How I Became a Full Time Yoga Teacher: From College Student to 10 Year Career

I sometimes think of my life as pre and post discovering yoga. I would hardly be able to recognize the girl I was before yoga entered my life and changed me, wholly and completely. That girl was anxious, perfectionistic, and so dang hard on herself.

If there’s any lesson that I’ve learned in a decade of yoga, it’s that the easier, more compassionate you are on yourself, the easier it gets. More compassion, more ease. More grace, more gentleness. Then things start lining up and really cool things begin to manifest for you.

How did it all start?

India, 2013

A preppy ballerina goes to India over summer break and becomes a yoga teacher!

In college. My college, the University of Virginia, received a 12 million dollar donation to open a Contemplative Sciences Center and I was one of the first students to receive the benefits of this donation :) Apparently the owner of the Weather Channel is a huge Ashtanga yoga fan and UVA alum. Go ‘Hoos!

That coincidence was what started this whole yoga journey. I realized after my freshman year that I didn’t really enjoy the regular business or pre-law courses, but loved Global Development, Anthropology, Religious Studies and of course, the first class I took on Yoga, Yoga Theory and Practice with David Germano and John Bultman. In that course I started up a serious Ashtanga yoga practice. Perhaps for the other students it was just a requirement, but for me I DUG IN. Practiced every single day- and essentially became a weirdo on campus. Stopped drinking, eating meat, and partying. Instead just going full in on yoga.

That summer I went to India to do my yoga teacher training. Through the Contemplative Sciences Center I was able to meet the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra and other thought leaders. I also started a yoga club at UVA called U Yoga that still exists! It is UVA’s first Vinyasa Yoga Club.

Full Dancer, 2013

I was already flexible from ballet, so for me yoga was about the philosophy: detachment from goals/ outcomes, non-judgmental, present moment awareness, & self-compassion. Those were all the OPPOSITE of the hyper competitive environment I grew up in.

After college, I tried teaching in San Francisco for a short while and failed miserably to keep up with the cost of living. Honestly, this was not a high point in my life. While I was very lucky to find an AMAZING SF yoga studio (Hi Steve! Love you, Asta Yoga) and the Rocket- progressive ashtanga classes I was taking, my parents and friends all thought I was crazy— What kind of straight A student, summa cum laude UVA grad goes off to teach yoga and work juice stands?! Anyways, it seems crazy even to me now and I understand their concern. At the time however, I felt it was hard to tell anyone about what I was doing. I ended up finding a very cheap ‘round-the-world ticket and decided to go backpacking! This was all in line with what I was reading at the time too- I had interned for the Minimalists and was obsessed with authors like Tim Ferris.

San Francisco, 2015

That small blip in the bottom right corner was me! This used to be my favorite spot- Ocean Beach near Sutro Baths. On this day a photographer came by and captured my solo moment.

Haha, this story seems crazy to me now as well. So I landed in Thailand with my backpack and went straight to the tourist district, Koh San road. I met a girl there, Gabriella, a dentist from Mexico, and she was going down to Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Party. This party is one of the biggest in the world, held every month on the full moon, and attracts 20k party goers. I had no other plans so I decided to travel with Gabriella and went to the party with her. This was a strange and surreal experience because I witnessed some of the oddest human behavior I’ve ever seen: on the beach there were 4-5 huge jump ropes, set on FIRE, with loads of British guys trying to jump into it and then rolling off into the sand. At this time I did not drink or participate in drugs, and just watched the strangeness of human kind.

Ashtanga in Thailand

After the party, I left Gabriella to find some peace and quiet. I took a ferry by myself to a tiny island nearby called Koh Tao. In a hostel on Koh Tao I met a girl, crying because she was so nervous after teaching her first yoga class. I asked her if it was OK if I taught the next class in her stead, and she gladly gave me her teaching opportunity.

New Heaven Dive School, Koh Tao

I taught here 3x a day over the next 6 months and really solidified my teaching ability.

