My Journey to Becoming a Yoga Therapist

Back in 2015, I was taking classes in San Francisco with the incredible physical therapist and yoga teacher Harvey Deutch. When he opened up a Yoga Therapeutics training, I felt an immediate spark. At the time, I was already a certified yoga teacher (Yoga Garden SF, 2013), and I loved Harvey’s more clinical, physical therapy approach to yoga. I’ll never forget the moment it hit me: I could teach yoga this way — focused, therapeutic, powerful — and I didn’t need to go to PT school to do it.

This was ten years ago, and yoga therapy wasn’t widely known (it still isn’t). I completed 100 hours with Harvey in 2015, and by 2017 I found myself funneled into the “official” level-one yoga therapy training at SMC in Marin. My son was almost two, and being a working-student-mama was intense to say the least. That chapter included solid bouts of anxiety and a terrifying misdiagnosis of a congenital heart condition that, thankfully, turned out to be far less serious than local cardiologists originally thought. I’m forever grateful for my intuition and for the specialists at UCSF who gave me clarity and confidence in my very healthy heart. Still, I needed a break after that first level of training. I promised myself I would finish level-two "at some point," though I had no timeline in mind.

And yet, I never stopped teaching. With over 400 hours of yoga therapy education under my belt, my teaching naturally evolved. My classes were increasingly infused with a therapeutic lens. When my daughter turned two, I started thinking about completing the training again. By then, MotherLove Yoga was thriving, and I had fully embraced yoga therapy as the foundation of my work. I wasn’t in a rush, but I held the hope that I’d finish “sometime in my 40s.” After all, I had paused further yoga training for something even more demanding: a full-on, immersive training in motherhood, led by two small but mighty teachers. (Relatable?)

Then, in the spring of 2024, Robin, the director and lead trainer at SMC, emailed me about completing the program. It felt like a sign, especially since I had just wrapped up seven months of Ayurvedic practitioner training with the extraordinary DeAnna Batdorff. I figured I'd keep going.

And now, nearly a year and a half later, here I am. I turned 40 and I’ve completed the final level of yoga therapy teacher training. I am deeply humbled by my teachers, my clients, my cohort, and the teachings themselves. It was a wild, intense, transformative journey. Though I’ve been teaching in a yoga therapeutics style for years, this last chapter cracked me open in a new way. I have worked through deep difficult layers of my own life that I hadn’t touched before — and I've emerged with more clarity, wisdom, and compassion than ever before. And, just to note, this journey has no destination (one of my favorite and most challenging understandings).

Yoga therapy has held me through some of the most complex and difficult stages of my life. These practices continue to offer me a deep connection to my Self and my Truth. Looking back, I can see clearly: all of this has been part of the path I am walking to become the woman and yoga therapist I am today.

The teachings of yoga philosophy have come alive in my work. The kleshas help me understand the roots of suffering, and sutras like Heyam Dukham Anagatam (2.16) remind me how we can work with that suffering and heal for our future selves. What’s shifted most in my teaching is my ability to truly see people — to relate with them through a layered, holistic lens. I draw now from a deep well of knowledge: ancient, philosophical, scientific, embodied and intuitive. And I offer it with love and reverence — for my students, for my community, and for the lifelong practice that continues to shape me.