BE HEALTHIER.
BE IN COMMUNITY.
BE TRANSFORMED.

Meet our August Student of the Month, Holly!

If you get 30 seconds with Holly, your day just got better! Her spirit shines bright. Her joy is contagious. Coming to class isn’t about your performance or even your enjoyment. It just works and Holly’s another testament to that.

“Thirteen or fourteen years ago, I won ten free Bikram yoga classes in a silent auction benefiting the Feline Rescue Association. It took me many months to gather the courage and collect my winnings.

Edward Robinson led my first class. It was the most uncomfortable 90 minutes of my entire life. I was “all over the place” and “a spaz” in class and I decided that I would commit to taking the other nine classes as soon as possible to get them out of the way and be done with this torturous, humiliating practice FOREVER. I was not good at yoga and felt like such a fool.

I cannot pinpoint the moment of the shift. Sometime during those first ten classes, I came to realize that it’s not about being “good at yoga.” It’s not a competition. The only one making value judgements about me was myself. I also came to find that as long as I did my best with whatever I brought to the studio that day, I felt the benefits. My husband noticed my moods stabilized, too. When those ten classes were over, I committed to a regular practice. That highly particular and specific sequence of stretching muscles, squishing guts, and wringing out blood vessels turned out to be real medicine!

When I fall out of a posture, I just try again. That’s the only way to improve. I apologize if my falling out of postures makes it a challenge for others to concentrate in class, and I hope others will send me encouragement instead of judgement.

I hate the heat. HATE IT. I have been known to stuff cold packs in my yoga outfits and pour ice water over my head during class. It doesn’t help. It temporarily gives “the soft animal of my body” what it wants, but fighting the heat is a losing battle, and facing the heat is an act of surrender. In the hot room and in all of life, learning to surrender brings miracles.”

“I’m so aware that it’s now. It has given me the feeling that I have no past. I feel like I’m born, in each moment, brand new. And that I don’t have to take anything from back there with me because however I am at the moment is how I am meant to be, and I don’t need anything of the past. …It’s very freeing, very freeing.” Rev. Penny Donovan