Hey there, Friend. I’m Liz. Thank you for coming by.
This photo was taken by my beloved teacher, David Harshada Wagner, on a mountain in rural India. This balloon landed by me after hiking and praying on top of the mountain during our January 2020 pilgrimage lead by David and my other beloved teacher, Adriana Marie Rizzolo. So much lead up to that moment. So much has happened since. I am just happy to be here studying and sharing this practice of Yoga.
I first stumbled upon Yoga when I was outwardly thriving and inwardly suffering to death in high school. On the outside I was both a cheerleader and a theater kid, fitting in wherever I went. On the inside, I was a raging storm of unhealed trauma and emotion. I always felt separate from something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I spent the first years of my life “fitting in” on the outside and feeling so completely uncomfortable in my own skin. It has been a long road, but that began to change the day I decided to take “Yoga 101” for a semester of senior year gym class. It was a class lead by the cheerleading coach, who, albeit very sweet and caring, only had the experience of Yoga through taking a handful of classes at her gym. Even though those watered down classes filled with giggling football boys were nowhere near the authentic Yoga I went on to find and study, I could tell there was a deep thread of something I had been searching for within this practice.
By the time I was twenty-two I had finished my first 200hr Yoga Teacher Training. My first years of teaching were centered around learning the ins and outs of āsana, anatomy, and learning how to care of physical bodies really well. After completing a 100hr advanced training for teachers in 2013, I went on to train with Sue Elkind and Naime Jezzeny at Dig Yoga. It was here where I really came into my own as a teacher and leader. I spent three years studying and apprenticing with Sue and Naime.
I spent my twenties teaching Yoga and beginning to grow up. During that time, I began really putting my practice into action. Going through lots of triumph as well as defeat in this time, I was able to apply everything I had been learning in my studies. I began getting steady footing on my path of Yoga. It is through dedicating my life to the path of Yoga, meditation and Inner Knowing that I was able to go from a sad, scared, little girl who felt wrong in her own skin to fully accepting and supporting of my own authentic expression as a human this lifetime. It is not the work for the light-hearted or easily defeated. It is an arduous, sometimes blissful sometimes wretched, path to freedom.
I owe so much to my teachers Adriana and David. The last five years studying and sitting by them has really helped me to come into myself as a Woman, a leader and a Lover this lifetime.
When I am not teaching, studying, or practicing, I can be found painting or knitting, tending to my balcony garden or dancing wildly in my kitchen for no reason but to celebrate our existence.
Thank you for Being.
XOLF