BENDING OURSELVES INTO SHAPE East County Yoga Teacher Discusses Her Craft and Her Life
	JUNE 2005

by Sandy Morrow
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’ve been practicing the science of Yoga for nine years. I took my first class at a gym and almost immediately fell in love with the movement and discipline. I always enjoyed the structure of dance and originally planned to become a professional dancer. I married my high school sweetheart, instead, and started on a career as a corporate trainer.

The Joys of Yoga
I started my first Yoga class with the simple intention of getting into shape. I was happy to discover that my body recognized some of the movements in Yoga because of my dance background. Yoga exercise doesn’t injure the body, unlike some dance movements. The practice of Yoga is a holistic thing. It is relaxing and dissociates itself from striving for goals and results. Yoga is respectful of your body. It is not merely low-impact; it is zero-impact. The practice of Yoga doesn’t aim to force the body into some physical condition; rather it uses posture, stretch, meditation, and movement to lead us in experiences of self-discovery and awareness.

The practice of Yoga developed into a central life passion for me. I became a dedicated student and found that my life was being changed. I learned through meditation to release negative energies and eliminate behaviors that were limiting my growth and drawing away my energy for living.

As my training progressed, I experienced a number of epiphanies — moments of great clarity — about the path I was taking. I developed insight into the things that I needed to change. There’s a lot of payoff for anyone through the practice of Yoga. We experience remarkable centering, with dramatic increase in awareness of the motions of body, mind, and spirit. The activities of stretching and exercise brings the parts of the body into fine balance, but the benefits extend inward towards a corresponding balance that is often attained in the life and breath of our inner being.

The practice of Yoga provides means for extending youthfulness. We use strength poses to reverse the body’s aging processes. Through increased physical strength and flexibility, practiced under the disciplines of mediation, we learn to release reservoirs of personal power, commitment, and discipline. Even though people tell me I look like a young woman, I recently became a grandmother.

From Student to Teacher
I launched into my career as a Yoga instructor following twelve years working in a corporate environment as a trainer for a west-coast drug chain. I eventually became disheartened with my job. The company was downsizing and shifting responsibilities. My role changed and my contact with people was diminishing. My job started to involve a lot of paper pushing and I really missed working with people.

I began teaching Yoga on a part-time basis and eventually came to have as many as ten weekly classes besides my day job, so I began making charts and thinking how to make tangible my dream of moving completely away from the corporate environment. I began to fantasize about becoming a Yoga instructor full-time. My daydreams began to coalesce into genuine visualizations. A mental picture of a future reality came into focus.

I reached the point where I could say, “I think I can do this.” The change was somewhat of a leap in the dark for me because it involved the loss of medical benefits, plus a huge reduction in income. Those considerations paled, however, in the face of the wonderful reality, that more and more I was finding a truly authentic answer to the question, “What do I really want to do with my life?”

I left the corporate world less than a year ago. It involved a great reduction in lifestyle but it is amazing how, when your passion kicks in, you can take charge of your life. You can live simpler. I don’t need silk nails. I found I could let go of things like that. Yoga has always been a passionate labor of love for me.

There are eight branches of Yoga, the last three get into religious and spiritual dimensions. I don’t teach the religious parts, but focus on body, breath, and meditation. I have a studio in my own home, but I hold classes in a number of other places. I teach at Club One at Brentwood, Club Sport in Pleasanton, Big C Athletics in Concord, Downtown Yoga in Pleasanton, Diablo Yoga Center in Danville, Fitness 2000 in Dublin, and the Yoga and Movement Center in Walnut Creek.

The other part of the decision of following my dreams had to do with family. I always said that I would help with my grandkids one or two days a week. My mom did that for my own children. I think enormous benefits result from a grandparent being able to bond with a grandchild. Being there for my son when little Cameron was born just sealed my intention for me. My heart was filled with a great conviction, “This child needs me; I need him.”

My own mom, who is half Chinese and half Portuguese, emigrated here in the late 50s and taught us children to value our extended family. Asian culture is very matriarchal. There are about 30 of us in my immediate family so I was always surrounded by siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Extended families are a diminishing cultural blessing these days, but I want to pass on the gifts of culture and extended family to my grandchild. I want him to grow up being surrounded by people who love and support him.