I ended up practicing yoga everyday and teaching so much yoga. It was a huge learning experience for me. However, I felt like it was also just a bastion of lost souls. The people who stayed on the island for months at a time, not just tourists, were all nomads and looking for something. I loved the diving community, but I didn’t love the feeling that I wasn’t building anything long term. By the time I left Thailand, I was confident in my ability to teach yoga and ready to tackle the real world again. So I moved to NYC, where some of my favorite yoga instructors lived, including my huge inspiration, Tara Stiles.

Y7- Yoga in the real world

My bread and butter for a few years- hot vinyasa, candle lit yoga! They also used my pic for this sign for the Silverlake studio opening. When I complained to HR about it, they said it was my honor to be chosen. I left the studio after that.

I’ll quickly sum up the rest of my journey here: I moved to NYC and started teaching as much as I possibly could. I taught free classes, donation based classes, and moved my way up to managing a studio, having a great roster of private clients, and cultivating an IG presence. I learned A LOT about the real world of yoga: yoga as a business. I learned about the commercial aspects of it. I learned about burn out teaching too much. I learned about putting myself out there and ASKING for what I wanted. And the whole time, I really, really enjoyed myself.

2018

Back when you did THE MOST for IG content! At this time, I was in my 20’s, running around teaching as much yoga as possible. 18 classes a week was not unusual.

Now time for my love story. Pre-pandemic when I was managing Fit House I had a wonderful yoga student who came to my most difficult class of the week: Sunday 75min Hot Yoga Level 2/3. He came consistently and religiously for months. After the first class, he said I had ‘the most graceful practice he’d ever seen’, and never said anything again. About 6 months later, after I’d left the studio and was no longer teaching live classes, this student emails me for a date. I was with someone. Covid happens and my ex and I did not survive the 24/7 contact and crisis of the pandemic. My old yoga student emails me a few more times, and the last time, I happened to be free, and was visiting NYC the next week, after going crazy being cooped up in my parents home in FL. We went on 4 dates in the span of my one week visit, and Bennett and I are engaged, and now living in LA.

Found my person 🤍

Bennett and I, hosting a yoga class for friends in NYC

Where am I now? I have LILA my online yoga studio that I am so thankful for. And I get to teach Yoga Teacher Training Retreats. I am so excited to continue to teach both online and in person 💕

Bali c/o ‘23 200hr Yoga Teacher Training

I am so proud of these students and have never felt more aligned, full, or had more FUN than during this retreat. I cannot wait to continue to host retreats and see how all of you transform. YOUR transformation through yoga gives me my greatest joy.

WOO HOO! Other questions that I get asked a lot:

How has yoga changed you personally?

This is one of my favorite questions because I now have so much GRATITUDE for the practice. I just smile and look back at the young teenager that tried very hard to fit in and excel. Part of what yoga has helped me with is authenticity- being able to unapologetically go after what I want and believe in- as well as manage stress and anxiety.

Pre-yoga I had been a competitive ballerina and gymnast in my childhood. It wasn’t very normal, I was going to practice every single day after school and didn’t go to the movies or have some of those normal, playful teen experiences. I was very focused and also living a double life as a straight A student at my school’s International Baccalaureate program (IB is a charter program that is similar to the British A levels and has the same curriculum whether it’s in Hong Kong, Singapore or NYC.) So I was in this demanding school program, while also competing in the Youth American Grand Prix as a ballerina. My other ballet school friends had all stopped going to high school and were doing home school to graduate. I was probably going on 5 hours a sleep while doing IB, ballet, and pursuing my extra curricular activity, journalism- and still ended up as the Editor in Chief of the newspaper my senior year.

I developed a lot of anxiety. By 17, I’d run myself totally to the ground, doing way too much, and had really bad heart pain. It felt like a hand tightening and squeezing around my heart.

It was so bad that one time when I had a panic attack, I totaled my car and was inches from running into a telephone pole... if I had impacted, it probably would have killed me.

