Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Hi, friends. Welcome back to another episode of deep in your practice with your host, me, Lauren Leduc. I'm the owner of True Love Yoga, and if you know me, you know I love yoga. Obviously, this is a podcast all about yoga. I teach yoga, I practice yoga. It's a huge part of my life. And I thought today I could share a little bit about my own yoga story and journey, if you will, into, I guess, where I am today. And I've noticed, teaching eleven years now, that people start yoga for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it seems like a good form of physical exercise, or maybe they doctor recommended it, or maybe they just want to meet some friends or get out of the House, or maybe they want to attend to their mental health. There are all sorts of entry points into this beautiful practice, and I thought I'd share a little bit about my. So I'll start with kind of my first exposure to yoga. So I grew up in the midwest, in Kansas City, and there really wasn't a lot of yoga to speak of, at least nothing that I was aware of. I was dancer, and I grew up in a religious household, and I just didn't know anybody who practiced yoga. I maybe heard about it on tv. I do remember that there is a show called tiny tunes. It was like an offshoot of Looney tunes. And there was one character that was a yogi duck, and she would om and levitate around, and I thought she was pretty cool.
[00:01:58] I knew people in my church, or kids in my church who weren't allowed to watch that show because of the existence of this particular character. So that is an illustration of how open minded the community I grew up in was around, really anything outside of Christianity.
[00:02:15] As I became a teenager, I developed a really difficult eating disorder, and it was actually in treatment for this eating disorder that I was introduced to yoga for the first time in a real way. So one of the nurses in the hospital, because I was in an inpatient program, was a yoga teacher, and she offered just as like a one off thing to do a yoga class. We weren't really allowed to do a lot of physical exertion as part of this recovery program. So I missed stretching, I missed dancing. I thought, hey, maybe I'll get to do a little bit of what I miss so much right now. What has been, like, such an outlet for me emotionally. And we didn't do a lot of movement, but the room was dark and there were candles lit, and I remembered gentle stretching and breathing. And it was the first time I had felt a sense of autonomy and a sense of peace. In quite a while, especially within this inpatient program, there was something like, I planted a little seed inside of me, and I think I was conscious of this at the time. It seemed like something I wanted to explore further and maybe could be a part of my life later on. So I struggled with this eating disorder for a while. I wasn't quite sure what to do with my life. I was a dancer, like I said. So I went into college into a dance conservatory program, and we had a little bit of exposure here and there to yoga through the program.
[00:03:45] And I really struggled while I was there was not healing from this eating disorder. I also struggled with anxiety and depression, and I had to drop out of school. And I remember the teachers said to me, keep dancing, but if you can't get into dance, make sure you're going to yoga. And that stuck with me.
[00:04:07] So over the next several years, my yoga practice was really irregular.
[00:04:12] So from age 20 to about 26, 27, I owned a few VHS tapes and DVD's, and they're so different from what I practice now. I'm really grateful for them. But I had like a crunch fitness VHS, I think, and I had wailana yoga DVD, which was like, totally wild. This lovely hawaiian woman, I think, who sings and does this very interesting yoga practice. And there is a show on PBS, and if I could catch it live, I would do it. I think it was called namaste yoga. But really my only exposure was to hatha yoga. I didn't know what that was at the time. I just knew pose, pose, pose, and it felt good.
[00:05:00] It was a different time. So I was born in 1984. This was happening in the two thousands. And while I'm sure YouTube existed in some way then, it wasn't like you could just pull up yoga with Adriene and go into a 30 day beginner program for yoga.
[00:05:18] They really had to do your own research in a lot of ways. I lived in Chicago for a while while I was studying there, and there was a Korea yoga center in my neighborhood. I had no idea what that was, but I would go on Sundays because they had a free meditation with free food afterward, and I was all about free food. But that was very interesting and intriguing, and it really exposed me to meditation in a different way. Anyway, I was trying different avenues into yoga. I expressed interest in yoga to a friend who actually offered me a scholarship spot to her yoga teacher training program or to one that she was involved in. And I wasn't ready for it yet. I didn't think I could be a teacher. I didn't feel established enough in my own practice, and also I was struggling a lot, and I didn't believe in myself in the time. I didn't. I couldn't really see, like, better things for myself in my life. Eventually, I hit this tipping point with my mental health, where I really needed to move back home to Kansas City after several years away to be near my family and to receive some support. And I really started taking my mental health seriously. And it was the first time ever that I had a solid enough support system around me where I could do yoga regularly with other people. So I joined a small community center for like $30 a month or something like that. And I would go to yoga classes like three times a week or however often they offered them. And I could feel this strength and flexibility returning to my body that I hadn't felt in a really long time. Again, I was practicing yoga for several years, but nothing in a regular way or regimented way. And suddenly I could really just feel myself connecting with my body in a loving way instead of in a punishing way.
