Exploring and living the teachings and practices of Yoga has been an interesting, exciting, and often humbling process ever since taking my first Yoga class in 1999. As is the case with many people new to Yoga, I only thought of it as stretching, strengthening and balancing. Over the years, it has more and more become a healing practice for me – from restoring physical ailments and imbalances, to
regain emotional balance and peace of mind. I initially received my teacher certification with over 500 hours in the lineage of Swami Sivananda, a classical tradition with a strong emphasis on spirituality, guided more by intuition than a picture-perfect alignment with regards to postures. I have adapted my teaching of Yoga quite a lot during the last 8 years of my professional life as a Yoga teacher. I started out to teach mainly in the Sivananda Yoga tradition. This is considered an integral Yoga practice that emphasizes all aspects of the human being, from our expression as an embodied being to the depth of the mind and the heart. Sivananda Yoga places a strong emphasis on balancing the sympathetic with the parasympathetic nervous system, which is one reason I have appreciated this approach so much. Over the years, I have attended many additional workshops and trainings that focused on various themes in Yoga - from Anatomy to Yoga therapeutics - but only recently have I attended the training with David Emerson on Trauma-informed Yoga in Wilmington, North Carolina, of which I think it is changing my direction of teaching in a more defined way then ever before. It set me out on a search for deepening my understanding and application of Trauma related healing. Additionally, I am currently going through the process of becoming a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a method that helps resolve Trauma symptoms and Chronic stress by working directly with the body.