THE BENEFITS OF INTEGRATING YOGA INTO YOUR LIFE WITH AMANDA LANDRY, LMHC | EP 60

[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast, recording live from Castle Rock, Colorado. I am a licensed professional counselor, owner of a counseling center and a sacred space holder for fellow therapists. This podcast is for those who want to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. I create intentional space to explore your own spiritual path, a space that allows doubt, questions and curiosity without the judgment or shame, a place to hear another story and dive deeper into how to have a genuine connection with God.

For my fellow therapist, listening, I will often pull back the curtain of our layered inner world that comes with our profession. I bring an authentic and experienced way to engage your spiritual journey in order to connect you with your deepest values for true renewal and soul care. But really this podcast is for anyone listening who’s desiring a deeper and genuine connection with God. For those of you wanting to engage your spirituality in new ways, Faith Fringes is for you. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, welcome back to Faith Fringes. This is Dawn, your host. Today we are going to be talking to someone I met at the Faith and Practice Conference in Jekyll Island. I actually met her on the beach, we’ll talk a little bit about it and we did a yoga class. It was so fun and I connected with her and said, “Hey, can you come on the podcast and talk about yoga and how it impacts you spiritually?” So yes, I’m really excited for you to hear her because I don’t know about you guys, but yoga for me, I have dabbled in here and there and there are times where I do it more and times, I haven’t done it at all, but I’ve really been thinking about getting back into it. So a lot of this that I’m asking her is definitely for me personally, but I thought I would share it with you too because I think as therapist we work with people who have anxiety, but we also need some place to like let go of our own stuff in our head and in our hearts and I think yoga has been a really good way to do that for me.

I know when I take a yoga class or even do some yoga on my own, it’s been super helpful of a way to move my body and just move my emotions out too. Not only that, but I find it spiritually connecting for me. I’m able to slow my mind down and connect with God when I’m there. It just is another practice for me that helps me, yes, just slow down, which also opens up some spiritual realm for me. So I’d love to tell you a little bit more about my friend. Her name is Amanda Landry. She’s a licensed mental health counselor, certified addictions professional, and a national certified counselor and private practice consultant. She’s the owner of a group practice called Caring Therapists and with several locations in Florida.
[DAWN]
The Caring Therapists specialize in working with children through adults. They treat individuals, couples and family. Amanda’s the author of Guided Journal for Women with Anxiety and you can find that on Amazon or wherever books are sold. And Amanda’s also the founder of my Private Practice Collective, which is an online community for therapists and private practice. She is a private practice consultant who helps solo and group practices build smart practices. Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
[AMANDA LANDRY]
Thank you so much for having me on.
[DAWN]
Yes, I think we need to tell people how we met because it’s a cool story. We were on a beach and you were doing yoga.
[AMANDA]
I was. That’s officially how we met and it was so beautiful there and being there in the sunrise and connecting with everybody in that way. What was so great is the sand was hard, so it was so easy to do yoga whereas in the East Coast the sand is not generally. I mean I guess we were on the East Coast, but on the East Coast of Florida there’s, we usually reference the East Coast and West Coast of Florida. The sand is different and up North where in Jekyll Island, the sand was perfect for yoga on the beach versus if you do it with softer sand, it can be a little bit hard trying to stick your poses.
[DAWN]
I was like, this is so awesome. I’ve never done yoga on the beach.
[AMANDA]
It was really fun. It was great. It was so nice connecting with you and then here we are to talk about yoga again.
[DAWN]
So maybe tell my listeners a little bit about you, your practice and we’ll go from there.
[AMANDA]
So I am Amanda Landry. I am a licensed mental health counselor in South Florida. I have a group practice called Caring Therapists and we have four locations at about 35 therapists.
[DAWN]
I don’t you were that big. That’s awesome.
[AMANDA]
Yes, so sometimes I don’t realize it either. Sometimes I just still feel like it’s even the five of us that started initially or something and now it’s grown into this massive production. I could probably double if I wanted to because there’s just such a need in South Florida and I’m not the only group practice down here that is like my size or equal to, there’s a lot of group practices. There are just so many people in south Florida and so many people seeking therapy.
[DAWN]
Well, that’s really cool. I didn’t, yes, I didn’t realize you were that big. That’s amazing. You’re running an empire if you have four. I own one for seven years and I’ve thought about expanding, but I’m like, I don’t know how to do it.
[AMANDA]
You do it with a lot of support. I have seven people, yes, systems and support. I have seven admins in various roles helping out and then systems of course. Because you can’t run a group practice or any operation without systems. I don’t eat Chick-fil-A because I don’t eat chicken but what I know about Chick-fil-A is what makes them not, I don’t know if their chicken is really that much better than other places, but they’re so efficient and how they do things that it really draws people there and they have fantastic systems. They have the best systems.
[DAWN]
Yes, and service. They’re amazing. My pleasure.
[AMANDA]
Well that is that their track line. It’s my pleasure.
[DAWN]
Well, cool. So how did you get into yoga? Did you always love yoga or how did that happen?
[AMANDA]
I started yoga really when, I may have started in college, but sort of like those years, it wasn’t a consistent practice. I might have gone to a few classes, but when I was in graduate school, I actually worked at my university and so then it was convenient for me to go to the gym at the university and they offered yoga classes and I remember very distinctly going to those yoga classes, which was probably a really good thing because graduate school is very stressful.

