What is Yoga?

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Brya podcast. I'm your host brya. I'm a yoga teacher. And in today's podcast, the first episode of my new podcast, I'm going to be talking about what yoga really is, because it is so much more than just than a physical practice. And when I first started, when I was 17 years old and I discovered yoga, I really thought, for honestly a couple years, I considered it to be a workout, a physical practice, because all of the other components of yoga were just not something I was aware of at first.

I grew up a an athlete. I was a competitive cheerleader, which is a very intense sport. You work out a lot. You push your body and these

[00:01:00] coaches they push these little girls from the time I started cheerleading when I was three years old I remember at practice They would hold you down and pull your body into stretches in the most harmful ways Because they did not care about us and our bodies and if we were okay and developing correctly It was all about how we looked how strong we were how able we were to Perform aesthetically and how good it looked for the team.

It didn't matter how you felt physically Especially didn't matter how you felt mentally If you made a mistake in cheerleading as soon as you got off that stage you were competing in front of hundreds or thousands of people, depending on the competition. As soon as you get off the stage, if you make a mistake, a coach was yelling at you and like screaming, tearing you to shreds and the other girls would like shame you.

It was just really intense. I didn't really mean to go on a tangent about

[00:02:00] cheerleading, but that's really what led me into yoga and why at first I really considered it a physical practice because I didn't know anything besides. a physical practice and it was an extension of I started practicing yoga every single day.

at the end of when I was a cheerleader. So it was my final year as a cheerleader. I finally discovered yoga and really it would have been such a benefit to me and to all cheerleaders out there to learn yoga and stretch in a way that is good for your body because so many athletes destroy their bodies when their children and then By the time you're 17, your body is already sore all the time.

I remember going to a doctor when I was like 15 and telling him I had constant back pain, and instead of giving me any solutions, this old man literally told me I had to stop cheerleading, and that was the only option. If you stop

[00:03:00] cheerleading, Your back will feel better is basically what he told me. So I just accepted that I was going to have chronic back pain for the rest of my life until I started practicing yoga.

And I realized that moving through yoga poses really feels like getting a massage and it feels so good for your body and it was so relaxing. So such a contrast to the way that I was used to stretching because I was stretching and working out every single day as a cheerleader, but in a way where my end goal was to have the abs to be perfect to look good and in yoga.

The goal is really to feel good, to tune into myself, to listen to what I need in my body. And I was just completely addicted. I love practicing yoga. I found Fightmaster Yoga. on youtube and every single day for years I

[00:04:00] would do a fight master yoga class on youtube and after two years of daily yoga pretty much online I'd gone to a few in person classes here and there but I was mostly just doing yoga online at home

and I think that's also obviously another reason why it took me so long to piece together the mind and the soul, like the spirituality, the philosophy of yoga because I was just practicing online. I didn't actually like go to a teacher and talk about these things. I was just doing the physical practice.

And then at 19 years old, I signed up for Lesley Fightmasters yoga retreat in Italy and this was my first solo trip out of the country. My first time ever going to Europe at all and I didn't know anybody

[00:05:00] there. It was so much fun though. I was 19 coming from the States so I stayed in a hostel in Rome for a week before the yoga teacher training and I Partied and had so much fun cuz like in the US at that time I legally couldn't even drink at a bar So I had so much fun at the hostel and seeing like the Trevi Fountain the Colosseum eating so much pasta, and all the yummy foods, and I just had the most magical magical week before hopping on a train and heading down the coast and then I went to Sperlonga, which is on the coast of Italy, on the beach in this small little cute town. I had this really cute little like beach area and then you climbed up a million stairs to get to the top of this hill where the old town was and it looked over the ocean and oh my goodness it was so beautiful and everything was like on top of each other and there

[00:06:00] was all these cute little shops and the most delicious restaurants and people's homes all just kind of mixed into the same square and it was just such a magical place.

Place and I got to meet my idol. I was so starstruck when I met Lesley Fightmaster Oh my goodness. I was really like wow. This is a celebrity to me This is the woman who I invite into my home every single day Practice yoga with every single day. I felt so connected to her and when we met she was We instantly became friends.

I was actually like the youngest person at this yoga retreat by 10 full years, and the girl who was 10 years older than me had come with her mother, so she was actually the youngest person there besides me. And all of these women at this retreat, especially Leslie Fightmaster, this was the first time I was in a place surrounded by

[00:07:00] mindful people.

women who were spiritual and understood the magic and the energy of our world and just hearing these women talk about how mindful and intentional their lives were and how magic everything was and how beautiful everything was just opened my mind to the beauty of the world we live in the possibility of just being whatever I want and just doing whatever I want.

