How I Became A Yoga Dancer
My first encounter with Yoga Dance was in March 2005. I was invited by, my then Dynamic Flow Yoga Teacher from the La Fitness gym in Canary Wharf, Olof, to a home studio in a corner of North West London called Willesden. I agreed to go to this class partly because I was in love with Olof and thought that we were meant to be together forever in eternal yoga bliss, and also because he told me something that no other yoga teacher had ever told me before. “I think you have a talent for this.”
You see, in 2005 I had only been practicing yoga for two years up to that point. It all started in 2003 with a knee injury caused from running two half marathon races inside of a month. My knee was severely damaged to where I couldn’t walk on it and I ended in physio therapy. Because of the abrupt stop in my running I began to suffer from night time muscle spasms in my legs that would wake me up in the middle of the night in severe pain. When I asked my therapist what to do, he suggested to try yoga to relieve the tightness in my legs. Coincidentally, that same day while walking home from the physio clinic, I walked pass the La Fitness Gym in Canary Wharf and saw through the street window of their main exercise studio, a bunch of people on yoga mats with their asses in the air stretching, what I assumed to be their hamstrings. In an effort to help heal my knee and get me back to running as quickly as possible, I doubled back and joined the gym that day. Physio was a hard slog but, yoga was even harder. Long story short. I caught the yoga bug and began wanting to know more. Especially when my knee got better as a result of the yoga. My physiotherapist and I strongly disagreed on this topic. However the evidence was too revealing to ignore. I found that I made more progress recovering from my knee injury after I started yoga, as opposed to before. As a result, I gave up running all together, something I thought I’d never do because it gave me so much joy. I’d been running races since I was 7 years old, and I never thought that I would give it up and here I was convinced yoga was my path to not only healing my knee but just my path.
Having the “ALL IN” personality that I have, I began practicing every day, sometimes twice a day. And, when I couldn’t make the yoga classes at LA. Fitness due to work scheduling, I found a local Bikram Yoga Studio and went there.
In an attempt to fully understand what a physical yoga practice was really all about and how to do it correctly, I ended up doing two teacher trainings in 2004. Bikram in…
