Christa in New York

To move a project forward, focus is necessary. You can’t know what beat to march to unless you can hear the drum. Without at least a general idea of where to go, a lot of effort is spent wandering around aimlessly. I’m an efficiency junky and I hate wasting time, or worse yet having someone else waste my time, so focus is incredibly important to me.

Stop and Get Clear
Compass Yoga is beginning to occupy a great portion of my life, which is what I’ve been working toward for the past 18 months. It’s very much the work of my lifetime, or many lifetimes, and it’s my legacy. I feel blessed to have found this calling so early on in my life and to have so much clarity on its direction and purpose. My yoga practice and teaching is very much focused on its therapeutic aspects and the relief it can provide us for both mental and physical wellbeing.

To get to this clarity, I had to really put aside to outside influences, get quiet, and listen. There were lots of people who wanted to send me off in different directions once I finished my first leg of yoga teacher training. I am very grateful that they were so interested, but when I really stopped and considered their advice, I just couldn’t follow their instructions and be authentic. I had to go my own way and forge my own path. It’s the message I received in my daily meditation practice and it’s the one that felt most worthwhile.

Assessment Time – Take Off the Blinders and Expand the Mind
Once I knew I wanted to have a therapeutic focus in my teaching, I took a look at the landscape of where to take further training and where to begin looking for opportunities to teach. I quickly realized that few training programs focus on therapeutics (which will be another focus of Compass Yoga once I build up the organization a bit more) and there is an incredible amount of need for it. I hit the opportunity jackpot with this road, and it dovetailed perfectly with my own unique personal experience with yoga.

I found my way to yoga for therapeutic purposes and it made a tremendous difference in my life. Finding this same emphasis as my teaching purpose brought all of my experiences, as challenging as they were, full circle. It gave them great value and purpose. Once I realized all of this available opportunity and all that I have to give in this realm, I felt like someone took off the blinders that I have been wearing for so many years. Now I see opportunity everywhere.

Choice – the Final Frontier
I quickly realized that I could easily spin myself around in a circle if I didn’t narrow down my business development efforts to a population or a cause that I feel most passionately about. There’s no end to the amount of work that can be done in therapeutic yoga and it’s easy to get caught up in wanting to help everyone. I’ve always found that by trying to serve everyone, you serve no one well. I had to choose, and choose I did.

How I chose to focus on helping veterans and their families
I found my way to yoga as a means of recovery – from trauma, stress, anxiety, and insomnia. By my early twenties, I found that my mind and body were sufficiently battered. Yoga helped me to pick up the pieces and put myself back together again. Over time, it helped to heal old and new wounds alike and continues to do so. It became so much more than an exercise I did on a mat. It became a way of life. I live my practice; it’s always with me and within me and that’s a powerful possession to have.

A Teacher Finds Her Students
My goal with my teaching is to help others like me, others who feel battered, beaten down, or lost, and want very much to feel independent and in control of their own lives again. When I hear and read the stories of veterans, when I hear the stats of how much help they and their families need, on some very basic level I understand that need. I have never been into battle as they have. I’ve never even held a weapon of any kind. I do personally understand the aftermath of trauma and what it does to a family, particularly to children. I understand profound, irreversible loss, grief, and guilt. I understand the feeling of not being whole, present, and engaged. I’ve been there, too.

Yoga, which literally translates to “union”, helped me to bring it all back together for me and I know I can use it to help veterans and their families. The practice gave me direction, discipline, and an outlet to process and feel my feelings so that I could move on, so that I could transcend. No matter what the cause, that’s what all people in trauma are looking for – not a way to forget but a way to move on and honor all that we learned in the process. Yoga gets us there. It takes time and patience, but the door is open if we have the courage to walk through.