It was such an amazing experience. The yoga retreat was so lovely. We practiced yoga in the morning and in the evening and there was an activity every day. We would like go to the beach together or go shopping in the little markets or go into like a, like a town nearby. And we saw these ancient Roman ruins on the beach this one time.

It was like some Emperors. Beach house it was so beautiful and We had all of our meals together and every

[00:08:00] meal breakfast a lunch dinner I sat at Leslie Fightmasters table

I love her so much. We became friends and after the retreat, we stayed in touch and Leslie invited me to California for yoga teacher training.

I flew to California and I took her yoga teacher training and it was in two parts. So we started in September of 2018. And then I flew back again in January, um, of 2019 and graduated my yoga teacher training.

And it was just so. Mind blowing all of the stuff I learned so obviously I learned about the physical practice the asana How our body works how everything is so interconnected? physically and how to sequence a yoga class, like where, which poses should like kind of be in

[00:09:00] which order to really help you feel good and keep your body strong and healthy and staying safe.

And that's like really what I expected. What I didn't expect was all the other limbs of yoga because yoga is not a workout. It is a path to enlightenment, the intention behind yoga is feeling into the oneness of all of us, feeling that interconnectedness and becoming just one with source, with the universe, with goddess, god, and connecting to earth and realizing how connected to everything we all are and just feeling peace inside you despite how chaotic your external circumstances might be.

And so the eight limbs of yoga, it starts with the yamas and the niyamas. And this is kind of like instructions on how to live and how to

[00:10:00] be in the world, it's just like a framework for how to live your life. And that's really the starting point of yoga

and then you get into asana, which is the physical practice of yoga. So a lot of times people just practice asana and they think that's yoga, but that is one eighth of your practice and all the other limbs are equally as important and necessary to be practicing yoga. So we also have pranayama, in yoga a lot of people practice breath work thinking that it's something separate and maybe even something new but breath work is yoga it's one of the eight limbs and it's called pranayama in sanskrit and it's been around forever meditation is also one of the limbs of yoga.

So a lot of times I see people talking about breathwork and meditation as if they are something separate than yoga. They are yoga. And yoga really

[00:11:00] means to unite, we are all united and feeling into that oneness, that we all are one.

are a part of. So another really mind blowing thing that I learned at yoga teacher training was all about our chakra system. I did not know, I did not know what chakras were before this, and oh my goodness. This is just gonna blow your mind. So, you know how you have your respiratory system helps you breathe.

You need it to live. You have like your circulatory system. You have your nervous system. You have your immune system. There's all these different systems. We also have Another system that we're not usually taught about, at least not where I grew up, and this is our chakra system, and it is a system that everybody has but the reason

[00:12:00] that a lot of people don't talk about it is because it is invisible to the naked eye.

You can't physically see it with your eyes, but with practice, with intention, with focus. You can see it in your mind's eye. You can see it in yourself and in others and you can feel it. And when you learn about the chakras, it makes a lot of sense. Learning, all of this stuff from yoga and learning about the eight limbs and studying the yoga sutras, which is a book you should read.

Learning about all of this is really beautiful and it feels right. That's like the number one thing when you learn yoga. more about yoga. It, you know that it's true. It's a universal truth. When you hear the magic and the wonder and all of these

[00:13:00] amazing things that can help you feel good and find calm from within yourself anytime, anywhere, and you learn about all the practices and all the magical, miracle things that happen through it, it feels right.

It's true. You know, it's right. Like when you hear a universal truth, it's something you can feel as like, it's like deja vu in a way, like when you're learning about it, reading it, you're like, I already knew this. Someone already told me this. Like maybe you've never heard it before. You've never seen it written down.

That was something that really blew my mind in my yoga practice. Never seeing something or having it written down or anything, but then reading it in a book that another yogi wrote Or like learning about it, hearing somebody else talk about it, hearing another yoga teacher talk about something that I discovered on my own, that I practiced in my personal practice, that I didn't learn anywhere, and then hearing again, time and time again,

[00:14:00] other people talking about it because, oh, Let me backtrack a bit.

So a year before my yoga teacher training, after Italy, that same summer, I went to Thailand for a month and I visited a lot of temples and I was really, I was intrigued by buddhism and I was learning about buddhism while I was in Thailand and then I came back I moved to Miami and I was in university and I had this course on mystical religions and for a project I had to visit a religious place and attend like a year.

Like, like, like go to church basically, but what me and the people in my group did, we went to a Thai Buddhist temple in Miami, they do meditation with the monks, you can learn meditation with the monks, it's free, I'm not, I haven't gone in years, I'm not sure if it's still a thing, I hope it is,

[00:15:00] but every Sunday, I wouldn't go every Sunday, but I did it a lot, I went a lot of times, Um, because it was really far away from where I lived.

