From doing, going, moving — to moving into stillness.

I don't share this to overshare. I share it because this is how I found the eye of the storm, that calm center even when life won't slow down, and I want you to find yours too.

I didn't understand what happened in that room. For my birthday in 2008, a friend took me to my first yoga class. I went in expecting stretching and maybe a workout. Instead, I found stillness, a quiet connection to myself I didn't have words for. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I just felt good. The noise had faded.

I didn't know it then, but I'd gotten a taste of inner peace. Not the deep, unshakable kind that holds steady even when life doesn't slow down. I hadn't found that yet. This was simpler: just a break from it. But it was enough. Something in me recognized exactly what I'd been missing. About a year in, a quiet inner voice told me, "Take notes. You're going to teach this one day."

There's a reason that one class stuck with me the way it did. It would take me years to understand why it felt like coming up for air. But looking back, I can see it now: I'd spent my whole life doing, going, moving. That first class was the beginning of learning how to move into stillness instead of just running from it, and how to feel comfortable in the eye of the storm.

Doing everything right, but never feeling enough

I learned to parent myself early. My parents came from a generation where survival superseded parenting, and there were real gaps, real neglect, in my childhood that shaped me. I had to figure a lot of things out on my own, starting around age twelve. I was anxious. I wasn't one of those kids who felt comfortable in her own skin, confident, sure of what she wanted or what she was good at. I was just trying to survive with whatever I had.

What I did have was drive. My parents only attended elementary school in the Greek village they grew up in. I don't come from a family of college graduates, and my sister was the only one who finished high school. But I wanted more for myself, and I chased it hard, all the way to Georgetown, with no road map and no one to show me how to get there.

When it came time to choose a career, I picked accounting. It was safe. I was genuinely good at it. I knew I'd always have a job. If I'm honest, fear and a lack of support steered me away from anything more creative. I became a CPA. I got married and had two beautiful children.

"Wow, I have a beautiful life. I am so lucky."

I remember sitting on the floor one afternoon with my three-year-old and my three-month-old, my husband in the kitchen cooking something delicious, thinking that very thought. And I meant it, completely. But even inside that same moment, something else was quietly true too: I still didn't fully know how to be present in it, to really let it in. Inside, I still didn't know how to just be and exist as I was. How to love Maro simply for being Maro, with no accomplishment required.

When slowing down brings up anxiety

For years, yoga stayed something I turned to on the side while I raised my children and built a software company with my husband. My accounting background turned out to be more useful there than I ever expected.

But not everything from that time was easy. Being present with my own kids brought up an anxiety I didn't see coming. Nobody had sat with me like that as a child, played with me, asked how I was. I hadn't been parented that way, so I had no model for it, and being close with my own children stirred up more than I expected.

Somewhere in those years, I started noticing real changes in myself, even if I couldn't have told you exactly how yoga was doing it. Slowly, my practice taught me how to hold that anxious girl inside me, and from there, how to actually create the space my kids needed. I started catching my own unhelpful thoughts. That slowing down, that small gap between a thought and my reaction to it, was the real thing that brought me back to myself, with my kids, and with my husband too. I didn't have language for it yet. I just knew I liked who I was becoming.

Breaking my body to fit the pose

My physical practice had taken a hard turn along the way, though. Living with undiagnosed hypermobility, I kept pushing my body into rigid, hyper-flexible practices like Ashtanga, until I was left with severe knee and low back pain for over a year. Part of what was going on, it turned out, was gluteal amnesia: glutes so disengaged that other muscles were picking up the slack.

It took a physical therapist, not another hard pose, to finally guide me toward weightlifting and rebuild real stability and strength. As hard as that time was, it deepened the same lesson I'd already started learning off the mat: yoga was never about the poses, or how far I could fold myself into a shape.

That shift also clarified something else: being hypermobile, I didn't need to go further. I needed to come home to my own body, with kind and curious eyes instead of judgment.

The trap of turning yoga into a workout

I began teacher training in 2017 and graduated in 2018, ready to offer a middle path I wish I'd had all along. I still lift heavy, do pull-ups, squats, deadlifts in my garage, and that's my workout, the place I get to push myself and compete with no one but me.

But on the mat, I'm after something else entirely. The moment yoga turns hard or athletic, I've noticed the goal quietly shifts. It becomes less about observing, more about nailing the pose or chasing how it's supposed to look. That's why my practice is gentle. Not because strength doesn't matter to me. It clearly does. But gentle is what keeps the goal honest: a space to explore the body without forcing or breaking it, to feel whatever's actually there instead of chasing a shape.

The two practices end up talking to each other anyway. My mat time tells me what to protect before I load a barbell. It's also why you'll almost always find a bridge flow somewhere in my classes, still one of the simplest ways I know to wake up the glutes. And honestly, being strong is part of what helps me sit still and comfortable when I meditate.

In 2022, we sold the software business, and for the first time, I could put my full attention into growing what I'd already started: teaching, sharing this practice, building something real out of it.

What yoga really is

In classical yoga, movement and breath were never the destination. They're preparation. Movement releases what the body's been holding, and breath calms the nervous system underneath it. Then we can focus our attention and become the observers of the activities of the mind. That's where real practice begins: not silencing the mind, but tending it, pulling weeds, planting seeds, becoming gardeners of our own minds, as my teacher says. Because yoga is an ongoing practice of self-regulation. The meditations I teach (breath awareness, body scan, and loving-kindness), come from Buddhist mindfulness traditions that share this same root: developing one-pointed concentration and becoming aware.

Every class I teach follows that same path: we move, we breathe, and we sit in stillness and become the observers so that we can finally see clearly.

I'm not going to tell you I arrived somewhere and I'm done. I'm still practicing, still learning. But today I can observe my own thoughts without being pulled into the storm, even when life doesn't slow down. That's the deep kind of peace I didn't have back in 2008. I'm still building it, but I finally know what it feels like from the inside.

I'm kinder to myself than I ever knew how to be. I've made peace with my parents, and with the parts of my childhood I once carried as weight. I feel more whole and at home in my own skin.

Finding your own path to peace

That's what this practice actually offers: permission, softness, and a kind of focus and awareness that doesn't come from forcing or straining, but from steady, consistent, and patient effort.

I'm not here to tell you how to take care of yourself. I don't know your path. But I can hold space while you find yours, the same space that gave me mine. I teach because I love it, plain and simple. Getting to create something that gives someone a genuinely beautiful, calming experience? That's the whole reason I show up. That's why I offer classes online: so wherever you are, whatever kind of day you're having, you don't have to find this alone either.

Come as you are. Move, breathe and sit with me. Let's come back to the present moment together.

That taste of peace I found back in 2008? It's still here, waiting for you too.

A little more about me: When I'm not teaching, practicing, or cleaning up a messy kitchen because we cook a lot, honestly, you'll find me hiking with my family, sitting at the piano (which I proudly started learning at 38), enjoying a cup of tea while swooning over a sunset, or deadlifting in my garage.