Vera Thomlison

When I first bought that one month pass to a local yoga studio, I had no idea it would lead me to where I am today. What began as wanting to add some stretching and mobility to my fitness routine quickly became more than that, the more often I went. I always thought yoga would be “too slow and boring”, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed for my cortisol-addicted brain. I was working out 5-6 days a week at the gym, “staying busy” with two jobs, filling my weekends with numbing activities and despising slowing down because that meant I’d have to deal with what I feared the most - my emotions - particularly around the lack of connection I felt going about my daily life.

Yoga made me realize what I had truly been craving: nurturing. Nurturing from a wonderful community, but most importantly, from myself. Cultivating a relationship with myself that was sustainable was no easy feat, especially after a lifetime of listening to that voice in my head that told me I was definitely not enough.

When I started feeling a connection with my body and the inner voice that I had ignored and shut down for so long, I was able to let go of a lot of addictions that had been gripping me for years. Previously I’d had nothing to replace them with, so there’d just been a void every time I tried to quit, leading me to return back to old habits easily. Feeling this change in myself inspired me to want to become a yoga teacher, so that I could help others do the same.

After teaching for a year, I traveled to Thailand to further my yoga teacher training and to finally end my relationship with alcohol, cannabis, and codependency. While being away from home made it easy to make changes, coming back and being in the same environment quickly brought back a lot of triggers - and I knew another big change was coming and needed to happen. I enrolled in a Life Coaching Certificate Program with Rhodes Wellness College and all the answers I was looking for came to the forefront. And while I thought I’d find the answers in my wise teachers and classmates, I quickly came to realize they were always within me, waiting to surface - through powerful questions, and self-awareness - the tenets of life coaching.

Yoga and life coaching were the two main things that changed my life drastically for the better, and it’s why I use this approach to help others find that same connection with their bodies and themselves.

Like a lot of the people I speak with, I was conditioned to believe my worth came from external forces and factors, and the cognitive dissonance between doing what I was doing to make others happy versus what I wanted to be doing to make myself happy was so loud that for a long time, drugs and alcohol seemed like the only answer to dampen the pain. I realized that any lasting change has to start with an understanding of the self, and a vision of where I want to be versus where I am now, and how to close that gap. It all starts with one small step, one small change, everyday.

Having struggled with addiction and disconnection, I know what it’s like to feel hopeless and alone, and on the other side of it, how it’s possible that one action or choice can make incremental changes every day that lead to big differences over time. When our minds feel relaxed, and our bodies feel safe, we can slow down enough to hear ourselves, to know what we want, and that we have the power to choose. Once we know we’ve chosen something, once we’re conscious of it, we show up differently. And when that happens, as I’ve seen over and over again, anything is possible.