My Husband Tricked Me Into Yoga...🧘‍♀️

I became a certified yoga teacher on Sunday.

If you'd told me that ten years ago, I would have laughed in your face. (And then probably gone back to the couch.)

Ten years ago, I was at my lowest. Lost, unhappy, and completely unwilling to admit either of those things. I was eating poorly, drinking too much, barely moving...and then forcing myself into social situations because I thought that's what I was supposed to do. Running on empty but pretending the tank was full.

My boyfriend (now husband) saw what I couldn't. He noticed the cycle I was stuck in...the emotional and physical spiral of feeling terrible and doing nothing about it. So he did something sneaky. He told me he needed to stretch his muscles, found a yoga video on YouTube, and put it on the TV.

I watched for a few minutes. And then I said, "I wanna try that with you."

Up until that point...I had always dismissed yoga. I grew up playing team sports — soccer, lacrosse, softball, ultimate frisbee. Yoga wasn't a sport. I thought it was fancy stretching for fit, skinny women who had a lot of time on their hands. I wasn't flexible. I was at my heaviest. I was too impatient to hold a pose. I had every reason to believe yoga wasn't for someone like me.

But something about it stuck.

We did a few more videos together. He stopped...but I kept going.

I even took one of the tiniest rooms in our townhouse (barely the size of a closet) and turned it into my own little yoga space. A mat, a couple of blocks, and a small mirror. That was it.

That room changed everything. Not because of the yoga poses. But because it was the first time in my life I was doing something just for me. Not to make someone happy. Not to meet expectations. Not to follow the script. Just...for me.

I practiced from the safety of my home with 'Yoga with Adriene', and she met me exactly where I was. She showed me yoga wasn't about perfect form...that I could be silly, that I could wobble, that I could show up exactly as myself. And in that tiny room where nobody was watching, I gave myself permission to be vulnerable and imperfect.

I wasn't consistent every single day. But yoga has been a constant in my life for ten years now. I'll never forget the day I finally touched my toes. (I literally thought..."Holy sh**t! Maybe I actually can change. Maybe the things I believed about myself aren't as fixed as I thought.")

It took me eight more years to walk into an actual studio. Eight years of "I'm not a real yogi...I'm just doing videos at home...I don't belong there."

Having just moved to Texas, I was ready to come out of my shell. I was ready to build a life that I loved and genuinely felt like mine. And that included community and yoga.

When I finally went, I realized I'd been my own biggest obstacle the whole time. The community was open, welcoming, and nobody cared whether my form was perfect. They just cared that I showed up...as myself.

That's when yoga stopped being just something I did and became something I lived. Because yoga, for me, is a metaphor for life. Some days are good, some days suck. And the practice isn't about being perfect or achieving for the sake of achieving...it's about accepting where you are in that moment and giving yourself the grace to know there's always tomorrow. It can be silly and fun, peaceful and humbling. And it still builds you up in ways you didn't expect.

What yoga actually taught me wasn't flexibility or strength...it was how to listen to myself. How to create space, get quiet, and hear what I actually need (physically AND emotionally) instead of reaching for what everyone else expected of me. The practice of yoga became my practice of living...adapting through change while learning to be my true self.

I'd never had that before. And I think that's what was missing for so long.

Yoga didn't make me self-fluent on its own. But it gave me something I'd been missing...the ability to slow down, listen, and actually be present with myself. That awareness fed into everything else, including the deeper work I did to truly understand who I am, and eventually, building Drishti Quest to help others do the same.

Six months ago, I decided I wanted to help others find what yoga gave me. On Sunday, after two months of intensive training (200 hours total!) I received my certification.

I'm a yoga teacher now. I still can't quite believe it.