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7 8 | M A C O N M A G A Z I N E F E B R U A R Y / M A R C H 2 0 1 9 and completely in love with movement, prayer and the intelligence of the body as it is healing. After training as a teacher for Arden Zinn, I started teaching various forms of exercise in 1981. When I proposed to offer my first yoga class at the Macon Health Club a few years later, I immediately had a room full of students and realized that, although I had significant training for certain types of movement education, this was going to be a much deeper journey. "I started traveling all over the country studying with the finest yoga teachers, physical therapists, physicians and healers that I could find. Iyengar style training was the only yoga publicly available in the Southeast in the 1980s. It provided a rigorous, sound foundation in alignment, safety and therapeutics upon which to build a lifetime of practice and study. "Eventually there were graduate courses in somatic psychology and dance- movement therapies at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., and six years of neurodevelopmental study and practice with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and her teachers in Amherst, Mass. Other formative influences for my approach today have included deep immersions in Continuum Movement with Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper, Authentic Movement trainings with Janet Adler, et. al., expressive art and movement studies with Anna Halprin at the Tamalpa Institute in California, and over 20 years of training in various Sufi meditation lineages. "In the early 1990s, I was registered as a Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator with ISMETA (International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association). My certification as an Infant Developmental Movement Educator brought me 13 years of work for DFCS in inner city day-care settings with special needs children and their caregivers. I set up yoga nooks in classrooms for 3- and 4-year-olds and had big fun experimenting with ways to explore breath, light and healing with them. "The Macon Health Club yoga classes continued for 23 years and some of the people who were there in the beginning are still with me today. I have taught for credit and community classes at Wesleyan College for almost two decades now and, over a period of 37 years, have had astonishing opportunities to work with oncology groups, churches, hospitals, school systems, social workers, chronic pain groups, corporate wellness programs, Montessori, the Emory University Dance Department, the Georgia Psychological Association, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and the most wonderful human beings imaginable right here in Macon. "Yoga and meditation are disciplines which will carry you the distance of a lifetime. Much of my work as a neurodevelopmental therapist over the past 25 years has focused upon Parkinson's diagnosis and stroke, and I have had the privilege of walking to the end of life with many inspiring, heroic men, women and their families. They are, and will be, my primary teachers now. "There is a way that meditation training, ultimately, is a training in annihilation. We are all apprenticing to the arc of our own disappearance and the realization that the only thing we can take with us is our state of mind. "The physical training in asana and pranayama is only preparation for great wild pilgrimages, ambushes and detours that will open up in the heart. I honor the teachers, guides, students, circumstances and privileges that have brought me this far and can't wait to see what happens next." Bringing extraordinary, innovative artistry from the classical music world to Macon since 1933 Adult $25, Student $10 478-301-5470 | macon365.com Macon Concert Association presents one of today's most dynamic and versatile young ensembles Argus Quartet Tuesday, April 2, 2019 7:00PM Pierce Chapel, Wesleyan College Celebrating the Good Life & Great Stories macon Celebrating the good life & great stories magazine Subscribe Online: maconmagazine.com or call (478) 746-7779. Front Cover FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 $3.50 Celebrating the Good Life macon magazine Plus: Welcome 2019 with 13 ways to live well, 9 Georgia adventures, 3 fierce fashionistas and countless Macon made gift ideas Be brilliant Building stronger youth Honoring family traditions Collaborating for our future D E C E M B E R / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 M A C O N M A G A Z I N E | 8 9 M B E R / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 FineLine Technologies JN 140406 Index 1 80% 2.0 BWR ND 0 2 1346919810 12 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019 $3.50 Celebrating the good life & great stories macon magazine Plus: Welcome 2019 with 13 ways to live well, 9 Georgia adventures, 3 fierce fashionistas and countless Macon-made gift ideas Be brilliant Building stronger youth Honoring family traditions Collaborating for our future MOLLY MARTIN