New york Yoga

New York Yoga

New York Yoga

I was born in Manhattan and moved to the Bronx when I was a teenager. When I started working as an English teacher, I met students who had already grown up there and we quickly bonded as friends. At first it seemed like our paths were just different. We were from two completely different worlds and it was amazing for me to be able to interact with their lives so closely. After we all became friends, we started going to school together, getting a diploma in Teaching.

In college, there were many classes that would bring students together but, this one really stood out to my husband because of how close my kids are. And so, I decided to teach Yoga. This is what I did for 4 years and in those 4 years I was teaching over 200 classes and taught thousands of students (including Yoga) around the world. Now, as I look back at those 4 years, I can't believe how much time has passed since I started teaching Yoga. My husband is now 41 years old and I have another 5 years left on my current license for a total of 3 years and counting.

The reason that all these years of helping people come into a better understanding of themselves, I think that I am the best teacher on Earth. There was a moment when I went over into my office in order to make some coffee and I saw my cup on the counter and said "What the hell do I have coffee on?” Then I took a sip and realized what I had was a teaspoon of cocoa powder on top of my coffee (I love my coffee!)

My children also loved having coffee but I couldn’t find anything else that they liked or enjoyed while eating it. So I asked myself, why don’t I try something other than caffeine? It turns out, I had no idea that Coffee had any kind of coffee or if it had any effect on them. All I knew about coffee was that it is delicious but not the drinker's choice. It turns out that there was always someone who didn’t like it, and then there were never enough cups of it! As I went through each year, I began learning more and more about Yoga, and what I truly believed it to be. One day I was reading the book Yoga For People Who Want To Be Happier and it dawned on me that Yoga was what I was looking for in life and I wanted to help others to become happier by doing Yoga. The only problem was that it was difficult to study all the material on YouTube. It was hard to learn all the poses, and it was hard to practice them everyday. But soon I was trying to put all this information into a long-term budget plan that I had set up to get me where I needed to go. All these months of studying were taking up too much space on my family schedule and I stopped finding time even though I still had many classes I never got to finish. My children begged me, and eventually, it became clear to everyone that I would need to start teaching again. At this point, I was 30 days away from reopening my studio in NYC and that meant that I was getting ready to take a week off. It was late the next morning when my husband came home and told us he needed to be with his children early. He told me he was running late and he was glad but he was worried he wouldn’t be in time to be in class before the day ended. We had been saying that he shouldn’t have been leaving to run so early but I thought we were okay. I told him I wanted to give him time to take care of his business and that’s true, but I also wanted to keep in mind that he should be there for my children. So, I decided to meet him later than we planned. A few hours later, my husband and I were sitting around the kitchen table and I got up to grab my phone and call my daughter right away. The alarm was going off on my phone and I grabbed it so I could call her right away.

When she answered me she asked me, “Hey Mom, how’s things? Is Dad coming home right as expected?” Before I could answer that question, I heard her mother ask her, “Hi Mom, I'm sorry he ran late last night. Do you know when he will be?” She looked down at her phone only to see the message that her father had received from Mike Ritts saying there was a chance to get an offer letter for my job. I looked at the picture, and she smiled and nodded her head, knowing that things always change. That experience was proof that I needed to start thinking differently when it came to accepting responsibility. With every mistake, I began to realize that I didn’t want to take responsibility for it. I wanted to blame others for my own actions. Eventually, I took my foot off the gas and let anyone handle the responsibilities. If it doesn’t work out it wasn’t a failure in the end, and it worked out perfectly. In retrospect, I have learned so much more in the past ten years than I ever thought possible. Just recently, when we found out we were expecting twins my husband and I finally made the decision to start planning with our three boys. It was very difficult for both of us when we came to this realization and it hurt our feelings. But we came into this decision with full knowledge of our family and our future together. We know that things won’t turn out how we want them to because we were willing to wait for them or risk falling apart because of this. I have learned to live with a lot of uncertainty. I didn’t want kids to be anxious just because something happened. I learned that I am responsible for everything I create because I created the life I have and I am doing the parenting stuff that comes along with it. What I never knew that I would need to do this is that when you make mistakes, you learn nothing. You learn more. Nothing you are taught in life changes you but your attitude and perspective on life. I have learned that sometimes it takes almost ten minutes, and sometimes it takes 10 whole days for you to get used to something. Because our minds aren’t capable of dealing with huge amounts of information, we suffer from massive ignorance. Not until we receive all of this information does it actually sink in that we know more than what we think. I was so scared and sad when we found out we were expecting twins that we wouldn’t need to worry about. But once we found out we were expecting twins everything changed. Having a girl wasn't even a possibility for me. This new discovery caused me to stop making careless decisions in my life. Things like relationships and marriage started changing in ways I never anticipated. Even though I knew that something would happen and it would change my life forever, it never really occurred to me that I would need to change for the better. If I can’t make changes in my life, it is the least likely scenario that I will go down a path that causes pain.

It turns out that I needed to change my attitude and mindset in order to make room to process my emotions. I had been keeping things bottled up inside and all of a sudden I had to use the time and energy outside of my everyday routines to release emotional energy that I didn’t know that I had been lacking all this time. Without going through with my usual routine of watching TV, exercising, and sleeping for most of every afternoon, I sat down and started writing letters. Writing a letter doesn’t sound like such a big deal when I write one to my sister for Christmas. Instead, being creative like I was showed me the power that words hold and that if I wrote something and left it unspoken, people wouldn’t know. I had no idea I was doing something different. It was a revelation for me as well as for my family that reading the newspaper was okay and reading my books wasn’t. My books were meant to entertain me while I wrote my letters on paper, so why turn it into something I could read without it hurting my mood? It turned out that these kinds of experiences were causing me to dig deeper and delve into self-discovery. Self-discovery is important because it allows me more time to be productive. Since I started writing letters I've started to learn quite a bit about myself inside and outside of my body. Some aspects of my self-discovery I experienced included:

· I finally understood anxiety and depression. Usually after reading a book for the umpteenth and twentieth time I’m convinced I’m reading a chapter wrong, I get bored and leave it alone. Once I realized that I was afraid that I was becoming someone else I didn’t want to be, I started writing letters, showing them to my sisters and friends, and telling them about the times that I was worried about this. Writing letters allowed me to talk freely, it gave me permission to show up I didn’t think I could. They were my conversations, they were private in nature and allowed me to feel comfortable speaking about my struggles. By sharing them, I was able to talk about my fears, my doubts, and even my dreams. From talking about them and feeling comfortable taking them out of my letters and being told, “Oh, well, you know… we all get depressed sometimes…” I was able to begin to open up and express myself a little bit more. I could finally allow myself to be vulnerable and share the thoughts I had. Through writing, I was able to let anyone know that sometimes all you think you can do is scare yourself. Being vulnerable opened new doors in my life. My family and friends told me about my struggle with perfectionism and self-esteem issues but I never shared

New York Yoga

New York Yoga