[00:07:14] And it hearkened back to, like, all of the best parts of dance for me, which was this emotional release, presence, feeling joy in my body. And it made me crave it more and more. And the more I did it, along with some other healing modalities like therapy and neurotherapy, the more solid I felt in myself. And I started going to local studios. I was the student that would be in class, like twice a week. I had a job at the time as a nanny, and it just. It was very stressful. And anytime that I had away from that, I just wanted to be in the yoga studio. And my teacher at the time suggested maybe I do yoga teacher training. And I wasn't sure. Again, I wasn't fully in belief of myself. I wasn't sure if it was something I'd be good at. It seemed like a bigger risk. And there was one night where I was laying in bed next to my husband, and I could not sleep. I just had all these racing thoughts. If you listened to the last episode about what yoga is, it's the Chitavriti that was going through my mind raising thoughts, and something like this little voice inside of me said, get out of bed and start googling yoga teacher trainings.
[00:08:30] So I just followed the voice, got out of bed, started googling yoga teacher trainings, and I found a training with a company called Frog Lotus Yoga in Costa Rica. And at the time, I had never traveled out of the country except like the Bahamas, I think, and didn't have a passport and the training was several months away and it cost several thousand dollars and I just didn't know how I was going to do it. But I put down my deposit that night and said, I will figure it out. I'll tell my husband tomorrow. And it was one of the very best choices that I've made in my entire life. So several months later, I figured it out, went down to Costa Rica. I had this really intense 200 hours training in like three and a half weeks with amazing teachers. And it got my body and mind and emotions into like, this really aligned, beautiful state. I felt my confidence blossom during the time and I found out that I had a knack for teaching, which was really cool.
[00:09:40] I wasn't sure what was going to come of this. I think people outside of myself in my life thought, okay, she's going to do this training, so she's looking to be a yoga teacher and to change careers or to establish a career. And in my mind I thought, like, maybe I would teach. I have an intuitive feeling that maybe I would, but it wasn't really the point of it. I just needed to cut out all the other distractions in my life and just focus on myself and the practice. And through this training, so many layers of the practice were revealed to me by my teachers, you know, beyond the physical, but also the physical was something that became very refined foundationally and beyond.
[00:10:24] But also my mind was open to philosophy. And at the time, I did have knowledge and experience with the energetic body, but it deepened my experience with that and with the history of yoga and how to sequence and Sanskrit and all these amazing things. And at the end of the training, my teacher, Jen, she said, go teach.
[00:10:45] She looked at me in the airport as I was leaving and said, go teach. And I took that to heart. I came home, started subbing at some local studios, and in the next year, I was teaching about 24 classes a week and practicing as much as I could. It can be hard, I think, when you're teaching that much yoga, to stay focused on your own personal practice. And in my experience, I really realized how the personal practice is the foundation completely of the yoga practice.
[00:11:24] You can't teach without connecting to the source, so to speak, and when you're teaching, you're sharing your practice. So in this year, I kind of randomly, again, kind of listened to my inner voice, but it felt random. Posted on Facebook if anyone would like to meet at this local park and do a papa yoga session, it was like a warm day in March, which wasn't typically normal here, and like 50 people showed up to it.
[00:11:54] And then soon enough, like the next week, we did it again. 100 people showed up. And I had this vision for a pop up yoga program that did classes all over the city where people could see all of these yogis practicing yoga together, all different kind of bodies and backgrounds, and where it could be completely donation based, too, where people show up, they pay what they can, they get a really cool, fun practice in, meet some friends, and then hopefully come back the next week. So it gained a lot of momentum, and I had started envisioning maybe a future of owning a yoga studio, although it seemed very far off. Again. All of these years, I've been building more confidence in myself and in my vision. My husband has been a business owner for a long time, and he was really encouraging. He even commissioned this beautiful, what is it? Like, granite ohm symbol, I think for my 29th birthday, or maybe it was my 30th, but he said, this is going to go in your future yoga studio. And at the time, I thought it was a very sweet present, but I thought he was kind of crazy. I'm like, okay, maybe 510 years down the line, so fast forward this pop up program happens, and somebody offers me a space just like that, like a couple months into this pop up program.
