Meet @halfmoonvinyasa sharing her #yogasavedmylife story with us 💚

"I grew up in a family that loved me very much but never displayed that love well or clearly. My stunningly beautiful mother starved & exercised to complete exhaustion every day during my childhood. She expressed her hate towards herself & her body so often that by the time I became a teenager, I believed being disappointed in myself & the way my body looked was the norm" .

Meet @halfmoonvinyasa sharing her #yogasavedmylife story with us 💚

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"As a young teenager, I was taken advantage of & sexually abused by a much older man from my neighborhood. My self-esteem dropped even further as in my growing physical & psychological shame, I isolated myself from friends & family. For a long time, I did not realize I was not okay

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I believed it normal to feel lonely & sad enough to self-harm. Sometimes, I hurt myself to take the edge off, & sometimes, I did it as a punishment for eating or weighing too much

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Yoga helped every time I gave it a try but I didn’t take my daily practice seriously until much later. As soon as I was old enough, I moved across the world looking for something else. Now, I know I moved because I was running from my trauma

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I became a lone teenager in the US who hardly spoke enough English to survive. I fell in love with the challenge. I went to college, learned languages, made friends. I built the life and family I have always wanted. One day, I finally decided to stare my trauma down & talk to a therapist. I was told, my experiences weren’t normal or usual & that I needed to work through them

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Not wanting to take medication, I started to take yoga seriously. I learned every inversion in the book to gain back the control over my own body. I took teacher training courses

. I learned how to just be and breathe. I learned how to love myself. Today, I own my own studio and work with a group of badass women who help heal others, as well. I live in an inspiring and loving relationship with the kindest man I have ever known and I can’t tell you when the last time was I looked at a scale. I appreciate myself the way I am in the given moment and every day, I thank the Lord for allowing me to practice yoga 💚 Szilvia"

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