Cheryl Chaffee - Cindy Turner - Jaye Martin Nancy Zampella - Randall Buskirk - Rita Knorr - Vesna Petrovich

Cheryl Chaffee

I took my first Anusara yoga class in 2004, and from that very first day I knew that I would teach yoga. It was as if my whole life had been leading up to that moment, and a big explosion went off in my mind and in my heart, and I knew that I had found my happy place. As a child, I learned ballet, took piano and guitar lessons, sang in choirs, and acted in the musical theater performances at school. As an adult, I never quite felt like I fit into the "typical" mold, being a strict vegetarian, homeschooling my children, and even taking my family out in the woods to live in a cabin for two years! For me, one of the beautiful things about yoga is that it does not ask you to fit any mold, it allows you to express and celebrate your unique-ness. It helps you to put aside the things you think you ought to be, and helps you accept what is happening in the present moment. Many people say to me, "Oh, I could never do yoga, I'm not flexible enough." This always brings a smile to my face, since when I first started taking yoga classes, I could not touch my toes! Over the years, I have increased my flexibility as well as my strength, in both my body and my mind. Yoga has opened me to so many possibilities, it has taught me to take on challenges and it has opened my eyes to a more spiritual way of thinking. Recently, I have discovered kirtan, and am so happy to be combining my lifelong love of music with this new spirituality. It is another way in which I can help others to connect with the goodness in their hearts, to raise their vibration and consciousness, and to create more peace and joy in the world.

Cindy Turner

Little changes can lead to big changes, and that is how my story starts. I started taking yoga classes in 1998 because I had tight muscles from doing weights. I loved the deep stretches of the yoga poses, but also enjoyed the relaxing benefits of a regular yoga practice. Out of the blue, I was offered to teach a yoga class at a local gym; I did not realize that this would set forth a chain of events that would transform my life. I took a weekend workshop with YogaFit, which gave me the skills to teach. I then began to experiment with other yoga systems, such as Iyengar, Ashtanga, Bikram, Tri-yoga & Kundalini. I noticed one of my students had beautiful form and expression to her poses and she told me that her teacher was Betsey Downing. I attended my first workshop with Betsey in May 2002. Because of Betsey's style and intelligence, I gained a new perspective and insight into my yoga practice. I decided to study exclusively with Betsey, as she was about to begin her first Immersion course and Teacher Training in Sarasota, FL. I attended my first John Friend Workshop in Dec. of 2003. I was so impressed by his amazing ability to move and transform energy in a room and connect personally with a very large audience. He can genuinely inspire and help other people because of his strong spiritual connection. Personally, I had arrived at this weekend workshop very stressed and left with a whole new perspective of hope. I realized that there are choices in how to live your life. Despite the obstacles of a single parent, I managed to complete Betsey's Teacher Training in July' 2005 and have had the privilege to study with a plethora of Anusara Certified Teachers at Garden of the Heart Yoga Center. I have traveled to study with John Friend and have met so many wonderful people. They all have inspired me with their wisdom, creativity and love. For the first time in my life, I know the direction I want my life to take. Hopefully, with hard work and determination, I will become Anusara Certified over the course of the next year. As I enter the certification process, I will look on it as a “Life Affirming” time of transformation. This will be a true expression of my desire to grow as a person, a yogini. My wish and intent for the next five years are to offer my skills in service to others as a Yoga Therapist. I will remember John Friend's words at each juncture, “The only way you fail is if you give up.”

