Yoga Dreams - Why I Decided to Go to India

I showed up to my first yoga class when I was 16 years old. I can’t remember what got me interested enough at such a young age to pursue it, but I kept showing up every week for more. I think the teacher liked me because I was so young, by far the youngest in her classes. One thing I will always take away from these beginning days are the loving smile and support of my very first yoga teacher, and her wonderfully relaxing savasanas topped off with Bergamot-infused shoulder and neck alignments. That smell is still nostalgic for me today.

I found yoga to be a magical, happy place where anything lingering on my mind would melt away and my body and breath came to life like a well-oiled machine. It was nurturing, honest, luminous. I felt whole.

Over the years, I’ve relocated a few times and explored many yoga studios and teachers. I’ve recently deepened my practice and begun to create my own routines at home, infusing them with meditation and energy practices. For the majority of my yoga-practicing years, I never entertained the idea of becoming a teacher. I never thought about it because subconsciously I didn’t think I could do it. My subconscious self had already decided for me that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, skilled enough, devoted enough. And then things shifted. During my time in Hawai’i, attending the first year of a holistic healing program, many age-old doubts and self-sabotaging tendencies began to expose themselves. Towards the end of that first year was when I decided I needed to pursue this.

Yoga in the Himalayas

Initially, I had been researching yoga teacher training programs in the New England area, as that was where I’d be returning to after my year in Hawai’i. I went to work one day, at a cookie shop in Waikiki, and excitedly told some of my coworkers about this new venture. One of them, in a sarcastic tone, told me I should go to India to study. Little did she know what kind of fire she’d sparked in me. What better place to study yoga, but its birthplace? My eyes got wide, and from that moment on there was no dissuading me. It just felt right.


Honestly, I don’t know very much about the history and theory behind yoga, beyond the basics. I’ve always been one to follow those pounding gut feelings, and this is what has led me to where I am today: one month from departing to India for six weeks of intensive yoga teacher training at Rishikesh, I have no idea what’s coming, but I’m ready to meet it with open arms, open mind and open heart.

By Stephanie Lederman