It was like in the middle of nowhere, it was all the way out in the Everglades, surrounded by farmland, a literal temple from Thailand. I felt like I was in Thailand when I went here. And you really do feel like there's like all these buildings and statues and , actual Thai Buddhist monks and I would go there and learn meditation and meditate with these monks and That was an experience.

So I had already had a meditation practice Alongside my physical yoga practice before I realized that they were one in the same and that like it wasn't something I had to do separately like sitting in meditation and and moving through yoga poses can kind of be something you do at the same time, but like, you know, also different things resonate for different

00:16:00] people and different things are good for different times.

One thing that I started doing on my own after learning about the chakras, after learning about meditation and yoga from all these different places was I would do this meditation where I close my eyes. fall into a meditation, visualize my chakras, so the seven chakras, the root chakra at the base of my spine, all the way up to the crown chakra at the crown of my head, and each chakra correlates to different energies and traumas and situations in your life that will either repeat or change depending on the harmony.

of your chakra. So I'm going to make a whole another episode. Probably the next episode of this podcast will be about me explaining the chakras because I don't want to make this episode too, too long. So be sure to subscribe, follow the podcast. And I, yeah, I think next week I'll do the chakras

[00:17:00] explained episode to really get into that.

But let me get back to this meditation that I would do. All the time before I realized that this is like something that lots of people do like I had Thought I made this up like done it on my own and then time and time again I have been doing a guided meditation with another person or like in a yoga class and been guided through an Identical practice because this is like a universal magic thing that we all know Innately to do but we also like teach each other and learn about it So it's just really really cool and that's what Synchronicities like that happen, but the practice is to really plug your energy into earth, the center of the earth, there's like this spinning ball of energy at the center of the earth and you can visualize tree roots or mushroom mycelium coming out of your

[00:18:00] being and connecting you to the center of the earth, which is Everyone already has this connection.

All life everywhere is connected like this energetically to the center of the earth and which is why we are all connected. But you can visualize this in meditation and then feel that energy coming all the way up, all the way through your body and out the crown of your head into The universe, the divine, goddess, god, this is your direct pathway, literally to god, to goddess, to the universe, to source, whatever it is that you believe in is true, and it's all one, and it's all valid, and you are divinely connected to it, and we are all connected to it, so again, as we are all connected to all of this, all of us, we're all connected through earth, through the divine and all this energy as it comes up through earth, it's also coming down through source and it's moving through us.

We are all sharing the same

[00:19:00] source energy. So, visualizing that, and then, and meditation is a really powerful practice and a really useful tool when you want to manifest something. , so after I was a certified yoga teacher, , I started making a couple videos here and there on YouTube teaching yoga, and I was teaching yoga on the bay during sunrise in Miami.

it was so beautiful there'd be like dolphins and oh my gosh i miss sunrises in miami and then in like february of 2019 i went to nicaragua for a month and while i was there i went to an advanced yoga teacher training that was for people who were already 200 hour yoga teachers.

So all these women already knew about all the magic of yoga and it was like really a beautiful exchange. We all were learning from each other as well as our

[00:20:00] teacher and we were studying our chakras and every day we were focusing on a new chakra and doing different practices to help us like learn about and harmonize.

our chakras and oh it was amazing and I learned so so much and I got a certification in chakra vinyasa yoga and I was teaching yoga in Nicaragua because I didn't have any money at all like I had no money and I just like booked a flight That I was gonna be there for a month.

I had like the week long yoga teacher training, but I still had three more weeks. So I volunteered at a hostel and I taught yoga for my, my room and board.

I wanted to start traveling full time, so I left Miami, I put all my stuff in a backpack, and I moved to Mexico City, so I was teaching in Mexico for a while, and also during all

[00:21:00] of this, I was working online with like these women who lived in California, so It was Angie Lee's pays to be brave conference, which is like a woman entrepreneur conference.

So while I was living in Mexico, I flew to California and I was visiting these women that I was working with and we had so much fun. We were in san diego being all businessy and While I was there, so I stayed with those girls for like the weekend and I actually stayed stayed with leslie fightmaster my yoga teacher at her house with her family they just took me in as part of their family and And because I'm a vegetarian so like they bought me like special vegetarian groceries and they just treated me like part of their family and it was so special and I would wake up in the morning and get ready with Leslie and we'd like dance around and we would do yoga together me and her and her husband in her living room every morning and it was Such a beautiful experience and I'm

[00:22:00] so so grateful that I was invited to their home and I got to live with them and spend that time with her and that was actually the last time that I saw Leslie because a year after that, she died COVID a year later was when COVID happened.

