Chapter 01
Come in. Take your shoes off.
The first time I walked into a yoga studio I was sixteen. It was a hundred degrees outside. My dad had signed me up for the summer because the high school football coach said it might help my kicks travel a little farther. I did not want to be there.
Something happened in that first hour. I do not have a clean way to say it. Something opened, in my hips and somewhere quieter than that, and I came back the next week, and the next, and the practice has been with me ever since.
Football brought me to LSU. For a long time I thought discipline meant grinding harder, wanting it more, refusing to stop. That worked for a while. Most things do, for a while.
Chapter 02
I built it the long way.
Football taught me what my body could do when I asked it honestly. What it taught me first, though, was that performance lives almost entirely in the place between your ears. The gym only finishes the sentence the mind has already started.
Strength training gave me a container. Yoga gave me something to put inside it. The gym builds the engine. The mat figures out where you are going.
Chapter 03
And then I drifted.
When college ended, the schedule that had held me together since I was a kid simply stopped existing.
I stopped practicing.
I told myself I would pick it back up once things settled. They did not settle.
A lot of things went with the practice. Sleep. Patience. The version of me I liked best.
For a stretch I believed I had aged out of growth. That whoever I was going to be, I had already been.
That was not true. It just took me a few quiet years to find out.
Chapter 04
The way back was a slow one.
I walked into Gaia Flow in Dallas on a Wednesday. By Friday I had signed up for their two hundred hour teacher training. I was not planning on teaching anyone. I needed someone to teach me again.
What I found there was not a workout. It was a conversation with my body that I had stopped having. Slower than the gym. Harder than I expected. And honest in a way that nothing else in my life was being honest with me.
Meditation followed. Then sound. The bowls, the breath, the quiet between the notes. The practice kept widening, and so did I.
Chapter 05
Now I keep the door open for you.
I teach the way I practice. Steady. Honest. A little stubborn. There is no shortcut I can sell you. There is only a door I can hold open while you decide whether to walk through it.
