Because Yoga Is Meant for Every Body

I did not begin yoga as a young, flexible, confident person.

I found yoga in my forties while living with multiple health challenges. I was insecure, deeply self-conscious, and unsure whether my body belonged in a yoga studio. I could not do many of the poses I saw others doing, and I often carried a quiet sense of shame about everything my body could not do.

Still, something within me kept returning to the practice.

Yoga gave me more than movement. It gave me moments of peace. It helped me breathe more deeply, listen to my body, and begin rebuilding a connection with myself. Through gentle yoga, chair yoga, yin yoga, meditation, and spiritual practice, I began to understand that yoga was not about performing the most advanced posture. It was about learning to be present in the body I had.

After practicing at one studio for four years, I gathered the courage to apply for its yoga teacher training program. I knew I could not do every pose, but I also knew I loved the spiritual teachings of yoga. I wanted to learn how to share the gentle, accessible practices that had helped me.

I was denied admission.

I was told I was too sick to become a yoga teacher. I cried. I felt humiliated, defeated, and convinced that perhaps they were right. For a few hours, I allowed myself to believe that yoga teaching was only for younger, healthier, more flexible people.

Then something inside me changed. Instead of giving up, I went online and began searching for another path. That search led me to White Crow Yoga in Nashville and to its owner, Mary Irby.

When I spoke with Mary, she told me about the lineage she taught: Thirumoolar’s Ashtanga Therapeutic Yoga. She explained that this approach to yoga was therapeutic, inclusive, spiritual, and created to help people understand their own bodies. It was not about forcing every person into the same pose. It was about adapting the practice to meet the individual.

It was a tradition that recognized yoga as a path of healing, self-awareness, breath, meditation, spiritual connection, and compassionate service.

For the first time, I felt that there might be a place for me. I enrolled in the in-person intensive training and drove two hours to Nashville and two hours home after working nine-hour days as a college instructor. Because I was teaching full time, I completed the intensive program during my summer break.

I cried almost every day that summer. The training challenged me physically, emotionally, spiritually, and academically. It was one of the hardest things I had ever chosen to do, but it was also one of the most meaningful and fulfilling.

At the beginning of the training, I still worried that I would never be a “real” yoga teacher. I could not do headstands. I could not move like the younger women around me. I could not make my body perform every pose in the way it was traditionally pictured.

By the end of the training, I understood something that changed my life:

The world does not need every yoga teacher to look, move, teach, or practice the same way.

The world needs teachers who represent different bodies, ages, abilities, experiences, and life journeys.

It needs teachers who understand what it feels like to be afraid to enter a yoga studio.

It needs teachers who know how to offer a chair, a bed, a wall, a prop, a pause, or a different way of practicing.

It needs teachers who can look at a student and say, “You belong here.”

That realization became the seed of Rose Temple Yoga School.