It’s just, I don’t think back then I probably appreciated how stressful it was because everybody else was in the same boat. It’s like graduate undergrad, go to graduate school. Because I was a psychology major, there were no jobs for psychology majors over $30,000 a year. I mean there’s, for a bachelor’s level, like it does not exist. So I knew I had to go to grad school, so it’s just like, here I’m going to go to grad school and two things, looking back and seeing maybe some of the coping strategies in a healthy way that I was using, such as yoga was great to manage it, but then being a therapist to graduate students and seeing how stressed they are and then remembering maybe some of that, I’m like, yes, that was pretty stressful.

It was an exciting time, but it was a stressful time because it’s not like undergrad where you can just get by and you’re doing at other activities and you can get a C and it’s like, I’m not a C person, but you could get a C and it would be like no big deal. In grad school, it’s like if you get a C you’re on probation and then if you get two Cs, you’re out. I mean, people get kicked out of program.

Yes, it’s intense. The amount of reading, I just remember like thousands of pages of reading and research. You’re like, what is happening? That’s all I did, is read.
[AMANDA]
For me, I remember the writing. I remember you went from 10 pages to 20 pages and I’m like a 20-page essay? How am I going to write all of this? I’m a decent writer. I have written a lot over the years, but writing is not my strongest suit, so I’m like 20 pages? I think I just needed an outlet. I had always used exercise as an outlet. I had always done organized things until I went to college and then I realized, oh, I’m not doing the same organized type of thing. Let me go to organized yoga classes, Pilates classes, step classes. I just always liked doing those and I remember going between classes or at lunch and doing yoga and just really falling in love with the practice and how it made my body feel.
[DAWN]
I love that. Then you just, you got certified though, right?
[AMANDA]
Yes, so for many years I have just done yoga. I’ve gone to different studios, I’ve done it at the house, I’ve done it, I mean some people will poo poo on like the LA Fitness Yoga classes because, but I always really enjoyed those classes because it really depends on the instructor. I’ve gone to classes at really well-known yoga studios where the yoga was okay because the instructor was okay. Then I have gone to really fantastic classes at LA Fitness or wherever because the instructor was fantastic and I have just always really enjoyed doing yoga. Have done it now for, so I graduated and, so probably about 17 years because I did once I was in grad school was in 2005, which just blows my mind.
[DAWN]
Oh, me too. Me too, great.
[AMANDA]
Yes. So I’ve been practicing and there was just a couple of years ago, four years ago, maybe about five years, should say, probably about five years ago, there was this part of me that was like, I really think I want to become a yoga instructor or at least get certified. This was when my private practice was really thriving and I had a group practice and I had a different iteration of what my group practice is today. It wasn’t really anything. I had renters. It was like a collective model and we enjoyed it but it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Then what I started to realize what’s happening was I needed to shift over my model.

I had like some extra money and I said, I’m either going to do business coaching with Joe Sanok or I’m going to become certified as a yoga teacher. Because really back then it was about the same. Things have really shifted in the yoga world and it’s much more accessible and affordable but back then, I mean you would have, most of the trainings were like in Costa Rica for five weeks, 40 hours a week because it’s a 200-hour training. We were just do back to back. I mean the trainings were really intense. Or you would spend like a year, Friday, Saturday, Sunday training, getting your 200 hours. So when my now husband, my boyfriend at the time, we talked about it and we decided, okay, a much better use of money is to do business coaching.

