YAY! We have a wonderful group of new Curvy Yoga teachers this month! I am excited to share them all with you! To see a full list of our Curvy Yoga Certified teachers, please click here.
Sandra Kozlowski
Tell us a little about your relationship with yoga — both your practice and your teaching. I started by taking a class in college and cried all the way through! It was so hard and too fast. Then I became very ill a couple of years later and almost died. When I came out of the coma, I realized that I wanted to really live in my body and that is when my yoga became a passion and not just a hobby for me.
I am so passionate about yoga, that I wanted to share the healing and hope that is gives me daily and through life’s changes, with the rest of the world!
Why do you want to bring Curvy Yoga to your community? In my community there are a lot of yoga studios, seemingly in competition for the most athletic. I want to bring yoga that empowers everyone who walks into my class, for people like me. It has been and continues to be my vision that we build a community of health and non judgment to assist people who walk through life’s challenges with breath and joy.
What can folks expect when they take a class from you? They will be shocked, I am not your “normal” yoga teacher. We laugh kinda loud sometimes, talk, and students talk back to me! Together we share our lives and learn how to live in this wonderful and often humorous place called “the body”. I encourage my students to laugh, listen to when their body tells them “no”, and to work with the “yes” without needing to defend the answer. I get excited when a student “gets the yoga smile”, when they have met a challenge and conquered it for themselves- whether it was breathing throughout the pose, deepening in a way they had always wanted, or used breathing techniques with their coworkers. My focus is to have yoga spread off the mat and into their lives.
What has been your favorite part of the certification process? My favorite part of the process was learning to question my beliefs about learning and teaching. I have been leading this quiet revolution since 2003 in my own community, and found that the gentle leading of Anna Guest Jelley and the nurturing of my classmates, has made me a better yoga teacher. And of course, in gratitude to my current students who let me “practice” with them all I was learning!
How can people get in touch with you? On my website at www.myrealbodyoga.com, email at myrealbodyoga@gmail.com and at Wild Grace Arts (360) 754-3983. Also in January 2014, you can visit my education site at www.sandrakozlowskiyoga.com to learn more about how Chakras and Maslow’s Hierarchy work together to help us recover to live our best lives!
Joanne Ranger
Location: Cornwall, Ontario, Canada
Tell us a little about your relationship with yoga — both your practice and your teaching. I have been practicing yoga for 7 years. I started doing yoga because I was looking for an alternative to high impact activities that would help channel my energy but yet not leave me in intense pain. I had been diagnosed with severe arthritis and yoga allowed me to continue to be active and more gentle to my body. It also allowed me to gain more mobility and manage my pain,
As my interest grew in yoga I noticed that most places put a lot of emphasis on asanas and did not really take into account the physical limitations that each client had. The groups were often very closed and I did not feel comfortable to disclose in a class that I needed the pose to be modified to accommodate my needs.
To satisfy my need to learn more about yoga and how it could help me personally, I found that there were others like me that wanted to practice yoga while respecting their physical restricting and feel good about their accomplishments. In 2012, I started my 200 RYT program and once I completed the course, I took additional certification on modifying poses for people with injuries and seniors.
Why do you want to bring Curvy Yoga to your community? Curvy Yoga is accessible to everyone no matter their shape or size. It allows people to be themselves in a safe environment. It allows empowers people that in many cases do not have the opportunity to feel that they can be active and strong.
What can folks expect when they take a class from you? The participants in my classes can expect to be treated with respect and dignity, to have fun and laugh and to discover their inner power. They can expect small classes, individual attention and a willingness to share my knowledge.
What has been your favorite part of the certification process? The favorite part to the certification for me was learning to breakdown the language barrier between curvy people and the not so curvy. I am not considered curvaceous therefore, it was important for me to learn a language that would be considered acceptable to others without offending anyone. It also provided me with responses people biases. Of course, I also appreciated learning the techniques to modify the poses. Anna is very resourceful and supportive.
How can people get in touch with you? I teach on a part-time basis at Om Satya Yoga. Sandy Banga is the owner and operator of the studio. We can be contacted via her website.
Abby Foster
Location: Alexandria, VA.
Tell us a little about your relationship with yoga — both your practice and your teaching. I discovered yoga in 1999 and loved it from day one, though I haven’t always been a committed practitioner. Everything has really changed for me since I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012 – my yoga practice has become an integral part of my self-care for my own healing and wellness.
