teacher training I lead, I ask everyone to tell their “yoga story.” I always begin with my own.
I began practicing yoga at 45.
I was one of those people who never did anything too active if I didn’t have to. Most of my life, I was lucky enough (or unlucky depending on how you look at it) to not need exercise to keep weight off. So around my mid forties, I was convinced by my partner to begin working out with weights and running. I very quickly realized how weak and out of shape I was. It was fun for me to become fit for the first time in my life, but honestly, I hated the actual work outs, but realized that they were good for me, so I continued to do them.
Eventually, my partner, who had practiced yoga as a child, wanted me to go to a class with him at the gym we frequented. At first I refused, but was finally convinced to try a class.
It was a Hatha Vinyasa Yoga class taught by an amazing teacher.
I was hooked. I had never felt so good in my entire life. I felt so complete. And I had no idea why.
I stopped going to Body Pump classes. I stopped running. I began practicing yoga with two teachers, both amazing and compelling — both very different. One I used to call “evil Barbie.” Tall and blond and strong and flexible, she would kick my ass and make me feel whole. The other teacher was chatty and a bit gentler, but also engaging and addictive. I simply loved them. I religiously practiced with them for the next couple years. Once I even attended a meditation workshop with Evil Barbie. In this workshop, she promised me that if I meditated 10 minutes a day, my life would change. After this I began researching meditation and practicing the 10 minutes a day that promised me change.
My attendance persisted until unexpectedly, they both left the club and left me bereft without them. For a while, I tried other teachers, other places until I realized no one was quite what I was looking for at the time.
I spent some time flailing, continuing my meditation practice, which encompassed a myriad of techniques I had read about including guided meditation, candle staring, mantra recitation and just trying to focus on my breath and the present moment. Until one day, it occurred to me that if I could spend 10 minutes a day in meditation, I could come to my mat and practice some yoga poses for 10 minutes as well.
Thus began my year of home practice. Those 20 minutes eventually became an hour and my practices varied from restorative to energetic vinyasa sequences.
I’m not even sure what kept calling me back each day, but as time went by, I began to notice that I was calmer, steadier, stronger. And I knew that it was because of the practices that I had begun and that my life was truly changing. So I kept practicing.
II.
One morning, I listened to a guided meditation on my IPad entitled Finding Your Inner Guide. It began by having me visualize walking into a house, then through a garden, into some woods, to a lake, into a boat and onto an island. When I was on the island, I was led down some stairs into a clearing where I saw the back of a tiny older woman with silver hair pulled into a pony tail and old fashioned stiff cotton yoga clothes.
(Digressing for a moment, I have always felt like there was a little old lady who lived in my head and talked to me. She was always wise and knew stuff. She could see through the travesties of life and called things as they were.)
So when I saw this little old woman in the clearing, I thought that I was going to finally meet my little old lady, and when she turned around, I was stunned for a moment to see that she was an older and wiser ME. My future self, was MY little old lady. I quickly adapted to this idea, but then the question arose, “What’s with the yoga clothes?”
III.
Soon after this meditation, I began to feel a strong pull to talk with the two teachers who I had originally studied with about possibly opening a yoga studio with them. At the time, I had some money saved and to me, this seemed like an investment and a calling. One of the women was interested. Soon things started falling into place, I found a location and signed a lease. We got my partner and contractor friends to help and built a yoga studio, cafe and retail store. It was a huge undertaking. We opened, and it was a very slow beginning. Classes did not immediately fill up as I had imagined and after three weeks, the yoga teacher who had come with me, quit. And… I was NOT a yoga teacher. So the first day after she quit, my assistant walks into my office to tell me that we had 4 people show up for a yoga class, and we had no teacher. For a moment, I panicked, and then, I asked her to look up the legality of me teaching a yoga class, grabbed some yoga clothes off a rack and walked in and channeled every yoga teacher I had ever had. I taught a yoga class. When the class was over, I walked out feeling like I was high. In a blinding flash, I knew my calling. I walked into my office and called a friend/client who had closed a studio and asked if he could come and train me to teach yoga. Within weeks, he had pulled together a training class, and within a few more weeks, I was certified to teach yoga.
III.
