Yoga

I begin taking Yoga in 1997 and in the following years it became an integral part of my life.  In October 2002 I completed a yearlong yoga training program  at the Health Advantage Yoga Center in Herndon, VA which also certified me for the 200 hour Yoga Alliance certification.  The teacher training course was taught in the Anusara style and was the style I primarily studied in the following years with many certified and well known Anusara teachers including John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga. 

From the summer of 2002 when I completed my teacher training, I begin teaching a yoga class at the local community center and then in 2003 and for the next ten years I taught two or three classes a week at various fitness centers and corporate facilities.  All this time I continued to take two classes a week and take numerous workshops while working full time at my regular day job.  After eleven years, in December of 2013 I decided it was becoming to much and stopped teaching. Although no longer teaching, I continued taking two regular classes a week, going to workshops and going on yoga vacations. After retiring in 2018 and moving to Floridia I continued taking two classes a week at a studio in Gainesville up until the COVID pandemic in 2020 when the yoga studio, along with many such businesses, had to shut their doors to students and patrons. During the COVID shutdown, the yoga center was able to continue to offer classes virtually on the Internet. Other studios and teachers in other did the same and I enjoyed taking classes from teachers that I had studied with in the past that lived in other states, a benifit of COVID.   While virtual classes helped the local yoga studio survive, others were not so lucky, and I knew of four others, which I had studied at in the past, that closed as a result of the pandemic. Although the local Gainesville studio survived the pandemic and started offering in-person classes again, attendance had greatly dropped off during COVID and students were slow to return to class afterwards. As a result, attendance did not reach the level needed to sustain the yoga center and it too closed in 2023. After its closing, I couldn’t find another studio in the area that offered classes to my liking so I now, after 25 years of taking classes, concentrate on my home practice. Over those years I received great benefit from yoga classes, they helped me physically, mentally, emotionally, as well as spiritually. I have studied with many wonderful teachers and have the greatest respect for the knowledge and wisdom they imparted upon me, and I will be forever grateful. I also met many fellow students in classes which, after sharing the common bond of yoga, became friends. Yes, I miss those days and classes, but my practice is now in a different place.