Claudette Evans (E-RYT 500, YACEP)
In 2009, after many years working in non-profit arts organizations, I took my first yoga teacher training program. This was not my first introduction to yoga, I’d learned about it back in 1992/93 watching a classmate in my musical theater program work her way through BKS Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, and later I’d been encouraged by one of my dance instructors to take yoga to help increase my flexibility, though I hadn’t really been open to it at the time. Fast forward to a post-college acting program where yoga had been peppered into our warm-ups, to eventually rediscovering the practice during my pregnancy with my daughter, Lily, that I finally embraced this weird and wonderful feeling I would later come to understand more fully.
Little did I know, that that 2009 yoga teacher training program would be the start of an entirely new career trajectory, and would shake the foundation of who I thought I was and what I believed I was capable of. Admittedly, those early years were a struggle. I was a single parent who always seemed to be one or two paychecks away from disaster, and yet I decided that I truly needed this; needed to spend thousands of dollars figuring myself out, needed the feeling I got at the end of every āsana practice, needed to discover that I had a penchant for Sanskrit, to rekindle my love of music, sound and vibration through the practice of chanting mantra, and needing to regain the loving relationship I had always had with my body. Yoga had changed me and my life for the better. And eventually, after that initial 200hr yoga teacher training program, a 300hr program, a teaching apprenticeship, yet another 200hr program, and thousands of teaching hours later, I decided to dive in head first and make yoga my full-time vocation.
Since then, I’ve served as co-lead trainer for dozens of yoga teacher training programs, as a guest trainer for programs around the globe, and introduced hundreds of students, near and far, to the Sanskrit language. I truly love what I do, and I’m so pleased that you’ve decided to join me here.
Please feel free to reach out at anytime with your questions. I’d be overjoyed to talk more with you about the practice I love so well, and ways I might be able to help you experience even a little bit of what I’ve found within it. I offer group classes, small group coaching, and privates in āsana, meditation, prāṇāyāma, Sanskrit, mantra recitation, and voice, as well as teacher mentoring sessions, teacher training modules, workshops, and retreats. Drop me a line.