The Unexpected Reason I Became a Yoga Teacher

I've mentioned before that one day I'd share how I found yoga—and this is that story.

Long before I was teaching yoga, I was teaching cycle classes and pouring everything I had into fitness. I loved connecting with people, but over time I found myself professionally burned out, discouraged by difficult work experiences, and wondering if I was still in the right industry.

At the same time, I kept coming back to yoga.

Not because I wanted to become more flexible or master advanced poses, but because of how it made me feel.

The music. The pace. The kindness of the teachers. The feeling that, for one hour, someone else was taking care of me.

In this subscriber-exclusive episode, I share how those experiences slowly changed the way I thought about movement, why yoga became more than just exercise, and how it shaped the teaching philosophy I still carry into every class today.

This isn't just the story of how I became a yoga teacher. It's the story of finding my way back to the kind of teacher—and person—I wanted to be.

Thank you for supporting Wellness After 40. Your subscription allows me to share more personal stories like this one alongside the expert interviews you hear each week.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to your subscriber-only episode of Wellness After 40. Today is a very special personal story that I wanted to share with you all. So thank you for being a part of this very special community. So today's story is about a question that I get asked often. And I get asked often how I became a yoga teacher. Uh, because most people assumed that I instantly loved yoga and decided just to get certified. But that's not how it happened. The real story is actually a little bit about trying something new because I had a health scare. It is also a lot about burnout. And I was able to find really amazing people and teachers that made me want to share the practice of yoga with anyone that I met. The health scare that I had was when I was in my early 20s and I fainted at work and didn't know why. And after going through my doctor, being sent to a cardiologist, the cardiologist told me that you passed out because you stimulated your vagus nerve. And girl, you just need to calm down. And he suggested that the way to do that was maybe take a yoga class. He wasn't really sure. But that was my parting medical advice was to calm down and figure out how to do that. So I went in my early 20s, started taking yoga classes, didn't love them automatically because I am an Aries and I love competition and I love racing people that don't think that we're racing and always trying to one-up myself. And so a yoga class to me was boring and I didn't break a sweat, and it wasn't hard enough for me to feel like I did something with my hour. And through trial and error and taking the right classes and deciding to change my mindset, I ended up slowly over time learning to love yoga. And if you think yoga isn't hard, I want you to hold yourself in a downward-facing dog or do what we call lovingly in yoga, a chataranga, which is a push-up. Basically, a warm-up in yoga is a full-on burpee. So if you don't think that yoga is hard, I can show you a couple of poses that will change your mind. So yoga has always been in my repertoire on how I calm my nervous system. Before I began teaching yoga, I had taught a lot of other modalities in fitness. I started teaching a stroller boot camp class when my son was nine months. And I moved eventually into teaching indoor cycling. And what I love the most about teaching was connecting with people. But I also love the physicality of teaching. I personally love to exercise. I really enjoy it. And I know from teaching for decades of fitness that that is a very uncommon trait. Like most people don't really like working out. So I love the challenge of showing someone a workout that they can feel good about moving their body. So that's a third reason why I love teaching fitness. So as I mentioned, I taught for over 12 years indoor cycling. And then I moved into teaching strength training along with teaching cardio classes. And if you're listening to this, you are a woman in your 40s plus. And so you know that when you start to kind of get into your late 30s, things start to kind of change in your body, and you can see the horizon of 40, and it looks a little scary, and things start to kind of change and things start to shift. And my body just started breaking down. And so I noticed that I was only teaching those modalities to people, and I wasn't ever wanting to do them like for my own personal fitness. I was gravitating much more to doing more body weight type of exercises like yoga versus like going hard on a spin bike or cycling. I also experienced burnout with teaching in some places where I just had really difficult times. Like it was a lot of interpersonal things. I worked at one studio only for a few moments, and the owner was extremely cruel. And so I found that coupled with like my changing body and just being in environments that were really toxic and again, just very unprofessional and difficult. I was like, I am over this. I don't want to teach anymore. I always came back to my mat and felt peaceful, like no one was expecting something from me. I didn't have to perform. I could just like breathe. I could listen to some really cool music. The atmosphere was always very inviting. And I was just really lucky to find teachers over the years of trying lots of different yoga classes that were like right in the vein of what I need to have a great class. For me, a great class is the right amount of challenge. It's not too easy and it's not too hard. And that's like Goldilocks and Three Bears with the porridge. Like I understand it's almost an impossible recipe. But if you know, you know. And really good music. I don't necessarily care about like the aesthetic. Like, yeah, sure, it's cool to be in like a cool environment, be it really