So I’m picking up where I left off with the evolution of BL. It’s 1997 and I’ve just purchased BL. I have a partner named Karen. We have 17 classes…90 students in our Rolodex…and I’m thinking just a handful of teachers including me, Chris and Karen. Side note here…notice that I said “thinking” in that last sentence, because remember this was 25 plus years ago and some of the memories are a bit foggy. As Chris and I have tried to reconstruct the details, we have asked others like long term clients, and Ricky, who was a member of BL way before I even owned it, and Briana who basically grew up at BL. How about some of you?? What memories do you have…what details do you remember that we might have forgotten?? You can respond to this email or reach out to us on social media on our Throwback Thursday posts. We would love to hear from you.
But back to my story as I remember it…
When I first bought BL we only taught fitness and we only had one store front (well maybe 1.5 store fronts…sketchy memory). But what I do know for sure was shortly after purchasing BL, we expanded to 2 store fronts to accommodate more bodies.
Side note here…at this point I was in crazy pain. My knees and my back hurt so much that I couldn’t even teach. I bought BL because of my passion for fitness and then for 1.5 years couldn’t even teach. Of course this is a whole story in and of itself, but here’s the short version. Over the course of this first year and a half, the pain was consuming both physically and emotionally. I took medication to sleep, to manage the pain to just be able to function. I had trouble even caring for my daughters at this time and thought the pain would never go away. I sought out the advice of 12 different doctors during this time and was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Bottom line is the mental stress and tension of trying to juggle running a business and take care of 3 active daughters landed itself in my knees and back. Of course, hind site is 20/20 and it took me awhile to figure this out. But there were several key factors that led me to this conclusion and resulted in my being rid of this chronic pain. It truly felt like a miracle but, in truth, the miracle is within all of us. It is acknowledging and appreciating the mind body connection. The two things I give the most credit to both my epiphany and my recovery was: 1) a book I read called Healing Back Pain by James Sarno and 2) my introduction to YOGA…
Stay tuned next week…this is where by story will pick back up…
