My Story
My first Yoga class was in my mom's living room with puffy mattress and a baggy t-shirt. I was around 15 or 16 then and my mom invited a teacher to teach us. I then forgot about it until I gained a lot of weight in college and my aunt (who I lived with back then) decided to enroll us into a yoga bootcamp held at a high school gym.
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After the sessions ended, I had forgotten about yoga again until a few years later and I was in stressful long-hours corporate work. I wanted something to manage my stress and I started taking yoga classes again.
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One of those classes was a free summer morning yoga at the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles, and that session became one of the most memorable moments I had in my Yoga journey. I remembered going into a tree pose in the middle of the class and I saw in the distance a school of dolphins passing by and in that moment, I got a taste of a quiet calmness that I was seeking.
How Meditation Saved My Life
Soon after the summer yoga and the dolphins, I stopped doing Yoga because work was demanding a lot of my life. Not long after, all the hours I put in a field that I didn't like finally pushed me towards depression.
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Looking back, the depression became a blessings in disguise. It became the beginning of a complete life change. I moved out of LA and decided to enroll in a dance school in Singapore because at that moment, that was my biggest regret: not ever attempting a serious pursue of dance when I was younger.
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However, a couple years into it and triggered by a major heartbreak, I realized that I had never really healed my depression and I simply pushed it aside. I got into a second episode of serious depression.
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At that moment, the Universe sent angels in the form of random friends that started telling me to try meditation to help my situation. One day, I found a free meetup group for meditation held at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. I thought it was the perfect set up to try meditation.
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So, one Saturday in January 2013, I met Gladys, who introduced me into meditation and Rebirthing Breathwork. In the first session of the breathwork, I realized how I never really loved myself and I had to learn to do that if I want to really get well.
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With that realization, began years of shifting the way I perceive myself and the world and I began the journey of self-discovery, healing and finding balance.
Coming back to Yoga
Meditation became my first love in tools that I use to find balance. But I found that it was missing the physical and movement aspects because I believe that there's so much we can learn about ourselves from our body and that the mind is never separate from the body. So, in 2016, I decided to take a Yoga Teacher Training.
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The decision to do that was not an easy one. By this time, the social media was already peppered with images of people in perfect bodies doing acrobatics acts as the image of Yoga. And that was the furthest from what I wanted out of Yoga.
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I wanted something more personal because if meditation is a part of it, then I was seeking for a Yoga that would helped me understand myself better. Again, Universe delivered and I found the teacher training at Kirana Yoga School that gave me all that I sought for.
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Since then, I studied with teachers like Deera Dewi in Indonesia, and international teachers like Cristi Christensen. I also got an internship with Shiva Rea. And I continue to gravitate towards teachers that see Yoga not just as asanas, but as a holistic practice.