nice, really pretty, or have great amenities, or be in a interesting location. But having an instructor with music that moves you, like and actually speaks to you, be it the right type of beats with the type of music, the right tempo, maybe the right lyrics or non-lyrics. I mean, you hit me with a violin, I'm gonna cry, and you have sold me, and I'm coming back to all your classes because you played something orchestral. I also found that I gravitated to teachers that understood how to convince you to do something. I know that sounds kind of silly, but it's in the same way that I love teaching to convince someone that this is the best modality ever. And it's not like convincing like someone in a way that's like, you know, forcing them to fake it. It's just figuring out what they need to love it. So is it, do you need the like the euphoria of doing something hard and accomplishing it? Do you need the like mental checkout? Like so you're focusing on something that's like so encompassing that it helps you like relieve stress. Like I love tapping into what that person needs and trying to make that the experience for their class. And so I was just so fortunate to have yoga instructors that could see that in the class and they could see that in me and say, okay, well, I'm gonna need you to do one more chaturanga, chataranga, one more chaturanga because I know that you're thinking about your grocery list. So we're gonna go for that. And so I was just very fortunate to have teachers that influenced me that this was something that I could learn to love to teach. And then the pandemic hit. I was chatting with a friend who owned a yoga studio who had uh done yoga teacher trainings. And she had plucked me out of class one day and said, you know, I've taken your classes at other places, and I think you should teach yoga. And I was like, No, no, no, no. This thing is so sacred to me. Like, this is mine. Like, I don't teach this, I don't have to, you know, I can always be a student. I don't I don't have to be a teacher. And she's like, Well, that's why you're such an incredible teacher, is because you're always a student. And I'm not saying this to to brag, I'm just saying that honestly, I I've learned that over the years that really great teachers are really good students. And so I always try to hold on to that thought. But she was like, I really would like for you to come and take this yoga teacher program. And if you look at in-person yoga teacher programs, they're incredibly expensive. They're like thousands of dollars, and they're also called 200-hour such and such YTT yoga teacher training because you're doing 200 hours of study, of classwork, of practicing. It's 200 hours of actual physical work for the for the certificate. And so it's takes, you know, usually someone at least like a half a year to do it. And so I told her, I was like, I I don't have the time or the money to do this. I at the time I was teaching fitness full time and I had little kids. And she's like, please just let me let me gift it to you. I'll I'll give you the program. You don't have to pay for it. And so I was like, wow, okay, sure. And then, like I said, the pandemic hit. And so everything in person shut down. So that made me start to kind of scramble. I was like, oh no, I was so excited to start this adventure, but now everything is shut down. And so I decided to keep the momentum alive for myself. And as everything in the pandemic shifted to online, so did yoga teacher trainings. I was fortunate to find a yoga teacher training that I felt pretty good with, that felt like it encompassed a lot of the knowledge of the sacredness of yoga as well as the actual like physiological education of yoga because it is a movement practice. And I was really fortunate to chat with friends that I knew that were really experienced teachers that said that they could let me shadow them during their teaching and ask them questions along the way. So I was able to do my coursework online and submit videos to the program of me practicing and teaching, and was able to get my yoga certificate fully online because it was April of 2020 and the whole world has shut down. And so I spent that year working on my yoga certificate and got my YTT or my 200 hour, and then decided I was going to try to teach yoga. And from the gift that I give myself on the mat and seeing that I could share that with others, it just slowly started to peel away the other modalities that I had clung to and taught for so many years. And I started seeing that while they didn't resonate with me anymore, like certain types of modalities, certain types of workouts, I was it was harder to also sell those, like quote unquote, not sell, but like also harder to teach those things. Cause I was like, ugh, I don't want to be doing this right now. I I want to be, I want to be on my yoga mat. And so I was fortunate to be able to pivot and make yoga more of my full-time job, my full-time career choice, and let the other modalities take a rest. I don't think I'll ever not love a beat drop on an indoor cycling bike. I don't think I'll ever not want to lift a heavy weight. Or, you know what? Maybe Tybo will make a comeback and I can get back into cardio kickbox because I loved me some Taebo back in the day, some belly blanks, yes. But for now, yoga has been with me since I was 25, and I don't think it's gonna ever go away. So that is the story of how I got to teaching yoga. It was really a handful of yoga teachers who really probably have no idea how much they influenced me in my life, and it was the timing of things, it was the practicing what I preach. It was it was a lot of different things, but yoga is an incredible practice, it is a beautiful way of life, and it is something that I just wanted to do more of. So that is just a personal story about me, and I can't thank you enough for being a part of this special community and supporting the show. I thank you so very much, and until next time, take care.