Where I have come from, where I am going...

I was born in Seoul, South Korea.  When I was six-months-old, I was adopted and spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in a small town in rural central Missouri.  I think I was the only Asian child within a 100-mile radius of my home.  From as far back as I can remember I fielded questions such as “Where are you from?” or “Do you speak Chinese?” or even “Why didn’t your real parents want you?”  I knew that I was different but in my struggle to fit in and “be like everyone else,” I rarely acknowledged that difference.

Small-town dynamics are interesting.  To some, small towns offer a close-knit, everyone-knows-everyone community; to others, that same closeness operates as a judgmental eye continually cast upon individuals within that community; and still to others, it is both.  So growing up, I had endless ambitions but limited confidence.

Self-criticism is a difficult thing to escape and pure self-acceptance is even harder to achieve.  Or at least sometimes it feels that way.  But eventually we learn that the self-criticism – the self- judgment we feel – is simply a barrier to self-acceptance.  It took me many years to learn that.  I had to learn to believe in myself and to trust myself.  I had to find things about myself that I, alone, genuinely liked; and I had to be okay with genuinely liking something about myself.   I had to learn to not be jealous of what others had but to be grateful for the things that I already possessed, none of which were worldly.  So I did learn each of these lessons at various stages in my life.  It took nearly thirty years but, with the help of some unlikely coaches and good friends, I had finally achieved self-acceptance.   While I underwent a tremendous amount of personal growth during graduate school, I honestly believe that because I experienced subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) prejudices growing up in a small town, it became second nature for me to look beyond other people’s appearances and try to truly connect with the person inside.

I was living in Columbia, Missouri when I signed up for my Beginner's Yoga class.  I walked into Alley Cat Yoga Studio in September of 2005 and immediately experienced a peace that, to this day, is difficult to describe.  The owner, Ken McRae, introduced himself to me, talked a little bit about yoga, and signed me up for the class.  While the entire process could not have taken more than twenty-minutes, it seemed as though a radiant spark had ignited within me.  I felt joy.

Although I didn’t have a consistent practice during graduate school, I was always able to experience that same inner peace and radiant joy whenever I returned to the mat.  It seems like such a natural state and yet, for years, I was hardly even aware it existed.  But once I realized it was there?  Not only did I want to harness it for myself, I wanted to share it with others.  It is that powerful.

When I moved to New York in June 2009, I returned to yoga after three years of graduate school.  This time I wanted yoga to have a larger presence in my life.  I found a hot yoga studio that I love (EStudio in Latham) and began to practice there as often as I could.  Now, as I begin the journey to (and through) my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program at Kripalu, I invite you to join me.

namaste,

angel