Welcoming our newest instructor Caitlin McGarry! While backpacking solo through Southeast Asia, Caitlin fell in love with yoga. Regularly trading yoga classes for room and board at hostels, she discovered it’s not just an asana practice but a way of life. Caitlin joins MixPose to share her passion for yoga and brings a wealth of experience in alignment Vinyasa and Hatha yoga.
Her most memorable travel moments
- Braking left heel in Spain and not being able to walk for 2 weeks (walking is very important for traveling)
- Getting stranded on the border of Vietnam and Cambodia at 4am! With no cell service!!
- Sleeping in a traditional Bedouin camp in the Wadi Rum, Jordan (The place the film all the mars movies in!)
- Hiking to the top of an 2 separate active volcanoes in Indonesia at 2am
In her own words:
“After practicing for 6 years, I decided to get my 200 hour RYT in alignment vinyasa and Hatha Flow at Ananda yoga center in Koh Phangan, Thailand before embarking on a 7-month long backpacking trip.
Throughout my travels, I traded teaching yoga classes for room and board at many hostels in various countries. It was exciting teaching students on a rooftop in Bagan, Myanmar while the hot air balloons rose at sunrise over the thousands of ancient temples in the background. Nothing quite compares to teaching in an open-air shala on a palm tree-lined beach in Siargao, Philippines looking out over the blue-green waters of the Philippine Sea.
My practice and teaching style has been shaped largely by my global travels. On my first 9 month trip, I traveled solo. It required an immense amount of endurance, confidence, and independence. When you have endurance, you can consciously make decisions and live with what comes from those decisions (this sounds a lot like the benefit you may gain from a meditation practice). You don’t automatically start off doing yoga with confidence, it takes time and practice to build up to it. Which is the same in my travels. When I first left the U.S, I was scared and nervous about the unknown, but after some weeks and months went by, I started to gain confidence in myself and my abilities to do what I was doing alone. And lastly, independence, yoga is a journey into oneself, it is an independent practice filled with introspection and pushing yourself to achieve things that were once personal barriers (maybe independence in and of itself is a personal barrier?).
My philosophy is that yoga is not just an asana practice it’s a way of life and living; a yogic state of mind. I always keep with me the feeling I get when I first step foot in a new and vibrant country and I bring the same feeling to my teaching — a feeling of bliss, novelty, and expansion of prior limits. Yoga has shaped me in many ways, from how I live my everyday life to how I approach difficult situations. I am so blessed to have found the practice of yoga as early as I did. My mission is to share my practice with people all over the world. Currently, I am taking a Meditation facilitator course (through the same school I did my teacher training with) to get more in-depth into my personal meditation practice and to be able to facilitate transformative meditations.”
Check out Caitlin’s schedule on MixPose.
MixPose offers free daily classes from great instructors like Caitlin. Try a class today!