Um, She just she was only 50. I think did she even turn 50? Maybe she was 49 and she just died in 2020 and it it was very Unexpected and it really broke my heart Obviously, I'm still really um, really heartbroken over losing Leslie. She was my biggest inspiration and It's kind of been all over a challenge for me to get,

[00:23:00] like, to stay as consistent in teaching yoga and being the person that I used to be, I guess.

Um, Because when Leslie died, I was actually pregnant with my first baby and that was unexpected and I was in a really dangerous situation actually, and during all this, I was studying prenatal yoga. So I moved back in with my parents when I was pregnant and I was studying prenatal yoga.

online and I was creating this membership and I was posting prenatal yoga classes on YouTube and I was promoting it on Instagram and I built out this membership and it was through each trimester I was making the videos so I was literally in my first trimester making all the first trimester practices in my second trimester making all the second trimester practices and there was Yoga classes, breath works, mantras,

[00:24:00] meditations, and it was so much and I was so proud of it, but everyone in my life told me that I was stupid, that it wasn't gonna work, that it was a bad idea.

Like everyone, my family, um, my friends, everyone just told me that I was an idiot and that I'm, I was being irresponsible and that I should go and get a real job while I was sick. I was pregnant and it was just like, it really broke my heart and I just kind of succumbed to it. And I was pregnant and my baby actually came early.

It was a really stressful time and she was in the NICU and I didn't get to finish the third trimester content. And I, uh, Leslie was really, like, the only person who ever believed in me and believed that I could be successful and believed that I would be a good yoga teacher and that I could do great things.

Like, she's really the only person ever who's ever

[00:25:00] really believed in me like that. And it just really crushed me that she was gone and I was pregnant and I was kind of all alone and I ended up Just one day deleting my entire membership website just deleted it because of a lot of just no one supported me and I was in a really toxic abusive relationship with the father of my children at this time he was very physically and emotionally abusive and manipulative and didn't like want me to make money online and just Ugh, it was just such a hard time, and I was so sad, and yeah, I ended up just not doing it, even though I already did it, and I, I, I honestly regret deleting that whole membership, but it was a great, it was great, maybe one day I'll remake it all, if I have another baby, I guess I don't need to be pregnant, but I think it would be nice.

[00:26:00] I really was proud. I was really proud of it. Honestly, I shouldn't have listened to everyone around me, and I should have stuck with that, but that's okay. On to bigger and better things. And then I actually had another baby a year later with the same person who is no longer in our lives. Thank goodness.

Um, and with my second baby, I had a free birth, so So I really do want to make another podcast episode about my birth story, like both my traumatic hospital birth and my free birth, which was beautiful and magical and empowering. So let me know if you think I should make those should like each birth have their own episode and be their own story or do you think I should kind of talk about them together and kind of compare what it's like being pregnant and giving birth, like in the U S healthcare system.

As opposed to a wild pregnancy and a free birth, if you're interested in that, like, let me know what you think, how you want to hear those

[00:27:00] stories. I actually just started, , teaching yoga in person, again, since having my babies, this week, like, I've been teaching online. but this week like a couple days ago I taught my first in person class so if you are in New Jersey or even if you're in New York City this summer I'm going to be teaching yoga classes at night during the sunset, which it sets over the boardwalk, but it's still beautiful at the ocean during sunset.

And like when we did it a couple days ago, the full moon was rising over the ocean as the sun was setting over the boardwalk, and it was so lovely and so beautiful just hearing the waves. So every Thursday night at Belmar Beach, you can practice yoga with me. It's by donation, so you can just show up.

Bring your friends and, , I recommend bringing a towel instead of a yoga mat because it's easier in the

[00:28:00] sand. So I hope to see you there. I'm currently studying yoga nidra. I'm studying it online and it's, it's really really like magical and I, I'm going to add it to my new program that I'm creating,, I am creating a whole book.

experience to help guide you through your chakras and bring harmony and healing to each of your chakras to completely transform and change your life so that you can live out your dreams because you deserve everything you desire and your energy being so stuck and holding on to things is keeping you where you are and when we can make little changes and move that energy around and get it moving we can start attracting the things we want and I want to help you do that.

help us all heal and feel good and find calm from

[00:29:00] within. So, if you are interested in healing your chakras, I'll leave you a link below to join the waitlist for my new experience. It's an online experience. It's going to be a self paced course full of yoga practices and info on the chakras and different tools that you can use to help heal your chakras.

Thank you for listening to the brya podcast. I am so grateful that you are here and tune in again next week.