A couple of years ago, I was in the middle of the decision to make a huge change from working full time as a practicing attorney with a couple of yoga classes per week, to teaching as much yoga as possible. I’ll talk more about that later, but this post is about my desire to treat my yoga business like a business–to make it into something adaptable and identifiable as something other than my actual Self. Like any human, I need to work on my Self without necessarily also working on my business, so creating that boundary was important to me.

Without an attachment to any one teaching space, I would be bringing “my” yoga to multiple different kinds of spaces, including private clients’ homes, dedicated studios, gyms, and a farmer’s market stall. I wanted to create some structure, some inspiration, some roots, for the yoga I would be putting out there. Eventually, I came up with Sassafras Yoga because of the Sassafras tree, native to my Mississippi. It’s a small, more brushy tree that tends to live at the edges of woods and ditches. It grows three distinct types of leaf shapes on one plant, and that represents to me the unity of mind/body/spirit. I always want that unity to be at the center of the yoga I practice, and the yoga I teach. Sassafras is very hardy and tough, and its root can be made into a tea that may have medicinal properties. It turns absolutely beautiful colors in the fall, which I just like. It’s also very fun to say.

My brainstorming and doodling came up with an image–an alchemist’s symbol for the element copper–with the three types of sassafras leaves hanging on it. I commissioned this copper wall hanging from June Caldwell Art, to put together this idea of what I want to bring to my yoga teaching.

Sassafras Yoga, in short, is what you get in a class or workshop with me. It is Mississippi rooted, you find it kind of everywhere. It is strong and healing. It is concerned with bringing your mind/body/spirit together. To each class, I try to bring simple mindfulness exercises to a basic pranayama (breath), asana (posture/movement), and meditation practice. Mindfulness exercises might be a simple invitation to focus on the breath, an exercise based in cognitive and/or behavior psychology, an ancient metaphor or parable, or a quote to focus on during yoga practice. Always, the goal is to help you relate to yourself any little bit better, to make your body feel any little bit better, and to remind you that your mind and spirit matter, and deserve care.

A note of gratitude: I wouldn’t have a yoga to call my own if it were not for the many teachers I have had over the years–in yoga, in literature, in philosophy, in art, in music–and as I describe what I think of as “my” yoga, it feels ridiculous. I didn’t invent yoga, so what do I even have to talk about? (This is called minimizing, one of my common cognitive distortions, which we’ll get to. Later.) But the thing I now remind myself is, each time I come to the mat, I invent that yoga practice, right there, in that moment. I invent that process of steadying my breath, of observing my mind, of strengthening and stretching my body. And I wouldn’t have these moments now if other teachers before had not shared, if they had said “I didn’t invent yoga, so what could I possibly have to offer?” So recognizing that I often tell myself distorting, minimizing things, I offer what I have, knowing that I have received powerful insights from simple offerings. I think of “my” yoga as a twig of outgrowth from a tree of human knowledge that stretches back over millennia. The yoga that will mean the most to you, of course, is the yoga you actually DO. I encourage you to look around your community for a class, and find out what your local yoga teachers have to offer.