Breathe was the name of that first business. It was catchy, and I loved it. Breathe was slow to catch on, but after a couple years of me supporting it with my real estate broker income, we began to inch our way to breaking even. And one month, we actually did. But the cost was high. I was thoroughly exhausted and my financial resources were depleted. Almost three years from the day we opened, behind in the rent and suffering from complete adrenal fatigue and financially bankrupt, I made the decision to close the doors. It was heartbreaking. I went into a dark, quiet place. I got very sick and ended up in bed for almost a month fighting the flu.
IV.
When I closed Breathe, I decided to take some time to further my yoga training, so I enrolled in a 300-hour training in Ubud, Bali. I wasn’t even excited. I just knew it was the next step on my path, so I enrolled. Then I got sick, and even before I was fully recovered, I got a call from my family in Kansas. My 42-year-old sister-in-law, love of my brother’s life and mother of 13-year-old triplets had suffered a massive heart event that had taken her young life. I was on the next flight, coughing up a lung, but determined to get to my family. The next few days were a blur. Jennifer, who I had known since she was 14, was gone. It did not seem possible. There was no way out of this nightmare that my family was at the center of and that was shared by hundreds of people. So we went through the motions. We mourned.
V.
I was supposed to leave for Bali in just a few days. I couldn’t imagine going through with it. We were all just walking around in a fog. It hurt to breathe. I offered to stay with my brother and his family.
My brother gently refused my help and told me that Jennifer would have wanted me to follow my dream. A part of me knew what he said was true. So I went home, packed my bags and got on a 24-hour airplane after airplane ride that landed me in a very different place…
My journey to Bali really began when I read “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. I was taken by the story and the magical place she visited, Ubud, Bali. My experience was not hers, but it was magical none-the-less.
I arrived in Bali heavy with grief. I immediately had culture shock, jet lag. I couldn’t smile.
People avoided me. I was the oldest person in the class at my 300-hour advanced training, and I couldn’t stop crying.
Eventually, the other two over-50 students and I bonded. They weren’t put off by my tears, which is definitely one of the gifts that life gives us. Compassion and an understanding that tears do not automatically mean weakness or depression.
I was grateful. And I was grateful for the long and sweaty days, the philosophies imparted and the wisdom gained from this training. It was full of beams of light in the form of beautiful, gifted yogis and yoginis. Eventually, my smiles returned, and I got stronger — durable.
I returned home ready to light up the world with my newfound yoga knowledge, but instead was greeted by further tragedy. My sweet, little Darby, my 5-pound lovable Maltese was sick and was in so much pain and misery that the vet convinced us to put him down. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done — until five months later when my beloved sheltie Murphy was taken from us as well.
I wanted the world to stop. But it would not.
I was forced to keep living in a world that was not as light, nor as fun. I went back to my teaching and started looking for a space to rent to lead a teacher training.
During my training in Bali, I came to understand that this was my path. I wanted to pass to others the gift of renewal and strength that yoga had given me.
One day I stumbled on a small store front in downtown Olympia, and I attempted to reach the building owner (it actually took three tries to find out who he was, fate kept interfering, but I persevered and found out he was someone I already knew.) It was almost funny and serendipitous. We met. I rented the small space, and with the help of my students and my friends and partner, we finished painting and hanging cloth and putting in flooring in one short week.
Soon, teachers were wondering in the door asking if I would rent the space out, I thought, why not??? So thus began Firefly Yoga.
And by the way, the name came from my friend Robin telling me that I was a little firefly who went around shining my little light from one person to the next.
I loved this image.
By the end of this growth-filled but tragedy-laden year, I remember looking in the mirror one day and wondering how in the world I was still moving after everything that had happened.
And in a flash, I realized… all of the death and the loss of that year was not me. It happened around me, but at my core, I was still solid. I credit my yoga practice and my spiritual journey with this connection to my higher self and the energy of love that was all around me.
I worked my butt off the rest of that year to build my first yoga teacher training. It was nerve-wracking and soooooo exciting. But the moment it began, I knew I had found my voice, my path.
Firefly has been a labor of love, and we have expanded. We have two studios side-by-side in downtown Olympia, WA and a second studio in nearby Lacey.
In just 3 years, it went from me to 30+ teachers. As of this writing, I have trained and certified about 70 yoga teachers.
I feel eternally blessed, and every day I am grateful for every moment that I get to continue this amazing journey with these amazing people.
