Yoga Warrior Studio

So the beginning of how Yoga Warrior was born is a sad one for me. My Mother died in 1999 and by March 2000 I was clinically depressed and in a scary place. My Mother was my best friend, we spoke every day, and with her death, I was now parentless as my Father had previously died. I felt hopeless and unable to cope, and couldn’t see as a single female how I’d have the strength to look after myself for the rest of time, I was so used to being looked after and that was the part I had taken for granted. I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t do anything, though I had been signed off work and was struggling to get out of bed in the morning. So in New York City in April 2000 when one of my friends told me that she thought yoga would really help my state of malaise, I thought fine. I was scared of where I was going, I would try anything if someone said it would help.

I went to a yoga class but I think before I went I didn’t even know what yoga was. So I was surprised when we were on the floor, barefoot and trying out all these strange positions I’d never been in before. The teacher was calm and spoke about breathing. At the end of the class, it felt like the first time I had taken a full breath in two years since my Mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Stress encourages shallow breathing, and shallow breathing retains stress. I came out of the class and as I walked down the streets of Manhattan, something had lifted. It wasn’t much but I felt different, lighter and somewhere inside I was able to be with myself. Being with myself was exactly what I had been unable to do for months, that meant accepting what had happened and facing reality.

And there it began in a little studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this love affair with yoga. I moved downtown and with that moved my practice in to Cyndi Lee’s OM Yoga studio off Union Square. Over the next year or so I downdogged up the Yazoo, learning to be right there on my yoga mat, in the present moment. Learning that lesson taught me to heal myself. Healing myself was the most profound shift in who I knew myself to be because it meant I could cope, I could look after myself and I would be fine. Everything was going to be fine. Eventually I could be happy when the sun was shining, I was laughing again and my heart was smiling during savasana.

My journey wasn’t complete though. Having emerged from this dark chapter, I found myself in a stressful career in New York City, still single and not really feeling at home within the American culture. Home for me is England and home was the last place I had wanted to be because that had meant facing a country with no parents. Living in the US had felt like it was providing some reprieve from that reality and around my personal angst, I was at least having an international career in the most dynamic city on earth. So I’d gone from Theology at Oxford to a Vice President at a Wall Street investment bank, what the hell was I doing?

Then September 11th happened on my doorstep. My office was right next to the World Trade Center and I found myself running from the falling towers back to my apartment, definitely lucky to be alive. Before my very eyes something much much worse than my own personal tragedy had happened, something unnatural, ugly and unforgiveable.

copyright Gavin Docherty

The tears for me dried up for good and I woke up, again, and considered what do I want to do with the rest of my life? One of the best things I think about a young exposure to mortality is that you get really loud and clear, I’m only coming here once so I better make it brilliant. Up until then I’d done the right thing, followed the predictable path that easily followed my education but I wasn’t satisfied and I definitely wasn’t being myself in that financial services environment. So a new enquiry began in downdog. What do I really want to do?

It came to me in a class with my favourite teacher, Christie Clark, that this is it. I’m never as happy as when I am in a yoga class. I loved the community and the sincerity of the energy in the room. I didn’t know the people in the room but I felt I shared their values, that was important to me and it felt like every time I went to yoga I was coming home. I’m not saying the workout passed me by, yes I loved that but yoga was already much more than that for me.

So a few months later I was in the Caribbean on a retreat with Cyndi Lee and talking to her about becoming a yoga teacher. I’d been doing yoga for two years but I knew I was still at the beginning and Cyndi said she didn’t think I was quite ready. No problem, I went back to NYC and upped the ante with my practice. By this point I was also training for the NYC Marathon and every day felt clearer and clearer about where I was heading. It was a good time, I had decided to leave NYC the following year once I’d completed the teacher training and run the marathon and when Cyndi said it was time, I began the teacher training course.

I was packing up my life in the US the summer of 2003, everything felt complete. I was now a fully fledged yoga teacher, a NYC marathon finisher, done with my career and the Sex and the City lifestyle of a single female in Manhattan. I was going home and was really looking forward to rain, the BBC, fish and chips and a lovely little village in Wales where my parents lie. Enter, my South African ex-boyfriend, Andrew.