Today we’d like to introduce you to Krista Shirley.
Hi Krista, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m the youngest of three girls born and raised in the sweet south. My daddy died when I was eight and I learned at a young age that I will not always be able to control external things outside of me: death, tragedy, other people’s choices or behaviors, bullies, the weather aha; I can only control those which are internal. I didn’t have healthy outlets to handle my father’s suicide, his choice to leave this world. My family didn’t have the support of our church to bury my father properly or even to step foot inside it again ourselves after his death. My sisters and I didn’t get the support we needed through the education system to protect us from bullies, both parents and students, after my father’s death.
Through the years, I consciously and subconsciously learned how to cope, how to survive, and when yoga appeared in my life, I really started learning how to thrive. I had found nutrition and health education and exercised sciences at age fourteen and I poured myself into it for years before I found Yoga; but it wasn’t until I was a Junior in College that I really found and fell in love with the spiritual practices of Yoga and Meditation. I was attending Rollins College where I majored in Classical Studies and Anthropology and minored in Archaeology. I worked and interned through school and also got certified in Pilates and started teaching that when I found Ashtanga Yoga. It changed my life in every possible way! I’ll never forget the day I walked into my first class, and Karen Breneman confidently choreographed a sea of students, through a beautiful flowing sequence of movements, using the ancient Sanskrit tongue, politely but persistently reminding us of the imperativeness of our focus on our breathing, encouraging us to move and breath and connect. It was amazing. I found a physical practice that was steeped in history, culture, language; was part of an ancient tradition, part of a lineage, something that taught the seeker step by step towards greater physical and mental happiness! Yes please! And to study at the source meant to travel to foreign lands and immerse myself in other cultures and languages and learn about their history and peoples and traditions and customs and everything! YES PLEASE! And it meant I’d get to help people feel better and look better and build more confidence and more connection to source and purpose in life? YESSSSS PLEASSEEE!
Once I graduated from College, I started to travel and study with great teachers. I did my first yoga teacher training with Manju Jois in Chicago and later that year, I spent a month in Thailand doing a very intensive immersion teacher training. I came home from that and taught Yoga all over central Florida for about a year and a half until I saved up enough for my first trip to India. In 2006, I made my first of ten trips to Mother India to study yoga asana, pranayama, meditation, dance, scriptures, art, language, cooking, textiles and more. I fell in love with India and I spent ten months there my first trip. I went home broke but changed and fulfilled and so so alive. Each year for years, I’d work to save up enough money to go back for two-three months at a time. In February 2009, during my fourth trip to India, my teacher took me in his office and told me it was time for me to go home and open a yoga shala dedicated to the teachings of Ashtanga Yoga. He bestowed upon me Level II authorization from the Krishna Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, India. Shocked, honored, stunned and scared, I went home with a new mission. I kept teaching around town for a few months until I got a new place to live and found a very tiny temporary location for my new Mysore Program and my brand new Yoga Shala. I was saddened but moved to learn my teacher passed on the day that I opened our little shala in Winter Park. I felt an even deeper sense of duty, then, to carry on this sacred and beautiful practice; a duty that really became my beacon of light through the years regarding how to navigate my business.
I spent a few months in this first space on Michigan street in Winter Park in 2009, teaching morning yoga classes. Yet the whole time, I was actively looking for a bigger and better space; and in late August 2009, I signed the five-year lease to our first official shala in Winter Park. I also found out the very next day that I would be having a baby! It was a very exciting but also stressful time in so many ways; so much change for me in my life. And on top of it all, I got engaged, had to start looking for a house for our new family, had to navigate my way through business plans and loan applications and a buildout for the shala; learn from scratch how to start and run a business, and prepare to become a mom. I was a high-risk pregnancy too, so that added an extra layer of challenges to things. On October 10, 2009 I officially opened The Yoga Shala in Winter Park, off Pennsylvania Avenue. Pregnant, engaged, authorized and very excited for the future, I was birthing so many new beginnings at one time. In January of 2010, six months pregnant and mom to an infant brick and mortar business, I made my first trip to India after my beloved teacher passed away. When I returned home, I worked hard to get our new home ready for my son to be born, and on May 3, 2010 my son Kaiden Park joined us in the world. His light, his shine, his entrance into my life changed everything for me; fore he gave me a greater sense of purpose than I’d ever known possible.
The next few years were a whirlwind of building the yoga shala, raising my son, trips to India with my son, planning a wedding, getting married; creating and implanting new programs in the yoga shala, in public and private schools around the country, and in corporate settings; and the start of teaching national workshops and international retreats. And all the while struggling to find peace inside my own home. After eleven years with my partner, for my mental health and the future of my son and myself, I left my husband in 2013 and started yet another new chapter in my life. In late 2013 I bought a home in College Park, and in January of 2016 I moved The Yoga Shala to College Park as well.