So I ended up doing the business coaching, which was a much better usage of those funds. I did a whole year I did Slow Down School and a whole program with Joe and it was great. It was phenomenal. I shifted my entire business model and that really catapulted everything. So the business model shifted in 2018 and that was really scary because I had had three years of doing the same thing, just having renters. So then I had to go to these slew of renters I had and say, we’re going to contractors, it’s going to a fee split. Fast forward, it’s worked out very well because ultimately my feelings or my thoughts are when you have contractors and you’re really feeding people referrals that they can grow much better than just renters, just worked out.

So fast forward, I got married, still did yoga, we moved, we bought a house, we did like the whole suburban life thing. We got married, we moved out of the city, we moved out West and then Covid hit. Covid hit and we were also trying to have a baby. So trying to have a baby, COVID hits, not sure where things are going with the business because initially like March, April, everybody’s panicked.
[DAWN]
We dropped 30% of our clients. We were like, crap, am I going to keep the doors open?
[AMANDA]
Yes. At that time, we had two locations and, I mean I was paying rent on these locations and I’m like, I don’t even know what is going to happen here. So I got pregnant, I’m going somewhere with this story, I got pregnant and I was really sick during my pregnancy. I’m not like the best pregnant person. Some people are like glowing and wonderful, not me. Nope. So I went from working out several days a week to like the first three months sitting on my couch. Then obviously once you start feeling better, I knew that I needed to get back to yoga. I did and I practiced yoga all the time. I signed up for a monthly membership for prenatal yoga and between walking and yoga, I really felt like my body was really prepared for labor. It went very smoothly while my pregnancy I felt was like not fun, is a really, really, really nice way to say it. It was just like I did not enjoy it. My labor was like beautiful. It was smooth and I really felt like doing yoga helped with that.

Once the baby was here, once I was cleared, I started to do yoga again. A mom friend of mine had posted that she completed an online yoga teacher training and I was just inspired. I was like, I want to do this. I was only three months postpartum when I started and what really was exciting was that it was much more accessible than the $3,000 Costa Rica training. That sounds fantastic. I mean I would love to do that, but that is not accessible to everybody. I’m like, I always thought, who takes off five weeks of work and goes to Costa Rica? Yoga instructors or entrepreneurs. I could see it now but certainly back then life was just not as accessible as it is today or even a few years later.

I looked into this training, it’s a company called My Vinyasa Practice. They’re actually out of Austin, Texas and they do a yoga teacher training. It was great because there’s two parts to it, is the learning part and then the practice part. Well my baby was so young then and he was breastfeeding a lot and sleeping a lot that I just listened, it was almost like listening to podcast for three hours a day or something. I did it when he slept or when I was walking him, I was trying to think, I didn’t listen when he was up, but what if I was walking him because he loves to be in the stroller walking or when he was sleeping or feeding or something like that. It was just really accessible because everything was, videos outlined what you needed to do, how to do it.

Then I just practiced when my husband would get home from work and I’d be like, I have to do yoga. I have to go do yoga. It was like our little thing for a while because you have to do a certain amount of practice. It took me a while. I mean it took me about seven months to complete because even though I was listening when the baby was sleeping and I was practicing, 200 hours took me seven months, which is fine. I’m very proud that I did it in that time. I’m good with that.
[DAWN]
So you were allowed to do it at your own pace though? It such that’s great.
[AMANDA]
That’s the thing. You could do it at your own pace and it really wasn’t, I think I got it on sale, so it really wasn’t that expensive. I mean it’s not the most inexpensive process, but it’s not really, for 200 hours it’s certainly fantastic. What I loved about it, there were two things that I really loved about it, is they really talked about diversity and inclusiveness because if you’ve ever gone to a yoga studio, again in suburban America and you walk in and most people are tall, thin, beautiful, flexible and I’m short, I’m not like the tallest person. Sometimes people are like, “Oh, you’re shorter than I thought,” when I meet them like in person.

So sometimes even for me going to yoga studios can be intimidating if I don’t look like everybody else or I’m not at the skill level. But this program really talked about yoga at every size and yoga at every person. It was so great and it wasn’t done in a way that it was like, it was done very authentically. It was like you’re going to have different size bodies, you’re going to have different abled people, you’re going to have certain level of diversity in that. You have to really be mindful of how you teach, the words you say, the music you use, the environment that you’re creating and it really stood out to me because those conversations are happening in the mental health world but I’m not familiar with any other world. So it was nice to hear it from a different world.

