09/14/2026
✨️Teacher Feature✨️ Meet Heather Fenwick! You can practice with her when she subs a class and when she leads the next studio workshop on September 26th - "Late Summer Slowdown: Gentle Yoga & Acupressure"
(Visit pilgrimageyoga.com or the link in our bio to sign up.)
🧡 How do you incorporate mindfulness into your daily life?
Lately I've been trying to notice my "self talk", which just means that when a difficult moment arises, and I don't handle it perfectly - my knee-jerk reaction is to tell myself that I'm doing a bad job and I'm ruining things for everyone else.
When I can take a moment to see that this is happening, I ask my inner voice to become my friend. Can I talk to myself the way I would talk to a friend in this same situation. 100% of the time I would never say to someone the words I've told to myself.
🧡 What advice would you give to someone new to yoga?
Take a gentle class, and don't worry if your body can't do what everyone else's does. When someone says that they're inflexible so they can't do yoga, it's like saying "I'm dehydrated so I can't drink water."
I often refer back to this time that I had a student come to my Hot Flow 2 class, and ten minutes into the practice, he lay down on his mat and took a savasana for the last 50 minutes of class. To this day, it's the best yoga practice I've ever seen - he listened to what his body needed, and didn't feel pressured to perform for other people. Chef's kiss.
🧡 How has yoga changed your life outside of the mat?
Yoga has changed my whole life. Not only am I more patient, kinder, able to see that hardships make me a better person...yoga also led me to my calling as a Chinese Medicine healer. When I took my first yoga teacher training in 2005, I was so enthralled that I quit my office job and got a one way ticket to India to learn more about this ancient art. I was surprised that the yoga they practice in the Motherland wasn't as physically precise as the yoga here (in my experience) - but I did learn to meditate, and I took an Ayurveda course (India's holistic medicine) at a family's home in Kerala.
Since Ayurveda didn't quite resonate as a life path for me, I was drawn to study Thai massage in Thailand, which I loved. After that 10 month trip, I came back to the USA, and went to Pacific College of Oriental Medicine to get my massage license, but fell in love with Chinese Medicine along the way. A 6-month certificate program turned into a 4-year full-time post graduate program... but it took me 8 years because I went back to India 6 more times... so I can also thank yoga for leading me to my Dharma (life's purpose) as not just a yoga instructor, but also an acupuncturist.
