0:00 With busy schedules, we don't always have the time or remember the importance of getting in touch with our bodies and taking care of ourselves. I spoke with Aya Norris, a yoga instructor at Good Space in Toronto. We talked about her journey into yoga, teaching and connecting with herself and students. 0:15 All my years of practice kind of led to being able to teach quite intuitively, it's just a it's a beautiful offering to share with people. 0:23 Then I briefly chat with Samantha Foster who works at Canada's National Ballet School and how the school provides students with the space to better themselves and share dance with one another. 0:32 It's really about celebrating different types of people and different types of dance. 0:37 These two forms of movement may seem different, and on first thought they are. But what connects them is a form of empowerment, whether it's self motivated, or through those around us. Aya Norris was stressed. She was fresh out of university with a business degree when she started personally practicing yoga as a way to relieve her stress. 0:58 I never would have guessed when I was in university, this is what I'd be doing. The real world was a real thing. My corporate job like had a lot of stress right at the gates. Yoga kind of got me down the rabbit hole of mindfulness and meditation and holistic healing and Eastern philosophy and spirituality. I had a personal practice for many years and then I left my last job. I was working as a director of sales. I was like, alright, I think like all these things I've been doing on the side to just keep myself balanced, I think it's time to share them. 1:26 For a couple years she did energy healing work, but was reluctant to teach yoga. Conveniently, Aya decided to do her yoga teaching in India, for her personal practice. 1:36 I did my yoga teacher training just for my in India, just for my own personal practice. I was resistant to like when I got in, I was like, oh, I'm not gonna teach. And then I taught my first class. And I was like, well, I really recognize like everybody, and everybody at the end of the class we did feedback was like, you have to teach. There was like, that was actually really fun and I could see that, you know, similar after the healings, like people would just leave the healing in like such a calm, beautiful, blissful state. So yeah, it was a natural fit. 2:05 Samantha Foster works with Canada's National Ballet School as a strategic administrative assistant. She acknowledged the challenge of ballet, but she noted the importance of having a solid relationship with one's dance team. 2:17 What's difficult about dance is oftentimes you have to be a team, you're there for each other. You go through all of it together. So it's striking that balance of supporting each other and helping you get through such an emotional and like physically taxing experience. 2:33 The ballet school staff and students work to provide a welcoming space for dancers to reach out and look out for one another. This ensures dancers are propelling their bodies in the right direction. 2:43 They're meant to like, kind of be a surrogate family. Well, because they're kids, you know. All the staff and the students have a really close eye on each other. Just because this industry does lend itself to people developing like things like eating disorders, they definitely happen. And so I think everyone always has a very close eye on each other. And it's a very open environment where people are encouraged to, you know, speak up if, if they think someone might need that help. The best step is to just be in really close communication with your teachers and the artistic staff and just be really open about where you're at. And then they have, like chefs and people on site, but custom make menus to give the body exactly what they need. To make sure that the students are, they can feel confident that their food is healthy and feeling their body like exactly the way it should. 3:32 The school also works to create a space for non-dancers. Samantha is involved with planning some of the events at the NBS including sharing dance day. The event is an inclusive community for dancers of all ages to participate and feel connected. 3:47 We do a lot of community work. Like we help serve like dance therapy for people with Parkinson's disease, seniors classes, we do workshops with, with kids. It's not just all about professional ballet. I think the school really wanted to share dance with everyone. We too, I'm sharing dance day every year, which is kind of a culmination of the kids community activities. Every year the school develops choreography that's distributed around Canada and different teachers run it with their students all across the country. It's really about celebrating different types of people on different types of dance. 4:26 Aya has been teaching at good space since 2018. when it opened. She loves the response from people who take her classes and enjoy seeing the growth of the studio, but also the growth and connections she's made with her students. 4:39 It's been so cool to be a part of the studio like since opening days and see you know, in the beginning we were brand new and so you know, I'd have like one person on my Sunday morning lesson and do the practice and now like it's so amazing to have full classes and to see the students grow. It's so fun to be like oh my god, these people are coming to like my classes in the beginning and then they're like working their way up. I feel this, like, you know, teachers pride. The heart of what I do, again, is bringing people back home and so I do a lot of guidance with the classes to just like help it be a little more of an introspective class for people to like really tune in to what's going on in their bodies. What's going on in their minds, what's going on in their hearts to kind of connect to their own wisdom. So I'll always like weave in themes of things that I'm exploring off the mat or learning about. So I'll say something, and it's always what I need at the time and then I'll have you know, my students come out and be like, that was exactly the message that I needed. So it's really beautiful. How just, you know, we're all connected. It's just so wild to see the energy of people when they come and, you know, people when they've just so blissed out and calm. I think it really is just like to be able to see that shift in energy for people and to be able to know that I'm a part of offering them this space to really reconnect to themselves and to really ground down and to really find more of a place of peace and ease within themselves. And it's so fun for me to share. It comes really intuitively for me. I think all my years of practice kind of led to being able to teach quite intuitively. It's just a it's a beautiful offering to share with people. 6:13 Thank you to Aya and Samantha for speaking with me.