MICHELLE CHEN

Throughout 8 years of University, yoga was a way to relieve stress for Michelle. After graduation, she started working long hours as a Pharmacist and stopped practicing yoga. She felt lethargic and unhealthy living this constant, busy, "on-the-go" lifestyle, convincing herself that if life is busy, it has meaning.

So, she decided to return to yoga in 2013 to change her lifestyle and discovered her love for asana. Michelle also has a love for travel which allowed her to experience the power of being present. In 2015, she followed her heart, left her job and decided to travel the world for six months where she attended the Bali Spirit Yoga Festival and other various yoga retreats. Through this experience of meeting various, amazing world renowned instructors, she discovered Ashtanga yoga. After her travels she returned back home and practiced asana continuously as a transition to use her body as a tool to find her way into the present. The use of breath and the alignment of body helped quiet her mind while returning to this busy lifestyle once again.

During her recent travels in January 2017, she decided to travel to India to attend the Tattvaa Yogashala and received her 300 RYT Ashtanga yoga certification. She fell in love with learning The Eight Limbs of yoga and discovered a deeper side to yoga physically, mentally and spiritually.

While traveling is naturally easy to be in the now, Ashtanga yoga has taught Michelle more than that. It has taught her a disciplined practice, mindfulness and philosophy of paying attention to the present moment. Yoga is not just about the physical practice, everything we do affects us and our environment.

Michelle is a strong Vinyasa Yoga instructor that motivates her students to challenge themselves and to see what the body and mind is capable of doing. You can expect to learn and have fun with heart openers, arm balances and inversions in her class.

"Asana is a window that opens onto some of our deepest personal conditioning and the suffering it creates. In order to relax into things as they actually are, one must surrender every last drop of the internalized desire to feel good. That desire is shaped by our most cherished ideas about what constitutes good and bad, as well as by ingrained, organic perceptions of pain, pleasure, neutrality. Relaxing effort means letting go of limiting internal definitions. Simply put, in asana one must do less to be more."

-The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali

Commentary by Chip Hartranft