The Heart of Yoga

My body has started failing me.

Every day feels like I’m fighting a losing battle with the vessel that provides my soul with Earth-bound life.

Slowly (but very, very surely) it feels like life is slipping from me.

Before you worry too much, I will be okay.

I was born with a Congenital Heart Defect and while my heart is definitely working overtime, making my body perpetually exhausted and my nail beds freakishly blue, it is temporary—a “simple” Open Heart Surgery will “cure” all that ails this 26-year-old.

The scars that cover my chest provide me with a reassurance that I can face this battle head on because I have done it before.

Until then, though, I feel a strange sense that I’m being brought closer and closer to the brink of non-existence. Closer than many people will ever experience in their lives.

Yikes! Sorry, David is right, that was deep.

Enough on my existential crisis, back to the yoga!

Yes, yoga. Glorious, challenging, life-affirming yoga.

I found it roughly five years ago when I was lost.

I needed something to ground me, to keep me sane, to stop my thoughts from racing and my head from spinning.

Strangely, in the depths of our despair we go looking for a way out, something to end the pain and suffering and put an end to heartache when instead, running away is not the cure, only the bandaid. The real way out is in fact, looking in.

Looking in allows us to consider the roots of our problems, the causes of our suffering.

And it’s really fucking uncomfortable.

Yeah, “oh wow” is the typical reaction many people have when they start tackling their depression and anxiety head-on via the practice of yoga. Myself included.

Looking in tends to be accompanied by the realisation that only you can control your thoughts and feelings and my god is that confronting.

It’s not an original thought by any stretch of the imagination, considering yoga has been around for a casual 5,000 years or so.

Nope, I’m definitely not the first person to turn to yoga. But for the first time in a long time I had ignited a passion within myself that I forgot I could feel.

At first it was mostly about the physical practice—moving the body, gaining strength, becoming flexible—but over time it has become much more about the mind.

Even more so now that my body has started failing me.

In March 2020 my passion for yoga was solidified in a yoga teacher training program.

The training blew my mind and changed the way I looked at the world. With a fire lit in my belly and in my soul, I returned to Australia ready to change people’s lives. I wanted to open their minds and their hearts to the glories of this inward adventure.

The universe had other plans, though. Her plans came in the form of a highly contagious virus that shut down the world and shut down any opportunity I had to teach.

My soul had been cracked open only to be left open with no way to be put back together.

So, after a year of deepening my own practice, while progressively getting sicker, I began to think…

What if I could bring my yoga knowledge, skills and passion to the Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) community?

The thing with chronic illnesses like CHD is that they’re invisible and they’re life long. You never know if you’re passing someone on the street with the same condition as you.

It can feel like a lonely existence, like no one else ever knows what you’re going through.

Many of us never find a community in sporting organisations because vigorous exercise is simply impossible. Heck, right now I stop about three times on a simple walk around the block!

All this to say, my dream is to create a space where the CHD community can come together and find gentle exercise in the form of yoga.

It will be a space where people like me, who struggle to get moving and struggle to find understanding in conventional sporting organisations and yoga studios, can move in a way that feels open and supported.

So often yoga teachers don’t provide options to make the practice easier, especially when you’re young and “fit-looking” like I am. I want to change that. I want to take yoga out of the ridiculously heated yoga studios and into our own homes where it is safe to move (and not move if that is what is needed.)

My Yoga With Heart Membership will be more than just a catalogue of accessible yoga classes and weekly new releases, it will also be a community that meets once or twice a month (maybe even once a week?) to discuss the struggles of our heart conditions, the impending surgeries we all face and a place to feel understood and supported.

I also envision a podcast that brings together a community of womxn heart warriors. Our CHD’s affect every aspect of our lives and I want to create a place where we discuss EVERYTHING in life from relationships to spirituality to food to money—all with a heart warrior twist. It’s like having a casual conversation with your girlfriends over a cheeky glass of wine.

(Or a whole bottle, because holy cow, there’s a lot to unpack)

This Yoga With Heart membership is for the 1 in 100.

It is for the Heart Warriors who want to exercise without the anxiety of studios that don’t understand their unique conditions and who crave a community that supports them.

I know it is niche, but it is so, so needed.

It is the community I wish I’d had in my formative years when it felt like the world and my own body were against me.

And it is the community I need right now, but cannot find.