My Journey of Becoming a Yoga Teacher in New Orleans

Rooted in Movement

This post will detail my journey of becoming a yoga teacher in New Orleans. I’ve had the great pleasure of being an educator for my entire professional career. For the last 15 years, I’ve worked with international students from all over the world who have come to New Orleans to develop their English language skills before beginning an undergraduate or graduate degree program at the university.

So it was no surprise, at least to me, when I became more and more interested in starting a yoga teacher training program a few years after finding yoga again.

Growing up, I was very active and athletic, attending and graduating from an arts high school (New Orleans Center for Creative Arts), where my specialty was dance. Ballet was our foundation, but we also had classes in modern, jazz, tap, flamenco, African, and many more styles of dance. We had guest teachers from Alvin Ailey, Chicago the Musical, Gregory Hines, and Savion Glover. Basically if any famous dancers were in New Orleans performing, we had access to them through the arts high school. It was such an incredible experience that I cherish until this day.

My Start with Yoga in New Orleans

I dabbled in yoga off and on for about 10 years, but could never get interested in it long enough to last. I found it to be slow in comparison to my dance background and the lack of “push” was off-putting to me. Coming from the ballet world where perfection is key, where your body is constantly critiqued (by yourself and your instructors) in order to achieve that perfection, I was looking for that same mentality of perfection in yoga.

A Life-Changing Yoga & Adventure Retreat in Costa Rica

In March 2023, a very good friend of mine invited me on my first yoga and adventure retreat with Bigger Life Adventures to Costa Rica. At the time, I was at the very beginning stages of a separation from my former partners, one of 20 years and the other of 10 years. Depression, loneliness, and sadness had set in pretty hard. I didn’t know who I was without my former partners. I didn’t understand my worth without them. So much of my “happiness” and identity was caught up in being part of my throuple, and now that the relationships were ending, I didn’t understand how I could ever be happy again. I had my doubts about using yoga to help get through a breakup.

And yet, what I discovered on that yoga retreat in Costa Rica is that nothing is permanent and that the Universe is abundant. I didn’t say a lot during that retreat, but I did a TON of journaling, pages upon pages of notes and reflections from our yoga classes and the incredible wisdom from Carrie and Zach. I remember telling my friend, “My goodness, I have so much to say!” referring to all the pages of journaling I was doing daily. And she replied with a laugh, “But you’ve barely uttered a word!”

One of the biggest lessons I remember from that Costa Rica yoga retreat was:

You are not your thoughts.You are so much more than them. 

My thoughts at the time were so negative, so punishing, so damaging. The things I would say to myself I would never dream of saying to another person:

“What is wrong with you? Something has to be wrong with you. You’re not enough. Who will ever love you if they don’t? You can’t do life without them. You don’t know how to do life without them. You’ll never be happy again. You failed.”

Thankfully, that retreat was the beginning of me learning to speak to myself better, to speak to myself the same way I would speak to my kids or friends, without inflicting shame, punishment, or judgement. This also was a catalyst to change my mentality. To understand and know that the Universe is so incredibly abundant. That the Universe wants exactly what I want. To let go of the anxiety and the worry and to trust the process, through the good, the bad, and the ugly. To go through the journey with equanimity towards the positive AND the negative because nothing is permanent. That what’s mine will always be mine. That what’s mine will never miss me. To always move toward love. To trust, trust, trust because everything, ALL of it is necessary for the grand design.

Using Yoga Teacher Training to Heal a Broken Heart

After the retreat to Costa Rica, my partners and I officially separated, but I continued to live in the house with my them and our children, determined to be a “family” for our children. However, the longer I stayed, the less peace I felt; the environment no longer served me. It’s amazing how we will stay in a situation out of familiarity when we know it’s no longer for us. After about a year in that environment, I had become a shell of myself. Trying to be “good” so that they would love me again, not eating and losing weight in what I now recognize was an attempt to control at least something in my life, finding myself in constant states of loneliness, depression, and sadness. I could no longer use the reason of “staying for the kids.” I could not be the person the Universe knew I was destined to be while remaining in that house. I could not love myself and therefore be the mother I wanted to be to my children while in that house. So I found a sliver of courage, not knowing how it was going to all work out, not knowing the outcome, and left my house, my safe space, and my comfort zone.

