Breaking the Yoga Stigma

For those of you who don't know me, I am a certified 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) certified instructor. With my certification I can teach yoga anywhere in the world. I love learning about the body and how our anatomy and body mechanics interact and work together and I love to work in the gym setting and challenge boundaries of what exercise and fitness can be, especially what yoga can look like.

A lot of the world has a misinterpretation of what yoga is: sitting cross legged meditating with your eyes closed and holding crazy hard poses. For me, this is not what yoga is and with this studio, I hope to break down those barriers and stigmas that people normally hold. Yoga is just a word, which in literal terms means "to yok" as in bringing the body and breathe together. I see yoga as a practice that can allow us to step outside of our busy schedules and over crowded headspaces and just slow down and come back to this moment. My hope with my teaching is to create a space where people can reconnect to themselves and sort through what is going on in their lives.

Yoga is not just the physical poses. A big component of yoga is mindfulness and connection to the breath. Being able to recognize the emotions and thoughts you're experiencing and step outside the clutter to take a deep breath can really bring us back to this present moment. When we take a deep breath and notice our heart beating and lungs breathing, it calms our nervous system and tells our body we're safe and that we're going to be okay. But let me be clear, mindfulness is not about ignoring or trying to force our thoughts away. Instead, mindfulness is meeting our thoughts where they're at and acknowledging them just as they are, inviting curiosity on how we can work with our thoughts and try to understand why we're feeling that way.

My hope is to teach from a place where people can fully emerge themselves in their body and the movements they're doing and feel so much love and gratitude for everything the body has to offer. We are capable of so much more than we know and I think yoga challenges us to dig deep and find our inner strength. It's a place where we can freely be ourselves, with no expectations, no right or wrong way to be, just a place to move within ourselves and listen to what our bodies are asking for. I like to incorporate a lot of dynamic poses to challenge the body and to help find that edge of where we feel strong but yet a little shaky, almost as if in awe of what we are capable of. This is place to celebrate all that we're capable and bask in our own greatest.

Namaste -- the light and being within me acknowledges the light and being within you ♡

Written by Maria Maxwell