I started around age 15. I grew up believing in karma — same idea the Bhagavad Gita talks about, do your work honestly, trust that things sort themselves out eventually. Even as a kid I remember thinking there had to be something everyone could do. Didn't matter if you were young, old, strong, weak — something that just kept a person steady no matter what. Took me years to realize that thing was yoga.

My first guru is who actually got me going. And for a long time, if I'm being honest, it was mostly about staying fit. That's it. It wasn't until later — much later — that I started understanding there was more underneath it. It works on your mind as much as your body, maybe more. Some days it helped with physical pain. Other days it was the only thing that could shut off an overthinking brain after a hard day. Life throws both good and bad at you, and yoga is the one thing that stuck around through all of it.

Then I became a mother, and that changed things again. Pregnancy is what got me into prenatal yoga in the first place, and it made that whole stretch of life a lot more manageable. But the months after — the nursing period, recovery, all of it — that came with problems nobody could really explain to me medically. Yoga helped again, in ways I wasn't expecting. Honestly that's the real reason I went and got certified in prenatal and postnatal teaching. It wasn't planned, it just made sense at that point.

Moving to the US opened up another chapter. I started mixing what I already knew with newer techniques I was learning here. These days I teach out of studios, but nothing about how I actually feel toward yoga has changed one bit. It's been there for me as a daughter, a wife, a mother — every version of me so far — and I don't think that's going to stop.