We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Daniela Kent Torres. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Daniela below.

Alright, Daniela thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was your school or training experience like? Share an anecdote or two that you feel illustrate important aspects or the overall nature of your schooling/training experience.

In taking a two-year initial yoga teacher training, I learned that developing expertise as a yoga teacher is both a technical and spiritual practice. And the spiritual practice is the most important part. Not only does teaching yoga require a certain of outward-facing skillfulness, like understanding anatomy and physiology for sequencing and high level communication ability to guide students through their practice, but living yoga philosophy is a must. In many ways, the truest form of yoga is seamlessly integrating its principles, particularly of care (ahīmsa), truthfulness (satya), consent (asteya), spiritual maturity (brahmacharya), and non-attachment (aparigraha) into even the most mundane parts of life.

Daniela, 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?

I first started practicing yoga because I was getting injured all the time. I have always been very active and love moving my body. When yoga first came into my life, I actually found it boring, and only stuck with it because I have a bit of a competitive spirit, and I didn’t want to let yoga get the best of me. But over time I slowly began to surrender to what yoga really has to offer, which is a space to embrace where you are and work on evolving yourself into the fullness of your potential. It’s this understanding of yoga as a deeply personal and empowering journey that I center when I work with my private clients. To me, the most important thing in developing a yoga practice is the relationship between the students and the teacher. I always take the time to get to know who my clients are as individuals, because yoga is not a one size fits all thing. Knowing not just my clients’ goals, but who what they’ve been through and what they care about allows me to develop unique, customized programming for them that embraces their needs physically, energetically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When I first began working with private clients, I had the mentality that working with as many people as possible was the way to go. I’ve since learned the opposite is actually true: not every opportunity is a good opportunity. I think it helps to be extremely selective in who you work with. The clients that I have had for years came to me easily and are just as flexible with me as I am with them. While being picky means that things will take more time, in the end pickiness pays off because you don’t waste your time and energy on people who see you as a transaction instead of a person. Especially when it comes to something as spiritual in nature as yoga, ensuring that the student-teacher relationship is one of mutual respect–for each others’ time, lives, finances, etc.–is everything.

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

Pivoting is part of yoga practice, because living yoga means understanding that things always change and evolution is necessary. When COVID hit, I had to transition to working with clients online, something I resisted for a long time because I firmly believe yoga is best in person. However, working with clients online comes with its own benefits: location and time constraints aren’t really a thing, and it makes yoga much more accessible in many ways for many people. I now almost exclusively work with clients online, and I am grateful that I did not let initial resistance to online yoga keep me from engaging with it. In fact, I am now pursuing my PhD because I have the flexibility I need to do so because of my online client base.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://danielakenttorres.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielakenttorres/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-kent/
• Other: https://annenberg.usc.edu/news/spotlight/yoga-practitioners-personal-health-journey-inspires-academic-mission

Image Credits

Photographed by Sean Dube