Jaye Martin

I've always been physically active. I ran track in HS, swam in college, and have always enjoyed skating, gardening, hiking, and canoeing since I was a kid. Of course, my career as a professional dancer was the most physically demanding thing I've ever done. Being a classical ballet dancer can be very stressful for the mind as well as the body...sometimes performing twice a day, rehearsing, and taking class in order to stay in shape and keep up technical standards. When not performing, sometimes I felt like I was at a constant audition with pressure to always look good and act vibrant and energetic even if I was tired or injured.... This was very important in order to be cast in good roles. In the ballet world it wasn't much about how you felt or whether or not you listened to your inner voice, it was about what you looked like on stage, performing and acting. I did some damage to my body. I was in subconscious denial of this for years. Thankfully, through yoga, the damage is revealed to me, sometimes it's repaired itself! When I look back, I see profound changes in my body since beginning yoga in 1998. These days I almost always feel good! If I don't, I'm very likely to listen to my inner voice and respond in an appropriate way. My body can move and express in ways it never did, I'm a better listener, more compassionate and WAY more balanced than ever in regard to my physicality. Of course, Yoga is something much bigger to me than the physical. The reason I first came to yoga class was for stress relief. Working as a dancer was stressful enough, but then I was going through a divorce at the same time. I needed to be accepted, loved, just as I was. I needed to believe and know that I was good and worthy of unconditional love no matter what I looked like, no matter how I performed.   Yoga has brought all this and more to me. I especially cherish the heartfelt connection to all, the feeling of oneness, and that we are co-creators in this experience...in the universe. What a big blessing it is! And what a wonderful gift it is for me to teach, to help and empower others the way my teachers have done for me. Blessings and all love to all my teachers including the one inside of me!

Nancy Zampella

I think yoga is in my blood. My mother did yoga when I was little, so I had a very general knowledge of what it was and what it could do for you. I “found” yoga for myself in 1992. I felt like I had come home. Yoga made everything in my life a little more bearable and a lot more accessible. My concentration and stamina improved. It also helped me put the other areas of my life in perspective. I was working really hard, putting in between 60 and 80 hours a week. Before I went to the Bahamas on a yoga retreat one Christmas, my boss asked me to think about whether or not I wanted to continue doing what it took to “get the job done.” Staring at the ocean one moonlit night after doing yoga and meditating, I realized I didn’t. Getting the job done wasn’t worth jeopardizing my health and happiness or demanding my co-workers work the long hours I did. I found a new job and eventually changed my line of work. Yoga has made me stronger and more flexible, but more importantly, it has taught me to be a little more patient, and to be more of a participant in determining my own happiness. I’m healthier now than I was when I was younger, mostly because I now know there are things I can do to empower myself, steps I can take to make myself well and not become a victim of pain or illness. These lessons I have learned through my study of yoga, especially Anusara yoga. I love teaching yoga as much as I adore studying it. It’s only right that I would try to share with others something that has done so much for me. My path as a yoga student & teacher has continued, first in New York, and since last April, here in Florida. We moved here for the sunshine, but the warmth I feel has come as much from all of you as it has from the sun. I am so thankful to have found Betsey and my wonderful friends, students and colleagues at Garden of the Heart. The close yoga community we share is what I always dreamed of, only better! I can’t wait to see where our journey on this yogic path takes us all.

Randall Buskirk

Once or twice a year, when I was a kid, a magician would come to town and do a show in the school gym. My friends and I had gotten interested in magic tricks and gimmicks you could carry around, coins that appeared and disappeared, objects that amazingly changed color. Pocket miracles. Soon we'd be able to read minds and predict the future, reveal or conceal secrets as appropriate. These things always worked at home in front of a mirror, but in performance they quickly turned mundane. Coins and cards dropped to the floor. Suave, adult patter provided with the tricks sounded even more ridiculous from a 12-year old. One day a real magician came who had the same kind of show that always cursed us-rabbits popped up at the wrong place, birds flew away, balls rolled across the floor. But we were out of class, so it was still great fun. After the show I went backstage and persuaded the magician to let me help him pack up his tricks. He relented and said, “Ok, kid, take this box out to the van.” He was surly and smoked a cigarette and argued with his wife who doubled as his lovely assistant. We packed the splintered plywood cases into the van and shut the door. He reached into his wallet and said, “Here's my card, kid.” I kept it for a long time, maybe even wrote him a letter. But no secrets were ever revealed. It wouldn't be the last time I was disillusioned. I still searched for the magic. I longed to understand the mystery. I knew there had to be something else because I felt it so strongly. I shot basketballs and threw baseballs. I picked up a guitar and dragged it around and said “Show me that song,” or “How do you play that lick?” I read books and looked for the revelation in words. I studied physics and tried to solve the equations. I looked at paintings, at color and form. I drank a lot of beer, worked crap jobs, and had guns put to my head. I played in bands, wrote some stories, wrote some poems, wrote some songs. I searched for love and a place in the world. And then one day I walked into a yoga class at a gym and practiced in my sneakers. I didn't know where I was, but it felt like home. I went back another time, then finally took my shoes off and dived in. Let me tell you, it's a deep pool. When I emerged I felt clean and good and my breath came easy and I felt alive like that for days. I wanted more of it. I felt connected to that mystery again, that I moved within it and it moved within me. It wasn't the mystery of darkness, but instead the mystery of light. And this light began to shine on those things I was still searching for, so that now they seem almost within reach, and if I stretch just a little farther…. See, I'm not sure how to talk about yoga, but if given a chance I'll talk all day. So just let me say come to the studio, come to the mat. Come home to your heart, wherever you are.

