April Featured Yogi: Golriz Shafaie

Golriz is a clinical director for an adult day health care that focuses on mental health and addiction.  She is also a psychotherapist in private practice in Encino.  She attends our weekly yoga classes several times a week, often straight from seeing her patients. Among our first yogis to attend our Costa Rica Yoga Retreat in 2014, you'll often see her at one of our community events and retreats around LA.  Here's what she shared on our interview:

M-- When did your yoga journey begin and how?

G-- I began doing yoga as exercise when I had health challenges 10 years ago.  

M-- How does yoga benefit you?

G-- Through yoga, I not only overcame my health challenges, but became more fit than I'd been in decades.  It also inspired a general well being approach to life that includes nutrition and lower stress.

M-- What insights or wisdom have you learned through your practice?  What inspiration would you like share or pass on to others?

G-- Even more significant than promoting my health, Yoga helped me develop a close relationship with my body and my mind, which facilitated a deeper relationship with my love and with life as a whole.

M-- What's your favorite yoga pose and why?.  

G-- Its tough to choose.  Dozens of positions each  taught me much.    My latest achievement was the headstand. It helped me see the world through a different perspective, literally and figuratively, and gave me a sense of accomplishment.  I also love side plank!

M-- Anything else you'd like to add, like a favorite experience/memory you have related to yoga.  

G-- Any practice and life skill begs for a good representative.

​Michelle embodies the best practices and deepest traditions from which yoga emerged yet she manages to make it practical and is a wonderful patient instructor. Her heart and energy are unique and contagious.

You also have to go on her yoga getaways!  The one to Costa Rica was one of the most amazing and beautiful experiences of my life!