Focused on Growth
Greetings Friends and Followers! Welcome to 2022! No matter where you are on your journey, I hope you’re finding optimism, joy, and good health so far this year. I love fresh starts and am excited about the new intentions and goals I’ve set. The first month of the year always feels like a clean break right into a slower, quieter time to contemplate, reset, or rebuild.
January 6 marked 4 years ago that I began my yoga teacher training at the Yoga Center for Healthy Living in Brighton, MI. That was a very malleable time in my life—the beginning of many course changes. I still source wisdom regularly through the friendship of my Yoga Mother, swap resources with my teacher training sisters, keep in touch with my Michigan Acroyoga community (which brought me to that training ground), and bond with the friends I made in Detroit just after graduation. I’m blessed with these connections and return as often as I can to that third space.
Since then I’ve had the honor of guiding students of various ages, abilities, and experiences through both in-person and online yoga and meditation classes, taught Montessori students about mindfulness and yoga, continued teaching a handful of cooking classes, attended continuing ed. courses in trauma-informed yoga, and continued my private food preservation work. I’m grateful for variety in my professional life.
I’ve curated the life I want and pared away the unnecessary. Gratitude for the quality of life I have the privilege of choosing. I’m grateful for balance between parenting, co-parenting, work, social life, extracurricular activities, taking care of my mental and physical health, travel, creating a healthy/organized home, maintaining a personal yoga/meditation practice, and finding discipline in my other movement practices.
And after 4 years of teaching yoga I felt moved to development further. I began my LLC in 2014 as The Mindful Palate when I was just teaching cooking/food preservation classes. After adding yoga, it evolved into MP (Mindful Palate, Movement Practitioner, Milwaukee Proud), which eventually morphed into the current EatMoveMKE as I desired a more concise name and focus.
On January 10, I started my next chapter into Health Coach training with a 1-year online program through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition (IIN), which leads me to certification as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach. My original college studies in Food and Nutrition in Business, followed by 2 years of Culinary Arts training, my 200-hr Yoga training and other certifications, and my ongoing personal work on mental health and spirituality have positioned me well for this next step. I’m devouring the coursework with pleasure, finding exciting ways to take study breaks, and feeling highly organized.
Two of IIN’s Core Concepts that I’m most excited to explore are “Bio-Individuality”—the idea that no one eating plan or lifestyle works across the board and we may each need different things as we age. And “Primary Foods” (the nourishment that’s NOT on our plates)—Spirituality, Relationships, Career, and Physical Activity. These are expanded in the Circle of Life (CoL) which includes Spirituality, Creativity, Finances, Career, Education, Health, Physical Activity, Home Cooking, Home Environment, Relationships, Social Life, and Joy. I’m grateful to feel alignment there and see lots of space to grow. I will be my first client.
As a yoga teacher, I’ve had the opportunity to use my gifts of empathy, compassion, patience, and nonjudgment to coax students towards finding what works for them. As a health coaches I’ll have the opportunity to be a valuable liaison between medical practitioners and patients in today’s world of “get ‘em in, get ‘em out” corporate healthcare. I look forward to working with clients to listen not prescribe, guide not instruct, encourage not demand, support not fix, and inspire not dictate. I’m excited to see where my studies will take me. I’ve got ideas for the focus on my practice and perhaps I’ll have the honor of working with some of you one day. Going forward I intend to keep living and teaching yoga and making the most of this wild and precious life we’re given. Peaceful new year to you all. Namaste.
