I am so honored and excited to share the news that Manduka, a sustainable yoga products company, made me their yogi of the week. My yoga story is posted on their website and Facebook page header. I shared my yoga story of healing with Manduka to inspire others and to explain how that healing story provided the impetus for the start of Compass Yoga, the nonprofit I founded to bring the therapeutic benefits of yoga to more people in more places, regardless of their financial and socioeconomic circumstances.
Here is the text of my yoga story as it appears on the Manduka site:
Meet Christa.
Christa used to manage Broadway shows for a living. That’s how she found yoga.
A musician working on one of the shows also happened to teach Iyengar yoga, and could sense the stress and pressure that Christa was under. He ended up offering her private instruction for close to 6 months – all he asked in return was that she ‘pay it forward’ to someone else in need.
Christa took that request and ran with it. She has opened a non-profit organization called Compass Yoga, teaching free yoga classes in New York City to people who don’t otherwise have the opportunity, or the funds, to begin a yoga practice.
This past spring, Christa went on her first trip to India. It was an experience that broke her down and built her back up completely new, and more powerful. She now refers to her life in two eras: her life before India, and now her life after India. She returned home with a new-found gratitude for all of the opportunities she has available to her, and feels more determined in her purpose to spread the benefits of yoga and meditation to more people.
Yoga has truly been therapeutic for Christa. It has helped her to work through her father’s passing, and to let go of the guilt she still carried from their rocky relationship. Yoga taught her that we don’t have to wait for healing, it is within us and available to us all the time. We have all the answers and all the knowledge we need; we just need to tap into it.
We loved learning about Christa.
Practice On.
–Manduka
Christa Avampato 