Here's a Worthy Life Pursuit...

Over the years of teaching yoga teacher training, I've taught students in various professions who were burnt out and needed new ways to sustain and thrive.

We had a few in one group:

An elementary school teacher who took the training because she felt her passion slipping away after a particularly difficult school year.

A nurse in a high-stress emergency room found himself depleted.

A social worker navigating the foster care system carried the weight of too many heartbreaking stories.

And a psychotherapist was beginning to wonder if she could keep showing up for her clients authentically, as she was feeling hollow inside.

Throughout the 12 weekends of teacher training, they sat side by side learning about breathwork and how to regulate their nervous systems, proper pose alignment, how yoga philosophy applied to their lives, and most of all, presence. The practice and training became a lifeline.

Halfway through the training, the school teacher started weaving mindfulness into her daily routine. She started the mornings by guiding her students through a 'box breathing' technique to calm and center them. She shared with us how her classroom became calmer, not because the kids had changed, but because she had.

She told us how a shy student tugged on her sleeve and whispered, "I like it when we do the quiet breathing. It makes my tummy stop hurting."

The ER nurse told our group that he uses breathwork and long-held forward bends between the codes and charting to ground himself. Instead of snapping at his coworkers or going numb with exhaustion, he has found more space, inside and out.

When a grieving family member collapsed into his arms, he shared that his presence was much steadier.

One night, he quietly led a colleague through a few gentle yoga poses in the staff break room, and it became a ritual for the night shift. One of the doctors said to him that he seemed different since the training started, and he responded that he breathes longer and slower now.

Towards the end of the training, our social worker student said that she felt a new sense of embodiment. She began finishing her client sessions with a grounding practice, asking the children to "plant their feet like roots" and take deep belly breaths. She learned how to recognize trauma signals in her own body and regulate herself before the meetings.

When she went to a team retreat, she practiced teaching some of her fellow social workers, who were skeptical at first, until one of them admitted, "I haven't felt this calm in years."

She realized she was no longer just surviving the system - she was helping shift it.

The therapist in our group said that she awakened a missing piece. She started integrating somatic techniques into talk therapy. She'd ask clients to notice where emotions lived in their bodies, offering them breath patterns and gentle movements as resources.

One client with anxiety described feeling "stuck in her chest". She guided them to breathe into that space and soften their shoulders, and for the first time in months, the client reported sleeping through the night.

She too felt more awake in her own life, less drained after sessions and more alive in her own skin.

At the Teacher Training graduation, they had each found a new rhythm. They hadn't just learned to teach yoga, they had learned to live it by creating their own daily discipline. In doing so, they all said how their ripple of calm, resilience, and healing profoundly affected their corners of the world.

And if you're motivated to learn techniques that help stabilize yours and others' nervous systems, register by Sunday, June 1, to save $350 for the next 200-hour teacher training that starts in September! - Payment plans are available.

From my heart to yours~

Namaste,

Maggie