Yoga is an immense blessing to my life. Through yoga and physical movement, I feed my spirit and restore my mind while also giving birth to physical matter that is a reflection of my soul.

Often, I’ve valued the spiritual and intellectual above the physical. When I finally chose to be more intentional about my physical development and fitness, yoga was not my first choice. I was introduced to yoga through texts I’d read during periods of spiritual seeking, thus I did not associate yoga with physical fitness. In addition, I wanted to strengthen and condition my body, and current practices seemed to be all about flexibility and stretching. Due to my preconceptions, I skipped yoga and started out with boot camps and forms of dance-centered fitness.

A Groupon and convenience led me to Yoga House Houston in 2013. I quickly learned that I had been wrong about the breadth of yoga and its capacity to strengthen and condition the body, mind, and spirit as a whole. Not only that, my understanding of the universal nature of yoga and its origins across cultures expanded vastly, and it continues to grow as I practice and meet new yogis.

A search for physical fitness led me away from yoga, back to yoga, and then back to myself. As a student and teacher, I acknowledge that we all come to yoga for various reasons, and I seek to honor whatever those reasons are when I share the practice with others through my classes.