I have been practicing yoga for most of my adult life. My mother exposed me to yoga when I was a child and I believe set the foundation for what was going to be a fundamental part of my life in the future. However, when I was school age the concepts of yoga and physical well-being activities never seemed to click. I was really never very physically active. I didn’t enjoy competitive sports much and I never really paid much attention to eating healthy. I struggled with eating disorders in my teenage years like many teenagers do and I don’t think I really got over them and began eating healthy until many years later when I finally connected with yoga.
I grew up in a very small community in the North Country, NY. I was surrounded by wilderness in one of the most peaceful environments imaginable. (The picture above was taken in my parent’s backyard). You would have thought that I would have loved the great outdoors and would have taken advantage of the many opportunities this area provided. But, that was not the case. I was more focused on getting out of the town and moving to a city at that age. I went to Marist College in Poughkeepsie and earned a Bachelors Degree in Economics with a Minor in Business Administration. I truly believed at the time that my dream was to be a successful business executive. I thought that this career would give me the life that I was looking for. Luckily, I was very smart and learning came easy to me so excelling in a very difficult college curriculum was no major challenge.
In college I began working with people that have disabilities. I worked in a group home during the college semester and a Day Habilitation site in the summer. These jobs fit in very well with my school hours and allowed me to make money while I earned my degree. They were just supposed to be college “jobs”. Little did I realize that this field would become so much a part of me that I would still be in it over twenty years later. In my senior year at college I started to discover another aspect of my being. A girl I worked with reintroduced me to yoga and hiking. She had such a great impact on me that many years later I named my chocolate lab “Lexi” after her since this dog also was going to be my new hiking companion. Suddenly the area that I grew up in and ran away from started to have an appeal. However, I am very stubborn and vowed that I would never return so I went to the other side of the Adirondack Park, the High Peaks region when I graduated from Marist. There were very few jobs in the Economics sector in this region so I continued to work with people with disabilities. Yoga was also very hard to find at this time in this area but I had all of the hiking, rock climbing and snowshoeing opportunities that one could ever ask for. I climbed more than half of the high peak mountains before I met my ex husband and moved to Albany, NY to be with him.
Back in the city atmosphere I was very ungrounded and had a difficult time trying to discover my passion. I finally had the opportunity to put my degree to use and try being a financial advisor for a financial firm. I quickly discovered that this was DEFINATELY not who I was and went back to working with people with disabilities. I was in a very unhappy marriage although I really did not understand this, so I filled my time with shopping, dining out and different social circles. I began to gain weight and feel less and less like I was where I was supposed to be at the time. I knew one thing for certain and that was that I did not like how I felt in this new slightly overweight body. This is what prompted me to join a gym and begin “working out.” I was VERY self conscious of my appearance and lack of physical abilities so this was a very awkward period of my life and something way out of my comfort zone. I began taking many group fitness classes since I really didn’t know what I was supposed to do in the rest of the gym and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. I started to really enjoy the classes but most of all the yoga classes reawakened a part of me that was dormant for a long time.
This is when I decided to get my Yoga Teaching Certification and began a program to complete my 200 hours of training. This training was a very fundamental step in my life and I never dreamed how much I would learn and grow in this process. In this training I finally began to reconnect with my body and all of my self-image concerns and criticisms began to disappear. I finally stopped “dieting” and started fueling my body with nutrients that my body needed. I stopped “exercising” and started focusing on “moving”, “stretching” and “challenging” my body in ways that I never have in the past. I stopped worrying about “weight loss” and began to naturally shed all of those excess pounds that were holding me back.
During this time in my life my mismatched marriage finally broke up and we went our separate ways. Although we continued to share two very special dogs that were truly the best gift I ever received in this relationship. One of them “Tucker” my boxer continues to be with me and is still the love of my life. I began teaching yoga as a second job to cover all of my expenses since I now was single again. I still seemed to have plenty of time to continue to explore where the next chapter of my life would be taking me. I also continued to take as many classes that I could fit into my schedule. I now was taking classes because I truly enjoyed them and not because I was “trying to exercise”.
This is how I discovered Barre and quickly decided that this was something that I needed to learn more about and offer to my students as well. Getting this new certification was so much fun and inspiring that I decided that I was not going to stop there. I then earned my “Group Fitness Certification” and “Personal Trainer Certification”. I also became a certified LiveSTRONG Coach through the YMCA at this time. I am currently working on my “Nutrition Fitness Specialist certification” and I am sure that there will be many more certifications to come in the future. I have finally discovered my love of learning and growing and I am very excited to learn all that I can in this area.
I have also been very fortunate to meet the man of my dreams. He deserves a lot of credit for my success. He has been been very supportive of all of the fitness goals and even though he doesn’t always share my interests or even completely understand most of them, he is my biggest cheerleader always celebrating my success and encouraging me to do more. I am very grateful for meeting him at this time in my life. I honestly believe that all of the other stages that I have gone though in my life have led me to where I am now and have helped me be “ready” for this relationship. I hope to continue to learn and grow with him by my side wherever life takes us. I really do not know what the future holds. One lesson that I have learned is that life is truly a journey. I have hopefully only lived less than half of my life and traveled down many paths so far. Each path has been a blessing and a journey that I needed to take to be where I am at now. I know for certain that my journeys are not over and instead of fearing the changes that are yet to come I am excited about the growth that I have yet to discover.