I began my yoga journey in high school with a VHS tape my gym teacher left for a substitute teacher to play. After a bleak few years studying sustainability and growing increasingly angry at industrialized humanity, a friend pointed out that maybe activist work wasn’t for me. Another friend suggested I deepen my understanding of Yoga and earth based spiritualities by enrolling in the integrative healthcare program at our local university. This lead to a life long interest in yoga and wellness practices from around the world. Now I hold a degree in Integrative Healthcare and Lifestyle Medicine, am trained as a health and wellness coach, and have attended too many yoga teacher trainings to list. I began teaching yoga at age 20, with my focus being on methods that cultivated peace in the body. Slow flows, restorative yoga and yin yoga. But then came Wild Yoga. Wild Yoga blends traditional ayurvedic Hatha Yoga with the principals of Deep Ecology to help foster mutually beneficial human-nature relationships. Wild Yoga is using yogic tools to return our minds and bodies into rhythm with nature. This profound way of practice came to me during a time of traumatic grief, and supported me over a decade when it seems like the only parties I attended were funerals. Wild yoga was my gateway to yoga as medicine. This was when my relationship with yoga became a devotion. I am fascinated by the healing methods of Ayurveda (which is humanities oldest lifestyle medicine), by the observance of nature as teacher. Currently I am well on my way to becoming a certified yoga therapist, and am very excited about the yoga studio near my home in Pine that I have just joined as a teacher.