The years 2016-2018 were full of teaching in Orlando and around the world, spending as much free time as I could traveling to South Carolina to be with my mother after her stroke and my family as a whole after my nephew’s death; being with my son enjoying his light, watching him grow, taking him to other countries, making memories; and navigating my way through it all. I was working far too much teaching students yoga, adjusting bodies, demonstrating, traveling, and trying to enjoy each moment that felt like it was flying by.
In April of 2019, my life changed even more when I had to undergo a rotator cuff surgery on my left shoulder for a supraspinatus tendon tear. Unfortunately, that surgery gave me an infection. I had to undergo a revision surgery in September and unfortunately, that surgeon accidentally severed my supra scapular nerve, killing my infraspinatus and supraspinatus; or my left shoulder and scapula function. There is so much I could share, and hope to one day, to help empower patients to be their own advocates. Yet, for now I’ll say that experts around the nation in many various fields of medicine were stumped by my medical anomaly – for although I pleaded from day one of the revision surgery that something was terribly wrong, and soon after surgery that I thought my suprascapular nerve had been severed during the last surgery – zero experts in any field believed that was even remotely a potential possibility in the field of possibilities. It was impossible I was told, so much so that I was misdiagnosed several times and underwent several unnecessary surgeries as a result. In April of 2020, I underwent surgery for nerve decompression in the hopes of decompressing this ‘uncut’ nerve because at this juncture, we had done every kind of test imaginable to figure out why my limb just stopped working the very day of surgery last September and no one could figure it out so it must be compressed… we hope…I thought I’d be under anesthesia for an hour, but instead I woke up from an 8.5 hour nerve transfer surgery to learn my nerve had indeed been severed during the surgery last September. They couldn’t find the other part of the cut nerve so they could not do a nerve graft. They felt they had to do something so they took part of my SAN, that powers my lower trapezius, and transferred it to my left suprascapular notch in my left shoulder in the hopes of getting some function back one day. I woke up to no nerve to power my rotator cuff, and now no nerve to power my mid and lower trapezius on my left limb.
The last few years have truly been my dark night of the soul. I have died and come back in many different ways. I lost everything I once cherished from my personal yoga practice which was my antidepressant, anti-anxiety, my sanctuary, my church; to my career, my yoga shala, part of my identity, all my life savings, my peace of mind, my sleep, my mental health, my everything.
Nerves are the hardest thing in the human body to heal or regenerate; they are finicky, they are very slow to grow (roughly one inch per month) if they ever do and you will never get back to 100%, even in the best case scenario. I spent nearly a year, April 2020-March 2021 waiting for these nerves to grow and by March 2021, my last nerve study showed all the nerves were still dead. My physical therapist then released me from his care and told me to go find an occupational therapist and get on disability. My nerve surgeon said the same.
That was a very defining moment for me in my life. I remember hearing my Doctors advise me on how to move forward with my life, and I remember thinking: I don’t know who you are talking about, but that is not my life, hahahahaha. I had slowly restarted some lite yoga asana in January, and it had been helping a little for tiny functional improvements, but I was scared because of all the surgeries and I didn’t want to make things worse. In March, I realized I had truly let all the fear or predictions or worst case scenarios of my doctors, my family, the odds, myself; I had allowed all these fears to consume me and I had to refocus on my tools. I got back to my mat differently in April.
January-April I was frustrated because my body knew the movements but, because I had limbs with inactive muscles, due to no nerves powering them, by body could not do the movements it knew how to do. It was a strange place for me. I’d been using Dr. Joe Dispenza work in brain science and meditation for about a year now and I had become accustomed to using blindfolds during his meditations. I then began blindfolding myself during yoga as I worked through the movements that my body knew so well; I had done the movements so many times my body could do it better than my mind. I was beginning to rewire my brain and body using only my mind. This is when real progress started for me. I was getting improvements in function, tons of improvement in my peace of mind, and things were starting to turn around overall. It was during this time that I had to close the yoga shala for good, during this time I found the very unique physical therapist I’d been searching for for years now, and it was during this time that I began to start to feel like myself again.
As of today, I can say that I’ve made it to the other side of the river, as Dr. Dispenza would say. I’m at a point where, yes, I am physically disabled, but I am working on my healing and more importantly, I am not letting it define me or disempower me. I am learning a new way of everything from how I fold my towels to how I prepare food to how I do yoga. I have gotten massive improvements in function the last few months with my yoga practice, my physical therapy, my meditation and diet and mindfulness practices and I am finding my way back to wholeness.
