We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Hannah Saunders. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Hannah below.
Hannah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
In 2020, before the world shut down, I did the most incredible solo road trip and drove from Jackson Hole to San Francisco and then down the entire coast of California. A few years prior I’d moved from Chicago to Jackson Hole and was still getting to know this new version of myself who took so many more leaps of faith than she used to. I’d always been interested in California but on a yoga retreat in Mexico the year prior I’d been in a sweat lodge ceremony and heard a voice tell me “you need to keep going West, further West than you are now”. It was such a big experience full of highs and lows, but all integral to my evolution. Near the end of the trip in Encinitas, CA I found the school where I would choose to complete my 500 hr yoga certification. It feels like one of those lifelong experiences I’ll always get to have– I’ll always be the person who pulled off an entire coast of California solo road trip.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
I’m a 500 hr registered yoga teacher specializing in therapeutics– and everything I offer is born out of my own lived experience with chronic pain and disease. I was lost in various health issues for such a long time, facing an endless circuit of doctors and feeling like no one bothered to really listen to me and my unique story and circumstances. In particular I started having daily tension headaches that colored my life and made me feel lonely and separate from my twentysomething peers in Chicago, who were all out having fun. It was a long road of trying many things before I eventually stumbled into an Iyengar yoga studio, and began to see over time the subtle and profound ways the practice was benefitting my life. It was then and remains to this day the most helpful thing I have found for treating my chronic pain. But it also introduced me to the deeper elements of yoga such as greater ease in one’s self and peace in our circumstances– not as we wish them to be, but as they actually are. I’ve become fascinated and deeply committed to the concept of healing, and now as a yoga teacher that’s my focus. I teach my students how to heal themselves through yoga. Whether it be chronic pain (mine stems from scoliosis) or chronic disease (I have multiple autoimmune diseases) there are bountiful lessons and sources of ease yoga provides, and my mission is to put those tools directly in my students’ hands. And unlike other practitioners in the West who may focus more on the athletic-y aspects of yoga, my focus is on feeling good as your whole self– body/mind/spirit. I also love infusing my other interests into my practice– I’m a Reiki practitioner and singer/songwriter, so elements of energy and music tend to be a part of my approach as well!
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
I’m proud of my depth of training, but I consider my greatest teacher to be my own experience living with chronic pain and disease. It allows me to help people from a first hand knowingness of what those challenges are like. It also allows me to have deep compassion for the various states of being in which a person may show up to practice with me. I know what it’s like to be afraid to try anything for fear of further injury, to feel like no one else will ever understand, and even to get lost in group settings where the teacher didn’t carve out the space to adequately consider your circumstances. There have been so many times where I’ve attended a class or training and my challenges have either been glossed over, or worse have been used to label me as “other”. It’s my deepest intention that all my students feel seen, know that I really want to help them, and believe that we can all attain healing and are in fact already whole and complete as we are.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn the concept that my scoliosis, chronic pain, and autoimmune diseases made me “broken”. I bestowed such fragility over everything and thought that the only way to move through life was with an abundance of caution. When I first started my yoga practice, I attended a class that was specifically for scoliosis. Incredible class, but also one that kept me living in a small way, as if I could only do things that had scoliosis in the title. A breakthrough moment for me was one week that class was cancelled, so I attended the general class in the other studio. Slowly proving to myself that I could practice with the larger and more inclusive group eventually influenced other aspects of my life too. Living small is one of the most damaging patterns we can adopt. We don’t have to be defined by whatever challenges and ailments we might possess at a given time, we are so much more.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hathaandheal.com
- Instagram: @hathaandheal
Image Credits
Hannah Hardaway https://hannahhardawayphoto.com/