[00:13:16] So that's where what was then called Karma Tribe Yoga was born in downtown Kansas City, where I would put out a jar hold yoga classes. I brought teachers in and people would pay what they can. And that got started. So kind of before my eyes, it became a studio. Over the years, it has shifted and changed. We did open a more permanent space in the midtown area of Kansas City, which is now where we're currently located. So we've been there for.
[00:13:45] Since 2016, and I built out a yoga teacher training program for people to become yoga teachers in 2018, and that is still going now. I'm super proud of it.
[00:14:01] Just to fill in a little bit more of what happened between opening the studio and now is I've Leddez yoga retreats all over the world. I've traveled all over the world studying. I've done my 500 hours certification, and I'm now an experienced 500 hours yoga teacher.
[00:14:18] As well as you'll learn, like, if you are a yoga teacher or, you know, yoga teachers, that we are really hungry for more knowledge. So a lot of us stack up a bunch of trainings. I've probably done, I don't know, 20 different certifications in the last eleven years. I'm currently doing a new 55 hours myofascial release training and we'll be holding a fun workshop for that soon, which is really exciting. I've done trainings in trauma aware yoga, in activism, in yoga, and all kinds of yoga, anatomy and intuition and dharma, which is purpose, and so many more anti racism in yoga. All of these pieces of knowledge have been woven into the fabric of true love yoga and also to our 200 hours yoga teacher training program. And most of our teachers are graduates from the program. And I don't know, just saying this right now, it seems like a lot, right? And me 15 years ago would have never believed that I'd be where I am now.
[00:15:27] I'll talk a little bit about my practice now. And like I said, when I was teaching a lot of classes, I did practice, but it was harder to keep up with. And I got to a really steady flow kind of a few years into studio ownership and where I was teaching a few classes a week, but had a great staff.
[00:15:46] And the pandemic hit.
[00:15:49] Obviously, we all know this. In 2020, we had to move all of our classes virtually at the studio, nothing in person for quite a few months. And at the same time, I became pregnant with my daughter, Gemma. She's three and a half now. And eventually I had to stop teaching because I couldn't really, I couldn't demonstrate the classes I could for a long time, but at a certain point in my pregnancy, I was done doing that. And then she was born and hardcore since day one. She is a mama's girl, super attached. And I envisioned being back in the studio for several classes a week, you know, once she was born and once the pandemic cooled down a little bit. But, you know, we've settled into a place now where one class a week is great for us and where I can lead our yoga teacher training and really prioritize that. And then of course, I'm doing stuff on the back end. But that being said, the first. The first couple years of her life, it was really hard to practice. It was really hard. She wanted me to hold her all the time. She didn't like being watched by other people, with a couple of exceptions.
[00:17:03] I would take walks with her, I'd try to move my body, but I could not figure out how to practice yoga on a regular basis. And about a year ago, we finally settled into a routine where I can keep her busy long enough for me to attend to my physical practice, my breath, practice, my meditation for a certain period of time every day. And while I can't spend hours and hours on my practice I can spend a good 30 minutes and when I come to teach on Sundays or for yoga teacher training, I feel like I can pull from that source, which is really awesome. Also, as I practice at home now, my daughter gets to see that and I don't want to force yoga on her, but I want her to see me dedicating myself to it, being devoted, you know, not only to her, but to myself and my practice and my community. And yeah, I feel really proud. I think that I have this heartbeat in my life that is my yoga practice and that it provides, let's say the life source or the blood for me to give to others, my daughter, my studio, my teachers, my yoga community, and now through this podcast. So for me, this is Just another way to connect with you, another way to teach and another way to share my practice. So that's it in a nutshell. I'm sure I'm forgetting things, all kinds of yoga stuff that I've done through the years, but really I just, I love the practice of yoga. It has given me so much and I feel it's my duty to reciprocate as a reciprocate. I feel it's my duty to reciprocate that in a way. So that's my yoga journey.
[00:18:55] If you want to know more about it or more about my life, I actually published a book last year called Embody your inner goddess. And it's not just about my story, it is daily readings, journaling and practices to bring you home to yourseLf. And I share bits and pieces of my own story, including some of what I shared today just to help you get in tune different parts of yourself, to help you love on yourself and to bring yourself to more familiarity with your own story and journey.
[00:19:29] So thank you so much for listening. I can't wait to share this love of yoga more and more with you. And if you are interested in my book, you can get it at the studio if you're local or you can get it at any major bookseller online.
[00:19:48] And I'm so, I don't know, so grateful to share my story with you. So until next time, Om Shanti Om. Peace. Thanks everyone.
