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

Alright, Todd thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share an anecdote or story from your schooling/training that you feel illustrates what the overall experience was like?

I am a yoga teacher. My background was as a professional jazz pianist. Many years ago, I went to my first yoga retreat for 10 days and stayed for 13 years! I had a complete transformation of my heart. One of the most important teachings at that time was that it wasn’t so much about my desire to make beautiful music, it was about being a musician of life. My heart awakened to a deeper desire to really make a difference in the world, to open people’s hearts to the joy that’s buried deep inside.

As a young entrepreneurial man, I had held back all of my feelings. It wasn’t okay to cry. Crying was a sign of weakness. Big boys don’t cry! But when my heart opened in yoga, I was surrounded by a loving community and by a teacher who was very skilled at helping people feel safe so they could let go. I’ll never forget crying my eyes out almost every day for 10 days on retreat. By the end of the retreat I was changed person. I wasn’t afraid to follow my heart and step into what the rest of my life would become.

The path of the heart is not an easy path. To choose to be vulnerable, honest, and open, instead of “right”, takes courage. But when any one person in a room chooses to relax and let go, it impacts everyone in the room. I’ve learned to be the first one to let go, admit fault, forgive, or apologize. When I’m able to let down my defenses, others let down theirs too. There is an inherent strength in yoga to open the heart and seek deeper guidance. For this to happen, one must release the need to control everything and open to the bigger energy. I call it, opening to grace.

In the philosophy I teach that underlies my method, Ashaya Yoga, (Ashaya means abode of the heart), we are co-participators with grace. Sometimes grace leads and we follow and at other times, we lead and grace follows us. It’s a dance.

This brings to light the teaching metaphor that for the bird to fly, it must flap both wings – one wing is self-effort and the other wing is grace. If we only flap the effort wing, the bird can only fly in a circle. How often do we over-effort in life? But if we only flap the wing of grace, we’ll also only fly in a circle. When it’s all grace, we tend to space out, loose our identity, loose our purpose and our unique gift.

We all have a unique gift to give. Finding your gift is a feature of the yoga I teach. When we find the balance between self-effort and grace our life becomes a flow. We have agency. In the highest sense, we are all gods and goddesses in disguise. We are born with cosmic amnesia where we forget where we come from. Forgetting our divine gifts can lead to low self-esteem, self-doubt, and even depression. Yoga is about living a full and joyful life with your heart open and full of gratitude for all of the good that we have in this world. To know what our purpose is, to know what our gift is, and then to live on purpose and offer it in service to others brings the greatest joy.

Todd, 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 am the founder of Ashaya Yoga, LLC, a company dedicated to the upliftment and transformation of the heart. I help people find their deeper purpose in life that supports them to live every day from a place of inspiration and confidence that they can make a difference.

My company focuses on the integration of body, mind, and heart as the way to radiant health and joy. I teach an alignment-based, therapeutic yoga, infused with heart teachings sourced from the ancient Tantric Yoga tradition. This tradition is based on the highest teaching of freedom, Svatantrya in Sanskrit, that means one’s own unbounded freedom. When you engage with life from the place of the heart, as a co-participator with grace, you recognize that everything in life is for your awakening and that life has your back. Even with all of the challenges that come into everyone’s life. There’s a deeper purpose underneath that when you can take a step back, you recognize the absolute perfection of how the universe has organized itself to make you exactly who you are. When you deeply believe this, instead of trying the change the unchangeable by trying to change our past or changing others, you take the wisdom from the past and apply it to the future. You begin to live as a “musician of life” where you are the master of your destiny.

Along with the practices of mantra, meditation, pranayama (yogic breathing), and asana (postures), Ashaya is a whole-system method that works on purifying the body, mind, and heart. Happiness is what’s leftover when you are out of the way! Our true nature is happiness, but we need to stop all of the negative chatter, doubt, anxiety, and fear that clouds the mind. I help people touch the deepest happiness within, which I call “unreasonable happiness”, happiness for no reason at all!

I offer an online monthly membership at www.ashayayoga.com, along with a schedule of live in person and live online workshops, retreats, and teacher trainings. In addition, I wrote a book, Tantra Yoga: Journey to Unbreakable Wholeness, A Memoir, that further explains the philosophy behind my method and is an inspirational book about the journey of the heart.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I followed two yoga gurus and paths both of which ended horribly in a scandal involved inappropriate sex and abuse of power. The first experience lasted 17 years. I lived at a yoga ashram with strict rules around celibacy. But whole time the founder was having inappropriate sex with several of the female disciples. Finally he was called out on and he denied it, lying to the community for over a year. Eventually more and more women came out and said it was true, they were victims, that he finally admitted it. This created a rift in the community and brought the whole thing down. We fired the guru which was unprecedented at that time. I was proud of the community for standing up for moral justice.

I was devasted in that I had given 17 years of my life to the organization which promised life-time care. All of my dreams were crushed, shattered, and I felt very lost. I gave up practicing yoga for a few months but gradually went back to it because the yoga was always true. It was the founder who messed up.

A few years later, I followed another charismatic teacher, this time for 15 years. Then a similar thing happened. His personal life was called into question and sure enough there was abuse of power and sex. This community crumbled but since this was my second time, I was a little more grounded and sure of myself. Still devastated, I had to walk away from the teachings, the teacher, and the community, for the second time! But then within that year, I got up the strength and determination to brand my own form of yoga, called Ashaya (abode of the heart). I’ve been able to forgive my predecessors for their transgressions and mistakes and I’m even able to bow to them in gratitude. That if it hadn’t been for them, I probably never would have branded my own method of yoga. I just knew that I didn’t want to follow another guru ever. So I created my own community that’s founded on the heart, that empowers others to rise up and be their best self, and to take me and any other yoga leader off the pedestal. I always try to show my human side, my shadow, my lesser evolved self, because we need to be able to embrace the full spectrum of our being – shadow light, in order to be whole and authentic.

I’ll never forget what a great yogi, Deepak Chopra said, “If you think you don’t have a shadow, then you must not be standing in the light.” We all have a shadow and it’s so important in Ashaya Yoga, that we learn how to embrace our shadow and learn from it.

I’m grateful for the resilience of my heart to rise up, not once, but twice after losing everything I worked for, in order to step more fully into the gift of myself. I’ve learned that no matter how hard we fall, the heart will rise again. We need to cultivate a bounce back attitude. This is a feature of life. Life always finds a way. But we have to stay in our heart, believe we can rise up again, dream again, and love again!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

I’ve tried everything. I’ve burned through many marketing consultants and brand specialists. They all helped. But the number one way that has grown my business is by me being me. The more I get out there and teach, the more students get attracted to what I have to offer. Word of mouth and the actual experience of being in my classes, is that attracts the most students. During covid, I had to stop teaching live in person. Initially my numbers went up because so many people were stuck at home with nothing to do. But after a year or so of online yoga, many students dropped out. Probably from screen fatigue.

Then when it was safe, I began teaching live in person. My numbers are growing again and I’m so enjoying the actual live in person connection with students. It’s been wonderful. Now I have an online membership which keeps students practicing during the week, while I travel on weekends offering workshops and retreats. The live in person workshops funnel students into my online membership, and the online membership becomes a potent market to inspire the online community to try me out live in person. It’s a win win now and feels like just the right balance for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ashayayoga.com
• Instagram: @ashayayoga
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AshayaYoga/
• Youtube: youtube.com/ashayayoga/