My Mother's Daughter

My mother was a teacher. My sister is a teacher. My aunts are teachers. My grandmother was an employee of the University of Washington for 23 years. Teaching might just be in my DNA and that took me a long time to accept. As much as I craved to walk in my mother’s footsteps, I have also made it a life mission to avoid her path completely.

How ironic it is that I am fully committing to becoming a teacher at the age she was taken from me in a portable classroom while teaching my class.

Though I have been a Yoga Teacher for over a decade, I have never committed to consistently teaching inside of a studio. Instead, I will visit studios to teach workshops, teach at retreats, teach online and via different platforms and create books and programs to use as teaching mediums (books, programs, app).  Committing to consistently being inside the same room to teach I naturally avoided. I now teach teachers online, providing them an at home way to receive their Yoga Teacher certification (The Yoga Teacher Training).

With a bachelor’s degree and over 1,000 hours of teaching certificates in yoga, health, fitness, and wellness, plus a few years under my belt as a basketball coach for youth…the inevitable next step surprisingly seems healing more than daunting. So, with a deep breath, I take a step down my mother’s path as I pursue my master’s degree in education.

My mother was 41 years old and my preschool teacher when Sudden Cardiac Arrest would take her life before my very eyes for no apparent reason in an isolated location where she was the only adult. Not only did this leave me without a mother that I spent every single second of my 4-year-old life with, but it left me with a lifetime of trauma and clinical PTSD to cope with. As I write this at the age her life was taken, I realize how young she still was.

Perhaps I am not walking down her same path as much as picking up where she left off.

I do practice what I preach or more accurately practice what I TEACH - when I tell my students that we are sometimes the teacher but ALWAYS the student. I am also currently taking Yoga Medicine’s Trauma Informed teacher training in pursuit of my 1,000 hours with Yoga Medicine alone and to maintain my Yoga Medicine Therapeutic Specialist license. I look forward to bringing more classes to you via the Yoga Medicine Online platform this winter as well.

Do not back burner life. Live it. The time is RIGHT now.