Rita Knorr, R.Y.T

I first discovered yoga on Negril Beach in Jamaica in the 70’s as I thumbed through Richard Hittleman’s 28 Day Yoga Plan. I had taken a week off with some college friends and decided to learn yoga along with catching up on sleep. Over the next 20 years I’d do a downward facing dog every once in a while, but I was totally immersed into my profession as a civil engineer, which lead me to projects in California, Massachusetts, New York , Kansas, Illinois, and Washington, DC. It wasn’t until the 90’s that I began to practice regularly with Iyengar teachers in Washington DC, New York, and Chicago. I loved the Iyengar no-nonsense approach to alignment and discipline, and pursued teaching in that style with fabulous teachers. I had heard of John Friend, so when I saw a brochure from Siddha Yoga Meditation describing sessions he would be teaching at the New York Ashram, I registered the first weekend I could. At the Ashram I was so drawn to the teachings of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, and the style of hatha yoga that she inspired John Friend to teach, that I have continued my own studies of Siddha Yoga Meditation for 15 years. When Anusara yoga was created, it seemed a natural stepping stone. Maybe it is the engineer in me that loves the concise and simple Universal Principles of Alignment as guidance in the physical practice, while it is the creative and inspired yogin that continues to thrive on the philosophical teachings.

Vesna Petrovich

I was introduced to yoga in my native Belgrade, Yugoslavia just after graduating from high school. I was back “home” after spending all my school years in French-speaking Northern Africa. Distressed by the move, I felt out of place in my own country. Somehow, my first yoga class brought me back home to my body. Renewed and hopeful, I left that first class as light as a feather, feeling wonderful once again in my body and mind. It was like a miracle, opening my life to new vistas. Not long after, and probably due to the opening created by the magic of yoga practice, I was on the go, realizing my dream to pursue my university studies in Paris. My first encounter with yoga in the city of light was not what I expected. While my teacher in Belgrade, trained in hatha yoga in India, practiced vinyasa with no meditation, my first yoga class in Paris was mainly a meditative practice. While I was guided into the depth of meditation in the corpse pose (savasana), I felt a complete dissolution of the body while fully aware of my mind. It felt real and totally frightening. In retrospect, I understand that the guidance was masterfully done but to my unprepared mind, the experience scared me away from yoga for years to come. Intensive university studies and big city life did the rest. Curiously enough, for my doctoral studies in French Enlightenment, I was drawn to study how the French rational mind of the scientific revolution viewed the “irrational” states such as dreams, dreaming and meditation as possible means of knowledge and self-discovery, and how those “irrational” states found their best expression in literature. During my years as a college teacher, meditation and yoga came back to my life as a way to take time for myself. Inspired by exceptional yoga teachers, my practice deepened and evolved somewhat flawlessly into teaching. From yoga student, I became a teacher, and … a yoga student for life. The Garden of the Heart Yoga Center appeared on my path as a fulfillment of wish. Longing for yoga training and a community in Sarasota, I was flying around the country until Betsey opened her beautiful yoga center! This sacred space has allowed us to develop our practice and spirituality so we can become fully alive, present in our bodies and minds, and honor the life that we are given. We are also blessed with a beautiful kula, or community of hearts, sharing a vision of a larger life and of endless possibilities. Our Garden embodies goodness, harmony and peace on our path to create a better world.