YOGA IS WHERE I WENT TO HEAL

For years, my work was to pay attention to what was happening in the world.

I was a journalist and editor, telling stories about social injustice and the people working to make sense of—and change—the systems shaping their lives.

I began my journalism career in 2007 at a community newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, covering social injustice and the impact local and state government had on its residents. Later, I joined an independent, nonprofit national magazine as its racial justice editor, focusing on solutions to the injustice. I eventually became a senior editor and then the magazine’s executive editor before leaving in 2022.

I was passionate about that work.

It mattered to me to tell stories that might otherwise go unheard. To examine the histories behind the headlines. To ask questions about power, inequity, belonging, and what it takes to create a more just world.

But there was a cost to spending so much time looking directly at injustice.

The stories were difficult.

The work was demanding.

And eventually, I realized I needed somewhere to put everything I was carrying.

For me, that place was yoga.

Yoga was where I went to heal from the work.

Learning to come back to myself

Yoga gave me something journalism couldn’t. It gave me a way to come back into my body.

To breathe. To become grounded. To notice what I was feeling instead of simply thinking my way through it. To rest. To create enough space inside myself to keep going.

At first, I thought of yoga as something separate from my work. Journalism was about the world “out there.” Yoga was about what happened on my mat. But over time, I began to see the connection.

My journalism practice had taught me to pay attention to stories—the stories we inherit, the stories institutions tell, and the stories that shape how we understand who belongs, who matters, and what is possible.

Yoga taught me to pay attention to another kind of story: the story happening inside a human being.

What happens when we feel safe?

What happens when we can finally breathe again?

What happens when we begin listening to a body we have spent years ignoring?

What happens when we develop capacity to pause before reacting?

And what happens when that inner shift follows us home—to our families, our relationships, our communities, and the choices we make?

Those questions eventually became central to my work at Get Even Yoga.

From the page to the body

I don’t believe inner work is a substitute for changing the conditions that make people suffer.

We need to understand systems.

We need to challenge inequity.

We need to pay attention to history, power, and the structures that shape our lives.

But I also believe that sustainable change asks something of us internally.

We must not only heal the suffering that oppression causes, but we must also heal the suffering that causes oppression. This is internal work required by each individual.

I agree with Detroit musical artist Sterling Toles, who said, "We must not only heal the suffering that oppression causes, but we must also heal the suffering that causes oppression.

This is internal work required by each individual.

Because we can know exactly what needs to change and still be too exhausted, disconnected, overwhelmed, or dysregulated to participate in changing it.

We can understand injustice intellectually and still struggle to recognize what stress, fear, grief, pride, or anger are doing inside our own bodies.

We can spend years caring for everyone else while neglecting ourselves.

Yoga helped me understand that the body is not separate from the work of creating change.

It is very much a part of it.

This is where Get Even Yoga lives.

Why Get Even?

I founded Get Even because I wanted to create for others the kind of space I had needed myself.

A place where you could slow down.

Breathe. Listen. Rest. Move. Feel. Reconnect.

And begin to understand that healing doesn’t have to mean becoming better at enduring what hurts us.

The name Get Even actually predates the yoga studio.

Nearly 20 years ago, I used it for a blog called Get Even Girl, a space for solo mothers navigating difficult relationships with unsupportive co-parents.

Over time, “getting even” came to mean something different to me.

Not retaliation. Not revenge. But balance.

Finding your way back to yourself.

Getting even with yourself, in a sense—coming back into relationship with the parts of you that may have been neglected, silenced, or pushed aside.

I held on to the name because I knew that someday I would use it for something meaningful.

Eventually, that something became yoga.

GOING DEEPER

Today, Get Even is a therapeutic yoga practice rooted in a simple belief:

We cannot create sustainable change in our lives or our communities without developing a different relationship with ourselves.

My work is continuing to evolve.

I’m currently pursuing advanced training in yoga therapy through an integrative medicine program at a renowned hospital in Southeast Michigan. The clinical experience is expanding my understanding of how yoga practices can be adapted to meet people where they are, including people navigating significant health challenges.

That training is changing how I think about the possibilities for Get Even.

I’m interested in a practice that is not only compassionate, but thoughtful.

Not only accessible, but grounded in evidence and clinical understanding.

Not only focused on what happens during a yoga class, but on how the practices we learn can support us in the rest of our lives.

I want Get Even to grow in depth as much as it grows in reach.

A bigger vision

Get Even began as a mobile service and now is a studio.

Yet my vision is larger than a studio.

I’m building a healing-centered, self-awareness practice that makes the tools of yoga more accessible to people navigating the pressures, inequities, and disconnection of contemporary life.

I imagine Get Even growing through one-on-one and small-group sessions, partnerships, workshops, retreats, educational programming, and accessible therapeutic offerings.

I want to help people who have never thought of themselves as “a yoga person” to discover a practice that is their own—one that can change with them, meet them where they are, help them listen more closely to their bodies, understand what they need, support them in their actual lives, and become a resource they can return to again and again.

The studio is only the beginning.

The deeper work is helping people come home to themselves. Because I know what it feels like to need that journey. I took it myself. And now, I get to offer a place for other people to begin.