As a child, I enjoyed being active and outdoors. My family and I enjoyed riding bikes, horses, snowboarding, and hiking. Growing up, I was never on a sports team but enjoyed being active outdoors. When I graduated high school I began to attend group fitness classes and soon fell in love with it. At age 19 I was diagnosed with ADHD ( the inattentive type). This was monumental for me because my whole life I just thought I was not smart and lazy. I wish I would have done more research than like I have now, but hey, I was 19 and just wanted to move on to the next fun adventure. From my teens to my early twenties I worked several jobs, all working with kids ( snowboard instructor, camp counselor, photographer) or/and worked in a restaurant. For me, wherever I worked, it had to keep me moving and with people. With that, I could thrive.

Fast forward many years. I have now been a wife for 12 years, a mom for 7 years, and have been teaching group fitness classes for 9 years now. I am a busy mom of two and my body is sore from teaching spin and weight lifting classes. My mom suggested to me that I try a yoga class. My immediate response was “That is not a workout” Remember my mind is very active and has an extremely hard time just being still. But I finally listened to her and grabbed a friend and we tried a yoga class at a local studio in my town. Guess what happened? I hated it and never tried yoga again. Nope, much to what I envisioned the class would be, it was the opposite for me. The class was fun, challenging, and relaxing all in one. I soon was hooked on it and came back every week. A big thank you to my mom who would take my toddler to breakfast every Tuesday so I could go to class. Even though I had no idea what I was doing and felt so unflexible, I fell in love with how my body and my mind felt after each class. I never in my life had laid down at the end of a workout and completely relaxed my entire body. I was always too restless, but for 5 minutes, I could do that. In fact, I looked forward to it. I then began learning the poses and how my breath and body moved together. Little by little my tight muscles from spin became softer and longer. I was officially hooked.

My Yoga instructor also taught spin and in 2014 I started teaching spin at her gym. She came up to me one day and said “Karen, you need to sign up for Yoga teacher training” Say what, me? The inattentive, scatterbrained, yoga newbie, A TEACHER? She convinced me with my years of teaching group fitness it didn’t matter that I was a yoga newbie. So I did it, I signed up for level 1 of the 200-hour yoga teacher training program. I am so grateful for the yoga school I attended because we could take the courses at our own pace. It gave me a chance to take a training and practice, take another training and practice. I was (am)also a firefighter’s wife as well as raising two kiddos who were young at the time. We had also just moved onto 5 acres of property on the outskirts of town. My plate was full for sure and being able to take my time with the training was very beneficial for me. The truth is I grew so much in my yoga practice while completing my 200hr. I was also fortunate enough that when I was halfway thru, I began to sub yoga classes at the club where I was teaching spin. The icing on this beautiful cake is that I met one of my dearest friends during my second training. We hit it off right away and began finishing our training together, splitting meals, and hotels and helping each other study. I am so very grateful for my dear yoga bestie.

In yoga, we learn that our practice is a journey, a process. It is like the saying, Enjoy the process. In Yoga, each body is different, and everyone’s journey is different. We get to make our yoga practice our own. That is why it is a yoga practice, not a yoga performance. As I was finishing up my yoga teacher training my life was hard and I was going through some things. I tell you what I was learning to teach others about yoga, was teaching me. I just wanted a quick fix, and move on. Yoga was teaching me to lean into my journey and not just miss it by wanting an automatic fix. But to learn from it, to feel it. Our yoga practices it is not like anyone else’s, it is our full expression of each posture. It is how we lean into our practice and make it our own. Learning this, I took it into my own life and grew in ways I thought would never happen. Tears and fears were shed at some of those trainings for me and I am so grateful for it.

In 2018, I finished my 200hr and became an RYT ( Registered Yoga Teacher). I was fortunate enough to get my own class at one of the clubs where I taught spin. I spent the remainder of that year teaching yoga and spin. Then toward the beginning of 2019, I really felt the want to homeschool. My husband’s schedule is always changing and sometimes he has four days off in a row. I wanted to slow down time, I wanted to spend more time adventuring with our kids. So fall of 2019 we took a big leap and I started homeschooling our 4th and 7th graders. Living in a rural area, it takes us 25 minutes to get to “town” as we like to call it. I knew that with not driving my kids to school and doing school at home now, teaching my fitness classes at the local gyms would not be possible. I had to walk away. It was hard, I was a new yoga instructor and loving it, but I knew I needed to go all in on this “homeschool gig” as I call it.

We were able to travel and then, well 2020 hit, and life changed for everyone. Now all the kids were home and bored. I figured out facebook live and my daughter and I started doing kids yoga. I would make up a theme and my daughter would decorate my room with any props she could find and we would do yoga together for her friends online. Then I learned about Zoom and started offering it to my friends in the evenings. With that, I started learning about YouTube and how to post videos. I also began to take online yoga training and received certifications in kids’ yoga. I am grateful for that time of learning, and teaching online, it was so beneficial for me.

When the world opened up, I started meeting our homeschool friends at the park for yoga. I was also hired to teach yoga at different retreats and vacation rentals. When our two years were up homeschooling, my oldest went back to school and started high school and my youngest wanted to keep homeschooling. So here we are now, I still teach Zoom yoga. I am making videos on YouTube. I still homeschool my youngest. We also have grown our little ranch and have farm yoga for kids and adults. I am a vendor for our charter school and am so grateful I get to teach yoga for homeschool kiddos.

I feel so grateful for my yoga journey. I have grown so much over the past few years and I know mentally it has helped me tremendously. I am excited about the future and where my yoga practice will take me.