We recently connected with Tabay Atkins and have shared our conversation below.

Tabay, appreciate you joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

When I was 6 years old, my mom was diagnosed with stage 3 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma cancer, after being misdiagnosed for almost a year. This was before we knew anything about yoga or veganism. She had to go through very intense chemotherapy, which broke her down physically and emotionally. By the time she beat cancer, she could not even walk on her own. When she was 2 weeks cancer free, she (almost accidentally) got into a 200-Hour Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training, without knowing a single thing about yoga. Throughout her training, I noticed her progressively recover and heal from the effects of chemotherapy and cancer. I was 7 years old by the time he finished her training. By that time, she could walk on her own again, and was healthier and happier than even before having cancer, mostly because of yoga. At that point, I decided that I wanted to become a yoga teacher and help other people heal and stay heathy like I saw yoga help heal my mom. My mom and I started traveling the country, taking specialty yoga teacher trainings. I became 200-Hour certified at age 10, and started teaching my own yoga classes, where I donated 100% of the money I made to cancer patients. I started learning about the plant-based diet and vegan lifestyle, and started incorporating that into my teachings. Over the years, I have studied and trained to learn a wide variety of health/wellness practices, to offer a comprehensive wellness service to my clients.

Tabay, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My specialty is wellness. I try to include a combination of multiple appropriate wellness disciplines to best benefit my clients’ needs. I was first inspired to start teaching yoga when I saw its benefits help my mom recover from cancer. I was seven years old then, and that is when I started to take various yoga teacher trainings. When I was 10, I got my 200-hour certificate, and when I was 14, I became 500-hour vinyasa certified. At the moment, I have over 1,000 hours of teacher training experience, learning specialty yoga disciplines including kids yoga, teen/tween yoga, vinyasa yoga, restorative yoga, acro yoga, yoga for children on the autism spectrum, yoga for cancer patients and survivors, and more. Besides yoga, I am also a reiki master teacher, which means I can practice reiki on myself and others, give distance reiki, teach others how to practice reiki, and teach and certify people in reiki level 1, 2, & master reiki. Veganism, and plant-based cooking is also a big part of what I teach. As a certified vegan chef, I teach people how to make easy, quick, and delicious vegan versions of their favorite foods, and also make these vegan comfort foods available through my vegan food truck, Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen. Being certified in plant-based nutrition, I am familiar with the connection between diet and disease. I use this knowledge to help my clients prevent or reverse chronic disease through diet change, and improved lifestyle through the many wellness practices I have just mentioned. As you can see, there are so many different practices you could try in order to live a healthier lifestyle. I try to be a one-stop-shop, and not just offer all of them separately, but to combine them in a way where each practice enhances the other, and all work together to benefit you.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Besides training and studying, practicing is very important in the wellness field. Practice what you preach, practice whatever it is that you specialize in, and practice being a student. The moment you stop practicing and learning and growing, is the moment your teaching freezes in time. Your teaching can only evolve with you. Taking trainings and increasing your knowledge on your field is great, but it is just a waste of time and money if you don’t take what you learn into your own practice and experiment with it there.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I remember a time when the whole world had to pivot! At the beginning of the pandemic, yoga teachers and many other wellness professionals had to switch completely online. For most, this was a completely new world. Online classes were not so common before the pandemic, we had to relearn how to teach. Not just in yoga classes, but also yoga teacher trainings. I took part in a handful of these virtual trainings during that time. Relearning how to learn and teach was critical then. If you did not change and adjust with the times, you were out of a job.
That change left its mark on how we still do things today. We now have as many virtual classes and as in-person, maybe more. We now have what is called a “hybrid class”, something that we would not have seen before the pandemic. Now that we as teachers are more flexible in the way we teach, we can best serve our students, no matter where they are and what the current situation is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tabayatkins.com
• Instagram: @TabayAtkins
• Facebook: Tabay Atkins
• Yelp: Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen
• Other: Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen: Instagram: @TabaysMindfulKitchen Facebook: Tabay’s Mindful Kitchen Website: https://www.tabaysmindfulkitchen.com

Image Credits
Tabay Atkins Ben Cope