Despite the many challenges I faced on many fronts, I can joyfully say I really have lived so many of my dreams, I have been able to share my love of yoga and meditation and wellness with many beautiful souls around the world; I’ve gotten to truly see and feel and touch real magic through my healing, my practices, my teachings, my life. I’m continuing to heal and beginning to teach again and I am re-creating my life on many fronts, including my career and what I want to offer the world. I am excited to announce that I will be launching the new Wholeness website www.olotita.com very soon and you’ll be able to see any current or upcoming group classes, workshops, retreats as well as information on private service offerings. And, most importantly, I just re-launched my YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/c/kristayogini – it is the place I’ll be devoting most of my time to bring you content on health and wellness, nutrition, meditation, yoga, healing, mindfulness practices, body mechanics, astrology, history and so much more! I hope you’ll take a moment to check it out, I’ll be posting new content weekly and I am so excited to be bringing a lot of my passions to this platform in a much bigger way than before. I hope it brings you knowledge, joy, inspiration and tools to continue to work on your own journey towards self-mastery!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I owned The Yoga Shala in central Florida for almost 12 years and had to close that chapter of my life in April of this year due some physical tragedies of my own. I’ve devoted my entire life to health and wellness and specifically to yoga since 2003. I cherished all the years I taught full time. With great persistence and courage and a whole lotta faith, I followed my passions and made a living out of it. I melded my passions and knowledge of Anthropology, Yoga, Archaeology, Meditation and more into apprenticeships, national and international retreats, local and national workshops and more. It has always been a great honor for me to help people find empowerment and better health and wellness through Yoga and contemplative practices, to help coach them to be their best and follow their dreams and to help people create and implement yoga and wellness programs in various settings from public and private school systems, newly established yoga studios, corporate settings and more. Unfortunately, in 2019 during a routine shoulder surgery, a vital nerve in my left limb was accidentally severed. That was the catalyst for some major transformations in my own life and as a result, my new and inspired offering to the world! As traumatic as my physical tragedies have been, as traumatic as Covid-19 has been on everyone, especially small group service-based business’ like yoga studios, I am ‘crossing the river of change’ with renewed inspiration for my work, my purpose, my mission and I’m excited to help those seekers out there!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Although I am no longer offering daily morning Yoga classes daily, I am still offering them monthly! Check out our brand new website www.olotita.com for my class schedule. I am also spending most of my teaching time working privately with clients on all aspects of health and wellness from yoga asana to meditation to breath work to nutrition to life and career coaching to body mechanics to energy healing and more.
I am still running our product line, Nysa www.thenysamovement.com, but it has also been transitioned to our brand new website, www.olotita.com
And, as things return more to normal I will resume offering workshops and international retreats around the world! In fact, I’m currently planning 2022’s international yoga, meditation, adventure, archaeology, and cultural anthropology retreat to Turkey! Go to the website above to signup for the newsletter to stay up to date with local and international engagements we are putting together!
But my biggest and most exciting new and evolving offering will primarily be online, via my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/kristayogini
I’ve had the channel for years but never had the time to devote to making it what I envisioned it to be. I was very busy running The Yoga Shala, teaching workshops and retreats, being a single mommy to my amazing son Kaiden, keeping up with my personal practices and getting some sleep, aha! I’d throw videos up here and there, and when I could team up with a videographer every now and then I was able to put up a few quality videos. I’ve had a vision for my channel for a long time, but I never made the time, spent the time, invested the time into it the way I need to in order to make it the kind of platform I want it to become for my work. And that’s exactly what I am doing now! I’m teaching myself how to film and edit so I can produce and publish the video content I seek to offer on a consistent basis. It is my hope that my channel will be a great source of inspiration, education, empowerment and joy.
If you want to spend time with me through my YouTube channel learning about self-care, yoga, meditation, breathwork, body mechanics, self-healing, grief, brain science, nutrition education, and toxic-free living to name a few, then I invite you to subscribe to my channel. And don’t forget to click the notification button so all new content goes right into your inbox!
All the things I’ve been through in my life, but especially the last two years, have shown me I’m supposed to redirect my focus in my career to sharing other parts that make the whole (olotita), other parts of health and wellness, mind, body and soul; other parts of fitness, physical and mental; other parts of me and what I am passionate about. This is a nysa for me, a new beginning. I invite you as I share more of those pieces of me in a bigger way.
Contact Info:
- Email: krista@olotita.com
- Website: www.olotita.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/kristashirleyyoga
- Facebook: Facebook.com/krista.noel.shirley
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/kristayogini
Image Credits
Phillip Simmons Jessica Gilbreth Marla Porter Garrett Frandsen Tamara Knight Wari Om