My teaching primarily stems from the idea that practicing yoga can help counteract the everyday strain we put on ourselves by sitting all day and by feeling stressed out. My goal as a teacher is to help my students move freely and feel more comfortable and relaxed in their lives.
Why do you want to bring Curvy Yoga to your community? The act of teaching yoga brings me joy. I see a lot of yoga-as-exercise, which is perfectly fine, but that image causes many, many people (often older, larger, and/or differently-abled folks) to think that yoga isn’t for them, when these folks actually stand to gain the most from yoga practice.
What can folks expect when they take a class from you? I think it’s fair to describe my classes as gentle, but not always easy. My group classes do presume that students can go between standing and sitting on the floor unassisted. We work to strengthen our core muscles, release tension in our hips and spines, improve our balance, and then we relax. Any time I have enough blankets and bolsters, I try to end class with a few restorative poses.
What has been your favorite part of the certification process? The certification process has been a real confidence-booster for me. Anna’s teaching has given me all the tools I need to teach diverse, accommodating classes, and to help my students learn yoga practices that work with their bodies and in their lives.
How can people get in touch with you? Send me email! abbyfoster (at) outlook (dot) com. I currently teach two weekly classes at PIES Fitness Yoga in Alexandria, VA.
Tracey Fletcher
Location: Tallahasee, Florida
Tell us a little about your relationship with yoga — both your practice and your teaching. My favorite part of my personal practice is the organized, peaceful feeling after a vigorous flow or mellow yin sequence, and I strive to help my students feel the same! Learning how to move to take a mental checklist of the body/mind to make the day better is such an important tool.
Why do you want to bring Curvy Yoga to your community? While rigidity and strict form has its place in the yoga world, I really love to encourage personalization and accessibility in any style of practice. I feel that Curvy Yoga calls for that, and I’m glad to now have more ideas and inspiration (the Curvy community is awesome!) to share with my students.
What can folks expect when they take a class from you? A relaxed, fun atmosphere where a little chitta vritti is A-OK. An emphasis on “personal” practice – I highly encourage students to make every shape feel great for their body.
What has been your favorite part of the certification process? Hearing some ideas I’ve had about yoga repeated by Anna and others really helped me feel more stable in my teaching style. I had developed some opinions that I had not yet heard from anyone else in the teaching world, and to hear so much support of them helped validate and make me feel comfortable sharing.
How can people get in touch with you? My email is fletchertl@yahoo.com!
Anne Campion
Location: Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Tell us a little about your relationship with yoga — both your practice and your teaching. I started to practice Yoga in 1996 when I was suffering from a debilitating and chronic low back pain. With time and a regular Yoga practice, the pain started to lessen and one day disappeared. Nothing less than a miracle to me!
Later Yoga helped me connect my mind to my body as I was mostly living from the neck up.
Yoga is now what brings me back to my body again and again. Yoga grounds me. Yoga helps me expand and get closer to who I truly am.
This is exactly what I try to convey in my classes.
Why do you want to bring Curvy Yoga to your community? My relationship to my body has not been easy over the years.
I was feeling self conscious all the time about the way I looked, my weight, how I was practicing Yoga too, and I was very much into the negative self talk like I don’t have the body for it, I am not flexible enough. In other words: I am not good enough. There were many times when I didn’t feel very welcome in Yoga classes and I wanted to disappear. I felt so totally out of place! And I hardly heard anything to tell me otherwise.
Curvy Yoga IS so very welcoming and IS for everybody and every body. Many people yearn for this and this is what I want to offer. I want to offer a body positive language at all times. I want to offer what I would have liked to have, hear, feel.
What can folks expect when they take a class from you? While gaining flexibility and strength without forcing anything, students discover how to welcome themselves to the mat. They learn how to connect with their own body in a loving and accepting manner. They can expect to hear body positive language only.
They can expect to be. Just that: be.
And they can expect to keep that forever. It’s not just a trend. Curvy Yoga is a transformational journey.
What has been your favorite part of the certification process? The connection with like minded people of course but also the connection with Anna whose generosity is out of this world!
How can people get in touch with you? You can reach me online at: www.yogawithanne.com, on Facebook: www.facebook.com/yogayourselfwithanne, on Twitter: @yogawithanne or via email: email: yogawithanne@icloud.com
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