10/06/2026
This memory. 🤍
Our official Grand Opening class in Hinsdale — and seeing it again today brings back so much more than that one day.
I had signed the lease for InnerJasmine almost 11 months earlier. What followed were months of building, planning, waiting, creating, imagining — and slowly bringing a vision into a physical space.
But the story behind the name, and really the beginnings of the InnerJasmine branding, started during my first yoga teacher training in October 2012 at CorePower Yoga in Lakeview.
In the years that followed, I had the incredible privilege of learning from teachers who had trained through different yoga disciplines and traditions. Some took me under their wings and exposed me to an incredible yoga community throughout Chicago — Moksha, Tejas, YogaView, Yoga Circle — and to teachers who traveled through the city to teach workshops, trainings and practices I might otherwise never have experienced.
I soaked it all up.
One of the most influential pieces for me was studying Universal Yoga with Lappa at Tejas. But across all of those teachers, traditions and experiences, I kept coming back to one central question:
Why do I teach yoga?
My “why” was deeply connected to another part of my life at the time. I was pursuing my clinical master’s in psychology, and I struggled with the idea of having to diagnose someone — to identify what was “wrong” — in order for them to receive care, particularly within the structure of insurance billing.
Yoga offered me a very different way of helping people.
I didn’t have to know what was “wrong.”
I could create a space where someone could come exactly as they were and perhaps find a little more of whatever they needed.
Balance. Grounding. Strength. Quiet. Connection. Peace.
And eventually I found the word that captured so much of what I was trying to understand: equanimity.
Not balance in the sense that everything around us becomes perfectly steady. Life doesn’t work that way.
But the possibility of finding steadiness within ourselves while life continues to move around us.
That became the heart behind InnerJasmine.
Jasmine itself had always done something similar for me. Its scent could bring me back — soften something, quiet something, ground me.
InnerJasmine became my way of expressing that idea: helping people discover whatever their own version of inner balance, inner steadiness or inner peace might be.
And eventually, that idea had a physical home.
Looking back at this memory today, it is incredible to think about everything that has grown from that original intention.
The work has expanded far beyond what I could have envisioned then — private practice, teacher training and mentorship, oncology-informed yoga, immersive experiences, community partnerships, and an ever-deepening exploration of Mindfulness, Movement, Nourishment and Restoration.
And we are still evolving.
There are new offerings being developed, new collaborations beginning, and new ways we are thinking about what wellness can look like through different seasons and stages of our lives.
And somehow, next year — 2027 — will mark 10 years since this chapter of InnerJasmine began.
That one deserves its own reflection when we get there. 🤍
For today, I’m simply grateful — for every teacher who shared something with me, every person who helped bring that original space to life, every student who has walked through our doors, and every person who has trusted me to be part of their practice along the way.
And after all of the building, changing, learning, growing and becoming…
we are still creating what comes next.