The Joy of Teaching
I’m much more balanced and happier these days than when I was in the 9 to 5 world of corporate business. I’m teaching classes out of my home studio. I can watch my grandchild two days a week. My son drops by for lunch sometimes. You can’t put a price on that.

I love the fact that my students come to me because they really want to learn. They are regularly so joyful following a class that their enthusiasm inspires and invigorates me. It has been a pleasure over the years to watch people’s lives change through the practice of Yoga. Yoga’s holistic approach enables people to process and identify what is going on in their minds and hearts. Such awareness can help a person return to healing and wholeness. I’ve seen the chronic effects of injuries heal. Emotions that were kept in darkness for decades have come to the surface where the light of revelation can destroy them. I’ve watched students become aware of their anger or sadness and begin to deal with these dark feelings in a healthy, liberating fashion.

I’ve been teaching for seven years and have had the joy of watching such things as a 70-year-old woman do a headstand for the first time since she was a youth. She came to me with a lot of injuries, but she’s dealing with them. Being witness to such a thing provides a person like me with incredible rewards.

People are becoming aware of the connection between Yoga and performance in any sport. Yoga’s disciplines lead to such things as visualizing, and learning to “ride your breath,” to extend abilities beyond an athlete’s natural boundaries. I will teach Yoga classes to about 40 members of Concord’s Terrapin swim club this summer. I will also teach members of the Mount Diablo Triathlon Club how to augment their abilities in running, swimming, and biking.

Practicing the Art
I remain a Yoga practitioner, as well as a teacher. Even though I have three Yoga certifications, I am currently enrolled in an advanced teacher-training course in a prestigious school, called “The Yoga Room,” in Berkeley. I’m taking an advanced three-year program of study with a trainer named Donald Moyer, who is the head of the school. I’m currently studying anatomy and standing postures. My advanced studies at the Yoga Room mandates five days of personal practice each week, in addition to the classes and journaling activities of the course itself.

I took a group of seventeen students to a Yoga retreat in Hawaii in February. We went to Hilo on the Big Island and spent a week at a facility called the Tara Yoga Center. It is a glorious and self-sufficient place up in the mountains. The center is off the commercial grid, deriving all its power from generators that are fueled by re-cycled vegetable oil collected from local restaurants. All the facility’s water comes from a rain-collection system. One unexpected benefit of training in Hawaii is that the climate’s tropical humidity helps muscles to relax more readily than in our drier East County climate.

The retreat was a wonderful holistic experience for both trainer and students. We had two daily classes, ate organic food prepared by a wonderful chef, and generally relished our mountaintop aerie with its breath-taking vistas of the tropical wilderness far below that included two waterfalls. We returned cleansed, with bodies completely relaxed and minds cleared of the noise of modern life. We were balanced and centered.

I plan to conduct even more retreats and provide my students opportunities to practice in new environments, and to meet students from other places and cultures.

The Life of Yoga
I’m a people person. Yoga has provided a way to form great relationships with a wonderful set of people. The study of Yoga exerts some intrinsic filters on the Yoga-practicing population. Not many bigots, for example, or obnoxious self-absorbed bores are attracted by the opportunity of getting in touch with their physical bodies and their inner strength.

My fellow practitioners have similar tastes to mine and tend to be sincere, friendly, loving people — who are on a happy quest for goodness and health. Nobody would spend an hour in one of my classes with me who isn’t searching for a holistic source of health — learning to live according to healthier patterns and generally deriving more satisfaction from life. I feel that my students and I have created an emerging Yoga community. Several hundred of us over the area are forming a human chain — a circle of people who are caught up together in a joyful process of expanding ourselves, bodies and souls.

I love what I do! Practicing Yoga is a great endeavor for me. Passing on to others the gifts that I receive myself is a continual delight. I wouldn’t change a thing about any of it, except to do things to reach out to even more people in sharing the pleasures that I am myself receiving.