About HollyYoga

My mystical, self-guided, winding path to embracing yoga has been one of the most satisfying journeys of my adult life.

Yoga has been following me since I was a little girl being annoyed at Lilias, Yoga & You on PBS when she dared to interrupt my Sesame Street watching. Sorry, Lilias - I now bow to you.

Three and a half decades later, I began an apprenticeship with a holistic healer (thank you, Wendy) and it was she who formally introduced me to the chakra system and how to use them as a meditation portal, which eventually made me realize - I wanted to learn to be a yoga teacher, if only so I could guide myself through a regular practice. A few years before that, during an evening walk, I’d said to my husband, “I think I’d like to be a yoga teacher”. To this day, I still say I wish I knew which star my heart was facing when I said that out loud because the Cosmos heard me - and then cleared the path and set my direction.

My first teacher training course was with Anmol Mehta, who you can still find on YouTube. I studied earnestly, like I was going to be tested by Anmol himself, closed-book. I threw myself into it, I took copious notes and gave it all the effort I’d never given to school, even college. All Anmol sent after I completed the course, was a nice letter recommending me as a teacher. There was something so beautifully simple about it and from the first class I taught, it all just flowed, almost effortlessly, even when I was nervous, I could connect by just closing my eyes and allowing. It was then that my resistance to Yoga Alliance and the formal, western path to teaching became firmly established. I’d opened a channel to something greater than myself and I felt a huge wall go up between me and the traditional, American yoga path. I was determined to maintain my natural abilities and not get shaped into some idea of what western culture believed to be a “real yoga teacher”.

I am equal parts people pleaser and (unexpressed) rebel. If I leaned into the Yoga Alliance path, I knew I’d strive to be perfect within the American yoga studio model (and quickly burnout when I couldn’t attain that perceived perfection); resisting that nourished that life-long, unrealized rebel streak. I would be my own, self-styled yogi – with the help of online instructors I enjoyed, trusted, and with whom I resonated. Voice and tone are huge for me – their vibration had to jive with mine.

And then I studied – and studied – and studied – and studied. My class sizes grew and I kept studying. I wanted to have the vocabulary to express what I felt and wanted to convey through teaching. I found inspiration everywhere, and in everything I read and watched – including non-yoga things, spiritual-adjacent things, nature based religion, sacred geometry, psychology, and cosmology. I built a working vocabulary and gathered related concepts to weave through alignment cues and breathing practices.

I continued to teach for a full decade without getting officially certified. I completed a plethora of online courses, namely with Sadie Nardini and Ashley Turner. Sadie’s style was Rock Star (my opposite), Core Strength Vinyasa and I loved her mechanics of powerful, graceful movement. I pieced several of her online courses together through Udemy and DailyOm. Ashley’s style was a blend of yoga and depth psychology, taught in a six-month course called Yoga, Psyche, Soul. Woven though those two powerful women were books by Barron Baptiste, a DVD set of 108 days of Ultimate Yogi with Travis Eliot (completed 3 times), and the lulling tones of Esther Ekhart/Ekhart Yoga and Yoga with Adriene on YouTube. Countless others dot my path, including several unfinished courses,  two that would have garnered me 200-hour certification.

A patchwork quilt of multiple teachers hovers around me, through every class. The lineages they link back to are my roots - and ultimately, I learned through teaching.

In 2021, I decided to buckle down and get certified. I knew it would provide a level of confidence to help alleviate my ever-present imposter syndrome. I found an online course through Yoga Renew and had my certification in hand on the last day of that year. The real takeaway from finally getting certified was that it really didn’t shift my teaching – it just showed me I did know what I was doing. I sent my certification off to Yoga Alliance and received confirmation I was eligible – all I had to do was send $60 to be registered. And that – is where that process has stayed. I did not register with Yoga Alliance. I will most likely forever be on the self-study, non-traditional path. I do tend to struggle with trusting myself, but I do trust the yoga forces that flow through me – and they have never let me down.

In the opening weeks of 2021, I began to teach through Zoom and my official online program began that February. Blending tech with yoga posed a bit of a challenge and my students and I have breathed through some hiccups along the way, but I love it. Just this morning, I taught a class to a group that spanned three countries. I’ve had people join me from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. My folks have joined me from hotel rooms, vacation homes, and spare bedrooms. It's been an honor, to be sure, to be brought into people’s homes and lives.

The cosmic throughline yoga has created through my life these last thirteen years has opened me to the mystical, the lighthearted, the dark, the mundane, the ecstatic - and just about everything in between

I would be honored if you’d step onto this path with me, in your own way.

And to those of you who have been with me up to this point (and hopefully beyond) a deep bow of gratitude to you all, my teachers.

Namaste.