Coming Home to Myself: My Phoenix Rising Story

I found Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy through luck and desperation. I was working a job that caused an immense amount of stress, which in turn had led to increasingly severe anxiety. Despite this, I thought that this job was “it” for me. I was working with great people, making good money, with lots of room for growth. In many ways, it was the perfect job. Yet it was the type of job that was hard to let go of in my down time; always more to do, always something to worry about. It was fighting with my husband over this constant attachment to the job, when in my defense I told him that I was in this job for him.

Couldn’t he be a little more grateful for how hard I was working, and just accept that sometimes I would have to deal with things outside of work?

Thankfully, this argument woke me up enough that I started to consider change. What was it that I had wanted to do before I was swept up in this job? The answer came loud and easily: Yoga Therapy. I had been a yoga teacher for a few years, teaching classes sporadically. When I first received my 200-hour certification, I knew I was interested in pursuing that education further and using it as a healing modality. I decided to start doing a little research, just to see what was out there.

Anxious and overworked, I felt like if I could just reconnect a little bit with what my goals and dreams used to be, maybe I could find my way back to myself.

As it turned out, I could take the Level 1 training weekend with Phoenix Rising, in Denver, in just two weeks. I did very little research on the type of Yoga Therapy Phoenix Rising offered; all I knew is that it was convenient, doable, and soon. I signed up without giving it a second thought.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in the circle with the other trainees a couple weeks later, that I learned just how perfect this modality would be for me. The emphasis on listening to your body, allowing it to guide awareness, and offering safe presence, all felt like it was designed for me. It was what I personally needed, as well. In that training, I reconnected with who I was in my heart, by connecting with what I was really experiencing in my body.

I started looking for the way out of my job that weekend. It would still be 5 months before I left, but the simple act of touching back in to who I was through the Phoenix Rising work started the dominoes falling. In that summer leading up to my eventual life-shift, I received two professional sessions from a local Phoenix Rising Therapist. I remember in one of those sessions, we were exploring my anxiety, and the way it was heightened by any constriction around my chest. I identified that this was a feeling of being trapped, stuck, and not free to move the way I would want to. I knew as soon as I said it that this was about my career path.

I had become immobilized by a situation that was good enough - when in my heart I knew there was something more true to me.

It took many conversations and a lot of planning for my husband and I to feel safe with me quitting to become a full-time yoga teacher. There were certainly many, many moments that it seemed ridiculous, especially in Denver’s saturated market, to think that I could carve out a good living teaching while completing my Yoga Therapy training.

Each time those doubts arose, all I had to do was come back to my body. Come back to the knowing that exists there and remind myself: This is what feels right.

This is the journey that calls to me. Challenges will arise. There will be successes and failures. But as long as I stay true to my heart, there’s no better path through life.