Meet @kacyharnedy sharing her #yogasavedmylife story with us. These are her words 🙏

"I began my yoga journey over nine years ago after ending a long relationship. I felt disempowered, unheard, emotionally abused and insecure. I was ready to shift into a space of love as I never had a truly loving experience in my intimate relationships, they all were very much surface-level, un-aligned relations"

"I started yoga for the physical aspects, to learn my body and to reacquaint to what physically felt right for me. I took my first Kripalu style yoga class one Saturday morning and fell in love: with the space, the feeling, the energy and I said to myself, I want to give all of this that I feel to others. I went on to train to teach and this is where life got ripped apart

.

I knew what my relational experiences felt like but not until training did I realize the extent of the trauma caused. This was a painful process for me to look into, I felt ashamed and foolish for putting up with everything I did, I felt taken advantage of and unloved

. I recognized that I was using these relationships to heal old wounds that I never knew existed. You know, we humans, we tend to think trauma is okay and acceptable and just deal.. I felt pain and loss and varying levels of sadness but also spikes of happiness and bliss. And I'm so thankful for each and every one of those moments because they were exactly where I needed to be

. We tend to expect to always be on the happiness side of life, but that's not reality. I learned that and accepted that.

I'm a work in progress and practice each and every day. I practice deeper breaths, I allow myself to feel and meet those emotions with compassion, without judgment. I celebrate small victories when I notice I changed a pattern, we have to be our biggest cheerleader. Yoga saved my life by asking me to show up, face pain, lean into it and let it go. I teach what I preach and will forever bow to the practice, the lineage and show up as a container of safety for all of my students as I myself will ALWAYS be a student first 🙏

Thank you yoga, thank you, thank you

Om Shanti .