Today my story continues with how yoga came to BL…remember up until this point, BL was just a group fitness studio. So jump back with me to last week when I explained that for the first 1.5 years of owning BL I was riddled with pain. After seeking out the advice of 12 different health professionals, the message from one particular person clicked. His name was John Gifford and he had a practice called Myotherapy. I ran into him at the other gym I had been working at and he suggested I read a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. My family was getting ready to go on a trip to Hawaii and I didn’t want to go because I was in so much pain, but I did go, and I read the book on the long flight over. I was convinced that the words on the page were 100% describing me…I walked off the plane and enjoyed my family trip for 10 days completely pain free. Hard to believe unless you had experienced first hand. The gist of the book was that most chronic pain is a result of our stressed out brains. And that mental tension could actually cause and perpetrate physical pain. Looking back it is so clear to me that my fear of failure, of not being able to successfully juggle the care of 3 daughters while running a business for the first time in my life was the cause of the pain. And the fear of not being able to physically do my job and teach classes was actually causing those muscles to tighten up more and lock in that chronic pain. So of course, I came home from Hawaii and the pain started back up again. I read Sarno’s second book that helped me understand how to apply these techniques to my everyday life AND my dear friend, John Gifford then suggested taking a yoga class.
I have to admit when he told me to try yoga, I thought to myself…”why would stretching have anything to do with helping my brain to relax???” Ha!! Little did I know. I took my first yoga class on a Friday at 12 noon from Johnny Kest in Southfield (sorry if you’re having trouble keeping all the “Johns” straight, but these are the 3 Johns who were instrumental in changing the trajectory of my life). I even remember the posture I was in…dragon, a hip opener…when a light bulb went off in my brain. This wasn’t just any lightbulb, this was a lightbulb accompanied by a huge realization and what some might refer to as ugly tears. I wept. But it was a good cry…like someone (that would be ME), was giving myself permission to be just as I was. I didn’t have to be the perfect mom, run the perfect business, have the perfect body. I didn’t even have to wait to be pain free to be happy. It was an epiphany that it was ok to be “perfectly imperfect.” After that…I started doing yoga regularly and guess what? The pain not only went away but stayed away.
I decided if yoga was such a gift to me then I wanted to share it with all the BL fitness peeps. This is when I ran into Steve coming out of a yoga class in that Southfield studio (I know too bad his name wasn’t’ John). I chatted with him about teaching at BL and well the rest is history. Thinking this was maybe 1998 ish that we started offering yoga at BL in the fitness room. I took Steve’s classes at BL and then when he had a conflict, I ended up needing to sub for him…so I decided I really needed to get trained to teach. So in 2001 I went to Tulum Mexico for an intense Yoga Teacher Training program with Johnny Kest. We added more yoga classes but then also needed more teachers. I started by training one of my fitness teachers, Andy Smith. I took my training manual and trained her one on one after hours. It was still not enough. The fitness folks were hungry for more yoga so in 2003, I took it upon myself to start my own Yoga Teacher Training program. And here is where my story will pick up next week…
