The Work of Unfolding

My Journey to Yoga Therapy

For most of my life, I’ve been interested in one question:

How do people restore balance and become more fully themselves?

Long before yoga entered my life in a serious way, I was studying transformation. Sometimes formally, sometimes through lived experience.

I was a curious, observant child with a lot to say about the world. In my family I was affectionately called “Motormouth.” But like many people, I learned early that not every space was safe for my full voice. Over time, I became skilled at translating myself — adjusting tone, language, and presence depending on the room.

Eventually, that quiet editing of myself took a toll.

By the time I reached college — the first in my family to do so — I had achieved many of the milestones people celebrate. But inside, I was struggling deeply with depression and trying to understand how to hold my life together.

I began searching for ways to support my body’s natural healing processes.

Early Lessons in Healing

Right after college, I followed a calling that surprised many people around me: I went to massage therapy school.

For me, it felt obvious. I had always been drawn to the quiet, relational work of helping people feel better in their bodies.

But I also grew up with a deep awareness of economic reality. I was the first in my family to go to college, and the pressure to build a stable career was real. Eventually I stepped away from massage therapy and built a professional path in instructional design — helping people learn complex skills and navigate systems more effectively.

Over the years I became very good at designing learning experiences that help people shift how they think, work, and move through the world.

But something was missing.

The more people I worked with, the more I saw how much stress, pain, and exhaustion they were carrying. Not just intellectually — in their bodies and nervous systems.

It became clear that information alone wasn’t enough.

People needed space to set things down.

Finding My Way Back to the Body

My own body had been trying to tell me this for years.

In my early twenties, I began experiencing repetitive stress injuries that caused chronic pain. A friend suggested trying yoga, and I walked into a hot yoga studio expecting a good stretch.

What I experienced instead was something deeper.

The physical challenge, the heat, the intensity — it felt like a kind of self-baptism. A release I didn’t fully understand at the time, but immediately recognized.

Life moved on, as it does. Jobs changed. Neighborhoods changed. Yoga would appear and disappear from my life in waves — something I returned to during moments of stress, injury, or transition.

For many years, yoga felt like a luxury rather than a steady part of my life.

That changed in 2020.

A Season of Reckoning

At the beginning of that year, I recommitted to my health in a serious way. I was managing chronic pain, migraines, and the physical and emotional toll of years spent caring for others while maintaining a demanding professional life.

Then the pandemic arrived.

Like many people, I experienced deep loss during that time. Several loved ones passed away, and with them many of the dreams I had been carrying for my future.

In the quiet of those months, walking became my meditation. I walked almost every day because the grief and uncertainty of that moment were simply too heavy to carry alone.

When wellness spaces reopened, I returned to yoga — this time alongside my physical therapy routine.

Something about the slower, more contemplative styles of yoga — especially yin yoga — began to resonate in a new way. The practice mirrored what I was learning about life:

letting go
finding edges
moving through discomfort with compassion
learning patience
offering myself grace

Yoga was no longer just exercise.

It had become a conversation with my life.

Teaching Before I Realized I Was Teaching

Around this same time, my professional work was evolving.

Through my business, Teach Your Truth, I helped women entrepreneurs find their authentic voice and transform their knowledge into workshops, courses, and learning experiences.

But something unexpected happened.

The women I worked with often arrived carrying much more than a business challenge. Many were navigating burnout, self-doubt, and years of being told to shrink themselves in professional spaces.

Before we could design their courses or programs, we often had to do something else first:

heal the relationship with their voice.

The transformations I witnessed were powerful enough that I began hosting retreats. Watching women reconnect with themselves in those spaces made something clear to me:

The work I was doing had always been about supporting healing, wellness, and transformation — I just hadn’t named it that way yet.

A Door Opens

Eventually, I enrolled in a yoga teacher training with a simple goal:

I wanted to deepen my own practice.

Traditional yoga classes had often felt inaccessible to me, and I wanted the knowledge to explore the practice more fully on my own terms.

What happened instead was that people began asking me to teach.

And when I did, I naturally gravitated toward working with people who also felt like outsiders in traditional yoga spaces — people managing stress, chronic pain, or bodies that didn’t fit the typical image of a “yoga body.”

My background in massage therapy and instructional design made it natural for me to create personalized, therapeutic experiences rather than one-size-fits-all classes.

Not long after, I discovered the field of yoga therapy.

Everything clicked.

Here was a whole-person framework that integrates body, mind, breath, and lived experience. A way of working with yoga that honors the complexity of being human.

For me, it felt less like discovering something new and more like recognizing something I had been moving toward my entire life.

The Work I Do Now

Today, my work sits at the intersection of several lifelong callings:

teaching
listening
supporting well-being
and helping people remember the wisdom already living inside them.

As a therapeutic yoga practitioner in advanced yoga therapy training, I draw from a wide range of experiences — instructional design, bodywork, mindfulness, and culturally responsive wellness practices.

But the heart of the work is simple.

Many of us are carrying far more than we were ever meant to hold alone.

Through therapeutic yoga, I help people slow down, reconnect with their bodies, and develop practical tools for living with greater steadiness, clarity, and joy.

Not through force or perfection.

Through practice.

Through relationship.

Through the quiet, ongoing work of unfolding.

Release what you've been carrying.

Reconnect with your body and inner wisdom.

Cultivate sustainable resilience and joy.