My Yogi Becoming

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks and I can’t really express what is happening but it feels right and important and divinely guided.

This week has been all about me and my business partner Banesa Tseki starting to compose our Yoga Teaching Program for The Nest Space and it’s made me reflect on my entire yoga journey so far.

My yoga journey began as a 6/7year old girl doing yoga in a small upstairs loft at a gym center with my mom in the 1990’s in Zimbabwe. I can’t remember exactly what happened in those classes but I do remember the peace and calm I felt in Shavasana at the end of the classes and the joy I felt in being able to spend time with my mom in this way

School life took priority from that point on-wards and I only returned to yoga again as a stressed out medical student in UCT. I practiced for roughly three years as a student and then in my final year of medicine decided to concurrently become a 200hr yoga teacher with a studio that used to be called Air yoga in Cape Town.

Unfortunately as a newly qualified doctor and yoga teacher, I had no time to really teach a regular class and so I started off slowly teaching every second Sunday when I wasn’t on call at a Jo-burg based studio called Living Yoga. I worked as a doctor for just under 2 years before deciding that I needed a change. While I loved medicine, I felt I wasn’t able to adequately serve my patients in the public health care system given the heavy burden of disease in the sector and the limited staff numbers. My soul was craving to teach more yoga and connect more deeply to my spirituality and so I decided to try my hand at servings as an eHealth business consultant at subsidiary company of Telkom called BCX – working on innovative projects to make health care more accessible to under served communities.

A stable 9-5pm job felt like heaven after medicine and I began using my evenings and weekends to teach yoga to private clients and at yoga studios and thereafter decided to concurrently do my 500hr YTT at Shakti Yoga Academy to deepen both my practice and my teaching offerings.

As my practice deepened, I began to realize that throughout my yoga journey I had always been either a student or a teacher of colour trying to navigate my spirituality in what felt to me as a homogeneous white space. This is what led to my dream of opening up an inclusive exclusively BIPOC yoga studio in an attempt to create the safe space I knew I was craving.

I started fleshing out this dream while I was working in corporate and in August 2018 The Nest Space was born. I worked part time as a preschool teacher for 1,5 years to help with the bills while working on the studio in the afternoons and over weekends and soon found an incredible business partner who felt like my twin flame after dreaming about that happening for about 6months.

Fast forward by 2 years: The Nest Space has expanded into a successful holistic wellness center with a vegan eatery and zero-waste grocer and our space is run exclusively by womxn of colour and all of our shop suppliers are small businesses owned by remarkable womxn. As a yoga teacher I now teach at retreats, events and corporate wellness days and have carefully moulded my brand into one that celebrates inclusion, accessibility and healing when it comes to yoga and meditation.

While I am so proud of where we (as The Nest Space) and I (as an individual) have come, the dreaming continues!

The Nest Space is now embarking on running the first fully BIPOC run teacher training in South Africa and because of all the hard work I have poured into my teaching I am qualified to be the lead trainer on our teacher training!

Our teacher training is going to be innovative and specific to the needs of everyone who feels like they want to immerse themselves in some way into the healing and wellness world, while (of-course) taking place in a safe and homey inclusive space.

We are going to be announcing the details for our training soon but for now I just can’t express how incredible it is to see my yoga journey morph and grow in front of my eyes. Its things like this that make me truly believe in magic.

Here’s a graphic of my yoga journey so far: