My Journey To Become A Face Yoga Teacher
With the Face Yoga Teacher Training Summer Camp starting on June 21st, I wanted to share the background of how I came into being a face yoga teacher. What started as a journey to reconnect with me and save my rapidly aging face after a year of tragic circumstances, turned into the biggest gift I could give myself and endeavor to bring to the world. Natural beauty had always been a passion, and botox was never an option… but when tragedy hit, I didn’t know if there could be another way through. If you are interested in becoming a face yoga teacher, you can find out more here or via the link below:
It was 2015, and my son had been sick for a year with cancer and was hospitalized constantly. I was juggling two other children, a breaking down marriage, and an ill son who needed his mother by his side to pull him through. It was the hardest year in my life and along with my family, I too was suffering.
Through the end of 2015, I was noticing how dramatically my face was changing, half of my face was beginning to droop and parts of my eyelids were becoming frozen in the position of stress. My face was traumatized. I realized that this was not aging at all, it had to be something else because people don't age 10 years in two months and, it was as if that was what I was experiencing.
Before I started face yoga, and now. A journey of healing the my face with a commitment to daily practice.
So I started to search for something which could help my face, help to make me feel like me again, and help me to simply - look happy. I knew that working with botox, fillers, and injections was not an option for me, I had always been passionate about the natural path - so I researched and followed what I could to find a solution to my facial problems.
At the time, I felt like I couldn’t recognize my face, and friends who saw me through this time felt the same. The comments were always the same; “are you ok? You look so tired?” I stumbled upon face yoga exercises on YouTube, it was all very accidental, and I just started doing these exercises straight from YouTube.
The exercises were creating a shift, some were working well, and some weren’t. I would save the exercises I liked, repeating them and marking each that I found had a potent experience for my face or others that would make me feel more awake, alive, and connected. I found some face exercises even started to make me feel stronger. It was through this time I was having, almost an awakening we could get it.
The exercises were doing something within my system, they were working on my mental, spiritual, and physical bodies. The awakening deepened and not only did my face start looking better, but I was also starting to feel like ‘me’ again.
I decided to take my new experiences with face yoga to the next level and took on a Facial Constructed Training Course. Now I was finding when I was running into friends, the comments were different; “what are you doing? You look so happy!”
And this was signifying a turning point in my life, it was a very big change for me to go from this very troubled phase into a happy, more connected phase even whilst navigating the hardships with my family.
It was like I was able to rediscover myself again, looking quite youthful and like someone who enjoyed life, which I do but was finding hard too.
So I felt that that was a big part of face yoga, it help me to connect with the person I knew as me.
And so I continued to study and take on more education around face yoga & science, which I still pursue and push myself to continue my studies today. The face - you know I am a bit obsessed with it! It’s like a book that can never be finished... There is always a new page to discover.
It does not just face yoga that fascinates me, I have taken many courses that cover different elements of face care. I have completed a Holistic Skin Therapy Course, Gua Sha courses, Cosmetic Needling, and other smaller courses - all to broaden my knowledge and expand the teachings from these into Face Yoga.
Every course further fuelled my fascination with the face, and I noticed I was starting to develop my style because I realized that as the exercises were great that I had learned in my teacher training there was still an aspect missing.
So then I took everything I had acquired to the next level, which we now know as my unique style of face yoga, which is a blend of exercising, facial stretching, and fascia work, all blended into traditional and newly created face yoga exercises.
I believe that this combination makes a very holistic, well-rounded approach to the face. Through this mixture of processes, we are not only strengthening, but we're also stretching & releasing tension locked in the face. My method gives you the tools to release these very deep-rooted tensions which are building up from your stress and emotionally challenging times. This is a fantastic tool for being the turning point and changes in redirecting this build-up back into your natural beauty.
As I was deepening my training and love for face yoga, I had my next epiphany moment, realizing that as I was about to have my fourth child, there was no way I was going to be able to go back to normal work, and it was then I decided to become a Face Yoga instructor.
Before this, I had a successful career as a PR manager in a thriving agency culture, but I just knew that with the children working 8-9 hours was just not an option for me.
So it was now that I was determined to create something, a business for myself that would feel and be meaningful, that could offer something positive to other people, and that I could work closely with other people.
I needed to be present with my family too, be able to manage my own time and ensure I could manage taking my son to all his doctor's appointments, stay home with my newborn and just having this very (very) busy life, a domestic life at home with the children. It meant that I could be with the ebbs and flow of the unreliability of having four children, you know, there's always one who is sick, someone needs to see the dentist or something - it meant I could just be there and not have to worry about the pressures of juggling a full-time job at the same time.
And I realized that I was not going to find a full-time job that would work with the realities of motherhood. I had to create that job.
So realizing just that I would have to dig deep into myself, to just take this path on and, and also learn as I went, how I wanted, to have my work life as a necessity to support my family and as a reality to manage it.
I kept asking myself, like - what was this job going to look like?
Because I realized that there were so many pitfalls for myself that I would create for myself.
You know, I was a very hard worker before I, I was really like, I wanted to do everything well perfectly.
I wanted to be good at what I did.
And the thing was that during these, these years when my son was sick, my brain changed.
I had PTSD.
And so my memory was not the same afterward.
I could not physically also take on the type of workload which I did before.
But what I noticed then was that I was good at teaching.
I was good at connecting with people.
And it didn't take this kind of like, it didn't take a toll on my brain or my energy.
So I was able to do that and just go into the practice, really enjoying the practice every day
And, as I built myself up, my practice, training, and teaching, I also built the business up at the same time because my practice was my business and that's what I found so powerful and so beautiful because I would just get stronger as my business was growing, I would just be more focused, more capable and kind of reinventing who I wanted to be along the way.
And so I also decided to do the teacher training because I wanted to share all these tools with other women. I thought, if I can empower myself - I could empower others with what I have learned.
So not only have I been given the gift of seeing women grow and transform with this practice, but they have been able to transform their faces, to transforming their relationships with their faces, and also transform their life. The women would find very often getting more energy, more self-love, and self-confidence which is then reflected by many people.
It's like, these can be such tiny changes, such small things but really, you find after a year or two doing a business that you love you can see the shift and people start to notice.
Like, wow, I'm, I'm stepping up for myself here with the commitment to my business and goals.
I'm doing something I used to be afraid of!
For example, I'm not afraid to show myself so openly and vulnerable on social media anymore, and honestly, I’ve gotten used to it. All those things that seemed funny and foreign are now just natural everyday occurrences I don’t think twice about.
If I ask myself, what has the new path done to my own life?
Okay. Do you want to know?
So it's basically, it's done everything to my own life.
I was on a path of being unemployed having no, you know, no work, and being in a position that I was not able to take on work or work for someone else.
I was not able to work for like eight hours, not even five hours a day.
So what this did was that it allowed me to create a business where I would thrive so I could work when I had the time when I had the energy, which made a world of a difference.
And it also allowed me to financially become completely self-sufficient.
And when I had a divorce from the father of my 3 children, or split up with my youngest child's father and was then a single mom of four kids, I could still afford the house and pay for their school fees and all these things that I had just never thought possible for me.
So this business, has done everything for me, and it still does, it still keeps on just developing, growing, and doing new things all the time.
And it's super exciting.
