Hi, I'm Maddy. I wasn't ready either.

My story

I was tight like the Tin Man

When I wanted to do my first teacher training, I wasn't strong, I wasn't flexible and my mind was all over the place. I was not the strong and bendy yogini you might see on my Instagram today. Not even close.

In July 2017, after years of spiraling with alcohol and drugs, I got sober, and I've stayed sober ever since. A month later, I started a semester-long yoga class for my kinesiology degree. I thought it would be physical. Instead, it cracked my heart wide open.

My mind used to feel like a scary place, and yoga became the one place I could breathe. I turned a tiny room in my townhouse, just big enough for a yoga mat, into my sanctuary and spent hours in there. I fell in love, and I wanted to go deeper.

So I told my teacher, "I think I want to do a teacher training someday, but I'm not ready yet. I'm not strong enough, I'm not flexible enough." She looked at me and said:

"You don't have to be ready. YTT gets you ready. If you have the call to do it, do it."

In 2018 I flew to Thailand for my first YTT. It was my first solo trip and my first time in Southeast Asia, and I celebrated one year sober during that training. It changed my life. At that point I had already been teaching fitness classes for four years while earning my kinesiology degree, so I added yoga to my schedule and started teaching right away.

Why I built this training

Over the years, I devoted 1,000+ hours to formal yoga teacher trainings, plus many more in other movement modalities, and I started noticing the little details that make the difference between an average teacher and an excellent one. I take being a teacher to heart, because I know the profound impact you can have on someone's life. This practice changed mine, so I keep past me in my mind and in my heart every time I teach.

Later, I became a lead teacher and spent years leading yoga teacher trainings at studios in California. I also became a hiring manager for new teachers, so I was the one running auditions, and I watched so many new grads freeze. That wasn't their fault; it was their training's. Their training didn't give them enough experience practice teaching. Plus they'd been handed cues, scripts, and sequences to memorize, but never taught the why.

Whether I hired someone never came down to how "advanced" their asana practice was. Flexible or not, strong or not, the teachers I hired were the ones watching the room, who could truly see the people in front of them and hold space for them. That's when it clicked for me: teaching and practicing are two completely different skills.

So I moved across the world to Indonesia to follow my dream of living and teaching yoga abroad full time, and I founded Samastha Yoga Shala in Lombok. I built it around the thing so many trainings skip. Since then, I've watched people who were sure they weren't "advanced enough" become teachers, leading their own classes and making a real impact on their students all over the world.