I remember having a yoga book for kids in early elementary school. I thought it was fun to make shapes like the animals in its pages - to stand tall like a giraffe, to bend and twist like a cobra. It is memories just like this - glimpses and moments and feelings over the years - that have blended together and shaped my relationship with yoga.

Years later, during university, my mother signed both of us up for a once a week yoga class in a school gym in the evenings. Neither of us was particularly flexible, lean or what I thought at the time was “the type” to do yoga. There was a small group of us - maybe half a dozen - we worked as partners using props.  We were all ages and body types. Our teacher was kind and welcoming, non-judgemental and empathetic. It was an experience that to this day is one of my favorite memories with my mom.

In my late twenties I was working in financial services when I heard about a new yoga studio nearby with heat. There was a mural of planet Earth with people of different colors holding hands painted at the top of the stairs. They kept a box of index cards tracking students’ memberships. I think I bought a 10 class card.  Everyone was practically naked, everyone seemed to know what to do and exactly how and when to do it. Everyone was sweating buckets into the carpet.  It was hypnotic, it was amazing.

Fast forward to the spring of 2014 when I travelled to India for the first time and left with a deep yearning to learn more about the yoga taught there. That fall, I moved back to Vermont full time with my young family. I was a wife, a mother of 3, recently having survived an emergency C-section.  A woman I knew excitedly recommended I try a hot yoga class and I really didn’t have any good excuse not to go. I didn’t know anything about the class, the history, the series or the benefits. When I stumbled across that Yoga Studio in Vermont, I had no idea the teachers were taught from an incredibly specific therapeutic lineage in Calcutta. I walked in, there were few familiar faces and I got on my mat. The teacher was kind, welcoming and gifted.

It was 90 minutes alone with myself.  I was hooked. The practice became my medicine right then and right there.  Every cell in my body said, thank you. Do this. You are exactly at the right place at the right time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!