Sasha’s Yoga Journey
Yoga came into my life around 15 years old when I found a Geri Halliwell DVD on my mum’s shelf. Growing up in the 80/90’s, I loved an aerobics workout and not really understanding the true essence of Yoga at that time, I started practising Yoga mainly for fitness. My childhood was turbulent and I grew up in a chaotic environment and although I couldn’t quite find the words and understanding, I could feel that Yoga was doing something more than just exercise. This kept pulling back to the mat.
Around the same time, I found a free book in a teenage magazine about a girl who went to India and stayed in an ashram. I have always been a dreamer, a reader and particularly, a lover of words. I started to dream that one day I would go to India and I knew for a long time that this would be a significant part of my journey. Until my 20’s, I mostly self taught from books and DVD’s but I did go to some classes in the gym for a short while. I fell in love with one particular class and I remember hearing the teacher talking afterwards about her training in India. Again, it was another little breadcrumb that would lead the way.
I was 18, when I stepped into my first backpacking world trip and not yet feeling brave enough for India, I went to Thailand, with a stop off in Sri Lanka. It’s funny to think that some 21 years later, Sri Lanka would become my home.
In my early teenage years and into my early twenties, having been in survival mode for most of my life and feeling so much pressure to make something out of myself, I pushed myself way beyond my limits with university, over-working, over-striving and partying far too much. At one point I was going to uni full- time and working over 80 hour weeks, doing multiple jobs and hardly sleeping. Living with a mixture of depression, burnout and an eating disorder, the inevitable happened and one day, something switched and I had a mental breakdown.
The irony is that when I hit rock bottom, despite feeling like I had lost everything, the path forward became so clear and the realignment into Yoga becoming my life started in those moments. Because I had overworked from such a young age, this meant that I was able to buy a flat really young. Amidst the chaos, I agreed on a flat sale and within 4 weeks, I was on a plane to India. The 2008 financial crash arrived within days.
I went to India to begin my first 200hr Yoga teacher training, not because I wanted to become a Yoga teacher, simply because I knew that I would need more than just a one week retreat. I travelled India for a couple of weeks before my training started and I had already began to feel much better. Friends had expressed their concerns about me solo travelling when I was mentally unwell, especially to somewhere like India but I just knew in my heart that it was the right decision. I needed to be pulled out of my environment and for the first time in many years, to have some space to breathe.
Considering I didn’t really know any of my teachers and even Ashtanga that much, I got really lucky with my first teacher training. It was not only transformative but I fell in love with teaching and India become a very special place of healing to me, that regularly calls me back.
I felt really connected to the Sanskrit word ‘Shanti’ that means ‘Peace’ and from here, Shanti Yoga Glasgow was created. I did some teaching on the move but after travelling for 18 months, I returned back to Scotland and began to teach a few classes in the evening alongside working in a restaurant. I worked hard to build my business: handing out leaflets, creating my brand and website and my Yoga classes took off really quickly. Despite having a degree in Spanish and Politics, I never really looked back, the unravelling of my teaching path was a very natural and organic process, once I was on the right path.
As Christmas arrived, I walked out of my restaurant job and found a tiny studio in the Hidden Lane, Finnieston on Glasgow Gumtree listings that fit only 5 mats. From here, I grew studios and a Glasgow community for 11 years and Shanti became a Glasgow institution. I loved the community that we built together, that still continues on now but the reality of having community Yoga studios was an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle for me. It took so much of my life and I sacrificed myself over and over for my business. Again, I found myself in constant burnout and I lived in a lot of fear of competition and losing everything that I had worked so hard to build.
October 2019, I was on my afternoon break from the India retreat that I was running and I was sitting, journalling on the beach, tears running down my face. I was a couple of years in to life-changing inner child therapy, my divorce had been finalised that year and I knew that things needed to change. I could feel within me that significant change was coming, which I thought would be at a personal level, however, I could never have known that it was at a global level. The following January, I had my annual tarot reading and she told that my whole life would change so significantly that I wouldn’t even recognise myself in 2 years. She was right.
March 2020, we all know what happened…the universe gave me what I asked for and within 1 week, sick with COVID, my whole life turned upside down and I made the decision to walk away from my studio premises. As the world turned, my worst fear happened, which turned out to be one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Stuck at home, I was focussed on building my online subscription channel and one of my old students requested that I start Zoom classes as she needed the accountability. From here, I built my online business. Not long after, I started to airbnb my flat. There was nothing holding me to Glasgow full-time anymore so when I saw an opportunity to base myself in Sri Lanka, I moved with ease.
After my first Yoga teacher training in 2008, and overcoming a huge step in my mental health recovery, I came out of my first 200hr feeling like I knew it all. Now I realise that I was just scratching the surface. 16+ years of teaching and over 1200+ hours of training, there has been many lessons and so much growth but the real beauty of Yoga is that it’s a life-long journey that just keeps taking me deeper and deeper into myself. And the deeper you go into yourself and into your inner knowing, the more you just can’t ignore your hearts calling. It has led me to reinvent my business over and over into something that works better for me. Taking so many leaps into the unknown, guided by the heart and as scary as it always is, full of trust in realignment.
2008 in India was the beginning of significant change in my life and the start of me coming back to myself. Not only for me to find so much joy in teaching but also for me, to find more peace within myself.
Image is of one of my first Yoga classes in South America 2009.