This is My Story, well part of it anyhow …

I was asked to participate in the Fraser Valley Yoga Teachers Blog Tour hosted by Wendy Weymann, and my immediate reaction was to resist it. Like, why would anyone want to know my story?

But it’s also my birthday and I’m the last one on the tour, so let’s just throw me right into the depths of my uncomfortable zone.

I am a mom to three amazing kids and a wife to a wonderful human.

My first ever yoga class was a prenatal class in 2002, in the hopes I’d meet other expecting moms. I practiced on and off, including mom and baby yoga after having Big (kid #1).

After having Middle (kid #2), I gave my life to raising children. Yoga wasn’t really part of my life, until a few years later with Little (kid #3), when my friend Jayne dragged me to a yoga class. I was hooked, and started practicing three days a week all over the valley. Knowing how much I loved it and really not wanting to go back to my previous life in finance, my husband suggested we open our own space.

And it was just like that. Impulsively, we thought of a name, then found a space, then hired people to run it.  From conception to opening was 9 months. By this time, we had a 9-year-old, 6-year-old and 1-year-old, a new business and 4 instructors.  My role was to be the full-time administrator and practice yoga as much as I could. But then I thought if one of the instructors got sick, I’d better be able to fill in where I can.  So, it wasn’t until after we opened that I completed my certification in teaching.

Then after teaching my first class, I thought,

“ah… THIS is what I was meant to do.”

I dove deep into learning. I have been trained in the Strala style of yoga, along with Vinyasa Yoga for Youth, Trauma Sensitive Yoga, Yoga for Golfers, and the Kinesiology of Yoga. I am also a Sport Conditioning Coach and have been the mobility and recovery specialist for several youth sport academies in the Fraser Valley since 2012.

All that is what brought me here.  Selfishly, I wanted to be able to work with my own children, who are athletes, and learn about the body more so that I could help them succeed and be less prone to injury.  Little did I know that in my work I would be so connected to others around me.

And that is what keeps me here. That connection.

Author and speaker Brene Brown writes: “Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.”

I have met young athletes that continue to keep in touch even after they’ve gone off to their Division 1 colleges; I have forged connections with people who are now my closest friends.  I’ve become connected with myself in a way that I didn’t realize that I needed, all because of this impulsive decision to open a space for others to connect to themselves, too.

Yoga was purely, and admittedly, a physical practice for me. Seeing what my body could do; being inverted and twisted and balanced was fun, and I felt a sense of accomplishment.  And then there were injuries and car accidents and events in the last 7 years of being in business that felt like it was necessary that I needed to do different work. Even though I love teaching my Strong classes (because I love seeing what YOU can do!), my practice became softer…but challenging in a different way because I was in my head more.

Being still wasn’t something that I was used to.

But combined with a softer practice and active rehab, I feel like I’m entering my forty-somethingth year of life, stronger than before, with still so much work ahead.

This is a snippet of how Parallel Yoga came to be, and my involvement in it.  You can read more about our teachers’ stories here, and more about the Fraser Valley Yoga teacher involved in this blog tour here.

We all have our stories.  Each day we choose to write a new page, or even a new chapter.  This is what makes up our lives.

Connection to these stories, and to each other, it’s who we are.