SWIHA Blog

There is an old adage which states, "If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours forever. If it doesn't, then it was never meant to be." 

There is no truer definition of surrender than freely letting something go forever with no attachment to it (whatever “it” is) coming back— while still being open to the miracle that it might. Surrender is not giving up; it’s releasing control or attachment to what you want, fully believing there is a higher, greater purpose for whatever happens. This process can be considered a walk in faith!

As strange and trite as it might sound, my recent stay in “Facebook jail” truly taught me valuable life coaching lessons in the art of surrender. As shared in a previous blog, Facebook disabled my personal account with no explanation other than to say that my account had been deemed a security risk and that no further explanation could (or would) be given. Now I realize that it is truly a “first-world problem” to have a Facebook account disabled. You might be thinking, “Come on, KC, there are much more important things to think about, let alone spend precious time praying about!” This is true, and the experience has been humbling and illuminating. In fact, as a result of being in “Facebook jail,” I truly have experienced a walk in faith. The following are the life coaching steps I took and will continue to take in the future:

It has been a long road to get to where Tim Barber is today. By his account, that amounts to somewhere around 2,300 miles and 15 years since the graduate of SWIHA’s 1000-hour Master Massage Practitioner and 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program first realized that he wanted to become a Licensed Massage Therapist.

Tim spent most of his life in New York. No, not that New York. “Everyone always assumes I mean New York City when I tell them where I am from, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” he laughs. Born and raised in the Central New York region, most of his life was spent surrounded by forests and water— not skyscrapers. Houses were often a half-mile to a mile apart. The town he grew up in was so small that there wasn’t even a four-way stop in it. His graduating class consisted of about 60 people. A trip to the mall would take about 45 minutes of driving to get there. The nightlife in his town consisted of crickets and lightning bugs. No, it definitely was not THAT New York.

Kevin Williamson had been working the 9-5 daily grind for ten years. Employed in the credit card department of a financial institution, his life was beginning to feel like the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. “I felt no real personal significance in the work I was doing,” he shares candidly. His job involved sitting at a desk and staring at a computer screen for eight hours a day with minimal security; the very real possibility of lay-offs lurked around every corner.

Kevin was feeling discontented, frustrated, robotic, and unhappy with how he was participating—or not participating—in his own life. Ultimately, this led to a mental and emotional burnout. Looking for options, he sought out hypnotherapy. His hypnotherapist was a graduate of SWIHA and ended up sharing information about the school. Kevin had heard of SWIHA previously and decided to take an opportunity for self-healing and self-discovery by attending a Gifts & Graces event for the first time. 

It has been said that, “All that wander are not lost,” and that certainly applies to Alexandria Cordero, a graduate of SWIHA’s 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program.

Alexandria had begun to feel stifled in Chicago and was seeking a fresh start, so she packed up her life and moved to Arizona with the intention of attending veterinarian school. Yet, after arriving and truly thinking over the prospects of paying over $200,000 for that schooling, she decided to take a year off and explore the new state which she had chosen to call home. Thinking of that time, she jokes, “My yoga practice was taking off with all of the free hot yoga on my patio every morning!”

After being encouraged to do so by a friend, Alexandria found herself attending an open house at SWIHA. “I knew that this was where I was supposed to be,” she says. “I decided to start with the 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training fast-track to see how I liked teaching yoga... I LOVED IT!” In the program, she went through deep personal transformation and found connections to yoga and the community of SWIHA unlike any she had ever experienced before.

The words of the teacher who led the morning yoga practice at the Wanderlust Mindfulness Marathon in Denver, Colorado still ring in my awareness:“What do you need to put down that was not yours to pick up in the first place?

Chelsey Korus is quickly becoming one of yoga's foremost teachers and philosophers. She's been featured in PopSugar, Prevention Magazine, Yoga Journal, Women's Fitness, Mantra Magazine, Fitness Magazine, Shape, and is one of the top teachers on Yogaglo, an online venue for the top yoga teachers in the world to offer video-based asana and philosophy classes.

It’s no surprise that the California-based yoga teacher has been traveling the country as part of the Wanderlust staff. She's been teaching yoga since the age of 15 and has been a lifelong student of various yoga practices, including Anusara, Power Vinyasa, Ashtanga, Acro, as well as martial arts, free form dance, and ballet. The surprise was the way she cued and invited deep inquiry in the middle of the mile-high park setting.

After twenty-five years of helping people to discover their gifts through life coaching and other holistic practices, I’ve heard an awful lot of stories about how some friends and families of our graduates weren’t exactly thrilled hearing them announce they were becoming a Healing Arts Practitioner of any kind. And yet, most who have made the “leap of faith” say they wouldn’t go back for anything!

In 2015, my uncle suddenly passed away from a heart attack. Because I was at his house when he was found, I had the terrible and sad experience of seeing him after death in a state that I wish I could erase from my memory. I dealt with nightmares and trouble sleeping, and so I decided to see a therapist to talk it out, as I could not get the images out of my mind.The therapist had a list of suggestions and tools to help me cope with this trauma. On this list was a familiar word: yoga training. 

PTSD paralyzes, terrifies, saddens, and dulls the senses. We have long known that our mind and body record everything that happens to us. These highs and lows create Richter-scale size memories in our minds, with our emotional “seismograph” documenting the most crystallizing and paralyzing events of our life. If we were to take a metaphorical scan of the mind, we would clearly see PTSD appearing on the “map” as a series of dark, sharp peaks — indicators of turmoil from which it is very difficult to escape. Those dealing with PTSD get mired in those dark spots.

Grieving through the “Dark Spots”

Recently, after over twenty years of distinguished service to his country and three years of trying to reconcile the battles in his mind through intermittent psychiatric hospital stays, my stepson Todd made the permanent decision to end his life.

For some people, the traditional college route is not the road to success. Amanda Petro is one of those very people.

After spending a year at Arizona State University, Amanda wound up feeling completely unfulfilled; she was beginning to lose interest in her path of study and was increasingly aware that she was not resonating with her classmates. In her search for more like-minded friends, she ended up connecting with two soul sisters here in Tempe, Arizona, who were soon graduating from the Yoga Teacher Training Program at Spirit of Yoga. “It was there at their YTT graduation ceremony that I realized I wanted to be apart of this incredible and seemingly magical school. I started off staying at ASU while I began my 200 YTT. Mid-way through, I quickly realized I couldn’t handle the workload of both. ASU was taking me away from diving deeper into my SWIHA education, so I decided to go full time at SWIHA and leave Arizona State University behind. It was the best decision of my life.”

When Gila Shire moved to Phoenix in 1997 after serving as a nurse in Germany for 14 years, little did she know that she would eventually end up teaching Prenatal Yoga at SWIHA. Once here, however, she made the bold decision to become a Certified Massage Therapist through SWIHA and build her own private practice.