The voice would get strong with judgement sometimes:

“How could you leave your children? How can you not see your children every day? What kind of mother leaves her children? “

But I stayed the course, trusting that everything would work itself out exactly as it was meant to.

After leaving my house and doing two more yoga and adventure retreats with Bigger Life Adventures, I knew that I wanted to find a way to have yoga in my life more. In the past, I had always made up excuses of why I couldn’t practice more yoga or start a teacher training program. It was always, “There’s not enough time nor money.” And yet here I was, now a single mother on a single income with less time and and even less money. That voice tried to creep in:

“How are you supposed to take care of your kids, pay for the tuition, work a full-time job, go to all the trainings, keep up with your weekly classes, etc.? You’re gonna be exhausted. You won’t have time. You’re gonna struggle. It’s not gonna work.”

I had been watching for yoga teacher training programs for a while and I found Wild Lotus Yoga’s Living Yoga Teacher Training program at a local yoga studio that I had frequented in the past. I was excited and nervous as some of my fears and deeply rooted insecurities came barreling through:

“What if they don’t choose me? What if I’m not good enough?”

Again, I found that sliver of courage, applied, and was accepted! I was elated! Over the next ten months, I invested in myself wholeheartedly. Not just the physical, but the spiritual and emotional changes I needed to make for my continued growth, transformation, and evolution. Like my very first yoga retreat in Costa Rica, the yoga teacher training program was transformative for me, from the meditation to the pranayama (breathwork) to the asana (yoga poses).

In her very first email to our co-hort, Anne Compton Lambeth, our facilitator, guide, and goddess through the entire training, said:

“There’s nothing you need to do now but to love yourself and know that you are ready. The timing is divine, and the practice will meet you right where you are.”

At the time, I didn’t understand why she was telling us to love ourselves when we had this really important training coming up! We didn’t need love, we needed to start preparing! And here I am now, chuckling at myself. I am in complete gratitude for the entire experience. How divine the timing was, how ready I was.

Throughout training, there were so many gems! I’ll list a few here:

I am enough. I have always been enough.

“The only way through is in.”

I am love. I am loved. I love. Love and always love. Always, always, ALWAYS moving towards and inviting in love.

Happiness, peace, and bliss are not coming from anything “out there.”

The non-duality of pleasure and pain. You cannot separate them; they are both part of life. Attachment to pleasure, but resistance to pain both cause the same thing: they both obscure reality and cause pain and suffering. We have to live and love through the impermanence of it all.

Detachment from the journey, the outcome, the expectations. Recognizing the divine in the entire story, including all of the triggers and perceived obstacles.

“Decisive action aligned with love cannot be wrong.” – The Bhagavad Gita. This was something that I didn’t realize that I so needed to hear to help me stop coating myself in shame and guilt for leaving my children.

“Yoga is owning, discovering, and expressing the uniqueness of you because your innate human is divine. None of it is not God. You don’t need to read about love and truth to know love and truth. Everything that shows up is FOR YOU. This is IT! Honor your life!” – Anne Compton Lambeth

Transformation often happens when what we perceive as “the worst thing possible” happens to us. My journey of becoming a yoga teacher in New Orleans is such proof of this! The LaTesha who took her first yoga and adventure retreat with Carrie and Zach is no longer here. The LaTesha who started her yoga teacher training program is no longer here. Those LaTeshas were all beautiful and necessary at the time, but now I’m here, thriving, in a state of peace, love, and joy, excited for my journey teaching yoga and leading yoga retreats in my beloved home of New Orleans.

I certainly hope that you will join me in New Orleans for Bigger Life Adventures’ first (of many!) retreats to New Orleans, encompassing cultural exploration, mindfulness, and yoga. I am also thrilled to be attending and guiding a couple classes on this November’s Thailand Yoga Retreat with Carrie and Zach!