Grounding in Gratitude, Why I Love & Teach Yoga

Trekking the rocky hillside path to the local farmer’s market, I took a mental snapshot of the sun-kissed landscape that felt so joyfully surreal: open-air houses well-kept with love, scattered amid luscious tropical rainforest trees with free-roaming dogs, cats, roosters and even monkeys, at just the right hours of the day.  My 13-month volunteer teaching term in Costa Rica was nearing its end.  So much insight and gratitude swelled in my heart from overcoming the struggles of the past year abroad-- adjusting to an unfamiliar culture and educational system, living in solitude away from close friends and family and confronting my inner shadow embedded in habits of thinking, doing, speaking and being.  I had left a life of apparent stability as a 5-year schoolteacher in the U.S. and chose, despite several colleagues’ and friends’ dismay, to displace myself in a country of which I had little to no knowledge, merely because I felt a burning desire to share my passion for teaching somewhere where I felt I could make more of a difference and where I could grow out of my “box” of existing.
 
How does this all relate to yoga?  My yoga asana practice became my daily refuge, an experimental church, a playground, a therapist-- my sanity.  Since my teenage years, I turned to running as a coping mechanism for stress.  It gradually became a competitive sport, in which my self-critical voice soon took over, manifesting in injuries.  During my volunteer teaching service, my daily regimen–a routine I adopted to create a sense of familiarity within a foreign place—became a morning, and sometimes afternoon, trail run to the ocean and yoga asana practice.  While running channeled anxiety and frustration, yoga spoke wisdom to my soul, encouraging self-compassion and thus, a newfound compassion for others, whose ways of living I didn’t at first understand.  I began to run, not for competition or ego, but for enjoyment and gratitude toward my body and the inspiring natural environment I felt honored to be living in.  Yoga unveiled courage and blessings at every corner, whereas during my first six months abroad, I suffered from deep surges of self-doubt, fear and sadness in which I craved to be home in the U.S.  Yoga became my tool to accessing a sense of home, or inner peace, in whatever situation I was. 
 
I’ve come along way and am still evolving in my practice of yoga.  Funny to think about when I fell asleep within the first ten minutes of my first ever yoga class in 2001, leaving the aftertaste that yoga was boring.  It took much persuasion by a dance colleague and friend to return to another yoga class, which was a contrasting experience of swimming in a pool of my own sweat and being intrigued by the practice.  For years, I toyed with yoga classes here and there, until I was forced to overcome a dance injury and surgery requiring a year to recover before returning to my two sorely missed loves—dancing and running in nature.  A vital tool then for restoring my physical, emotional and mental wellbeing was yoga, having turned to many paths of natural healing.  Yoga became a gateway for building body intelligence and finding peace within stillness, for such a craver of movement. 
 
Upon my return to California from Costa Rica, I followed my eagerness to share the empowering gift of yoga that continues to transform my entire way of being.  While new struggles arose on my path to transitioning careers and becoming a yoga teacher, many blessings affirm that I am right where I need to be and serving now as a full-time yoga teacher since 2010.  In gratitude for the land that inspired this transition, I now lead yoga retreats in Costa Rica through my community yoga and retreats company, Root 2 Rise Yoga.  Excitedly I seek new ways to deepen my practice in and share yoga’s many realms, such as meditation and powerful application to daily living.