After the accident, I quit ballet and tried to live my life as a normal teenager before college. I felt a lot of emptiness, lack of community, and still had anxiety even though I was sleeping more and less demanding on myself.

When I tried yoga for the first time, I could finally breathe again. I learned about the theory and the importance of wu-wei, action without clinging to results , dharma or your life’s purpose, about oneness and the underlying fabric of reality. I studied global development, anthropology, religious studies, even improvisation. I found the same themes over and over again from different disciplines. Then I went to India and spent 3 months doing a yoga teacher training in the Himalayas.

It’s been 9 years since I did my first YTT and 11 years since the accident. I do occasionally feel heart pain when my stress rises... but for the most part, I live with an open, pain-free heart.

Yoga gave me psychological health, purpose, and a more compassionate way of seeing the world.

I have gotten stronger and more flexible, but to be honest, the body has been bit of an after thought! A lot of my training is from ballet which I refined with yoga. So the movements I teach have the foundation in a decade of world class ballet training.

What style of yoga do you teach?

The short answer is: I teach a class that will both open and strengthen your body, while getting you into a flow state and feeling good. I like my classes to be fun and upbeat, physically demanding, and cathartic.

My style of practice is flow yoga: I’ve done my teacher training with Tara Stiles, Strala Yoga in NYC, and they have a very taoist flow. It’s about being soft in your practice and trying to listen to your own internal guidance, less about holding, being harsh and rigid in your approach.

It might seem like no yoga is harsh or rigid, but Ashtanga, Bikram and even Iyengar- the styles that are more “power” focused, have all been very serious and dogmatic. In India, I once went to an Ashtanga class and was asked to leave because I smiled. Hah!

I keep the “power” elements in my class, but without problematic dogma and guru hierarchy. I believe each student is their own best teacher.

I’m also very influenced by my ballet upbringing. I’ve been practicing pilates since I was 9. Pilates was actually made as conditioning for ballerinas, so it’s been interesting for me to see it go from something I only did in my conservatory to a really popular methodology. There are a lot of great conditioning elements that I include in my classes. But the most important thing I add from it is proper integration of the core and technique principles.

Mini Aside: Aligned Based Yoga Pro’s & Con’s

Technique does not mean “perfect alignment”. Way too much yoga is focused on alignment- trying to mold your bones to fit the anatomically ideal version of the posture. If you’ve been to a yoga class and felt like you were prodded and poked the entire time, or that you were doing it wrong constantly, it was an alignment focused class. Unfortunately, there are SO MANY famous yoga teachers that focus on this.

I get it from a safety standpoint- if you get everyone to do it the anatomically perfect way, you have a very small chance of liability if a student gets injured.

The problem is that there are a VAST amount of variations from the anatomical ideal. So you could be teaching this incredibly slow, precise way, and for about 30% of your class, it won’t apply to them. Their bones are not the anatomical average. And instead of teaching students to listen to their body, they learn to rely on the teacher. rant over.

I prefer teaching pilates style technique and conditioning. There are principles of movement like core integration that make EVERY movement safe. Your knee CAN go past your toes. Your arms don’t have to be perfectly straight. You DON’T have to bend at a 90* angle- as long as you understand general movement technique.

Anyways, that’s a long winded way of saying: I like to teach in more principles of movement and less on individual pose perfection.

So, I teach my own style of yoga. It’s a style that retreats to go forward, that lets go to go more. It isn’t alignment based like 95% of  yoga out there. I’d rather see everyone in my class wiggling around, making the class their own, than 20 ‘perfect’ yogis straining themselves to get into ‘proper’ alignment. People often ignore the transitions, the how, the texture of movement in yoga. I bring that to the forefront in my classes.

I teach yoga that flows, mindfully, and doesn’t push through pain. This yoga naturally heals while connecting you to your body and connecting you to your own source of somatic intelligence. And hopefully is fun, short, and exactly what you needed that day.