Then the other part was, there was a big focus on trauma. That just speaks to me as a therapist because so many of my clients struggle with trauma. I think people are drawn to yoga but can also be very scared of yoga because of movement, of touch of, there could be a male yoga instructor and that touch may be very uncomfortable even if a female doesn’t. But I’m imagining scenarios where my clients may feel uncomfortable with touch or going into certain poses that are very vulnerable. So I just really loved that they talked about the trauma piece and that trauma-informed yoga was brought into the conversation.
[DAWN]
That’s amazing because I took, as a therapist, a therapist taught how to do trauma-informed yoga in the session, but it was more about trauma and the breathing than it was about yoga. It was really fascinating and I could tell, when you were leading it on the beach, I could tell, I’m like I bet she’s trauma-informed because I mean, I thought you were just integrating your therapist awareness, but you could tell though because you were inviting us and, “You don’t have to do this.” You were very, your words were awesome and very inclusive to any level.
[AMANDA]
Yes, and obviously we’re taught that as therapists. I’m EMDR trained and I’ve read the Body Keeps the Score. It’s like we’ve done all the trauma-informed therapist things but I had to learn it from this lens as well. As a therapist, I don’t touch clients. We don’t necessarily engage in movement. It’s just a different lens. So it was really good that this followed what I already know as a therapist, but teaching in a way that would be useful to me with my clients or with other therapists. I’m really excited to do therapy with other therapists again, because I think that it’s so helpful but I also think it’s good for us to also have another tool that we can use even if we’re not directly using it in our therapy sessions.
[DAWN]
If you’re a therapist and you are feeling burned out or just needing a break and being around other therapists who really understand what you’re going through or if you are feeling like you just need some space to connect with God and get grounded back into what really matters to you and your spirituality, I would like to invite you to come to a Soul Care retreat for therapist, exclusively for therapist. I host soul care retreats for therapist and I just love holding sacred space for you to just reconnect with yourself, reconnect with God, and connect with others who are in the same profession and have probably experience similar things as you have. So I’m inviting you.

My next retreat is September 23rd through the 25th, 2022 in Colorado. We will have about 10 rooms to ourselves in this little beautiful retreat center in the Black Hills Forest and we have three hot tubs. There’s trails around there. We can see the mountains. It’s so peaceful there. I just want to invite you to come, come and just experience what it’s like to have soul care. We do some guided exercises as a group, we also do guided exercises as individuals, I have a workbook that can help walk you through what do I do with all this downtime because I know even though we are longing for the downtime, sometimes it’s hard to get there. Sometimes we get anxious when we’re there. Sometimes we get scared. So I will have a workbook that helps you walk through that, that gives you exercises to connect with God and figure out what’s really going on inside you.

We also have, there’s great food here, we have great conversations and there’s plenty of time to connect with one another and we have a lot of fun. So if you’re interested, send me an email, dawn@faithfringes.com. I only have 10 spots available for this retreat. We like to keep it small and intimate. Again, it’s September 23rd through 25th and that will be in Colorado. Reach out to me, dawn@faithfringes.com to find out more information today.
[DAWN GABRIEL]
Have you used it in your therapy sessions? Like even just some stretching or anything?
[AMANDA]
So light stretching, breathing, and I have, I will say I have with children because children are really movement focused. With adults, no because you really want to delineate like you’re here as a client and you’re here for yoga. Like if I were to teach, I’m not teaching at that level because of a variety of different like liability reasons and things like that. But I could see how even just light stretches or creating space in certain parts of the body to help people heal if there are any traumas or any tension points, people, they feel tension in their bodies and so just doing some light stretching or like usually seated yoga, not really anything standing or anything like that.

So you do have to be mindful. That was one thing. I’m using it to inform my practice and to also inform my clients about yoga. I think people are familiar with yoga. One thing I was thinking about coming on this podcast is, I work with a lot of clients with anxiety, clients with anxiety generally, making a generalization, do not want to be put on medication. If they’re trying therapy, they usually are trying to avoid medication. So they tend to be very eager to find holistic or alternative methods to managing anxiety. And I think yoga is a very good tool that people can utilize in order to manage anxiety and so I wanted to have a deeper understanding of how that exactly works.

So when I recommend yoga to clients, it’s not like, “Oh I go to yoga and it makes me feel great.” I know that there’s more to it than that but I want to be able to explain the fundamentals. Also, I think what I realized is that yoga’s much more than just the poses. It’s the breathing, it’s the meditation, it’s the way of life. That really brought it back full circle for me.
[DAWN]
When I’ve done yoga, I sounded like your trend of going to classes and doing yoga and I actually picked it up way more when I was pregnant also, but it was more for my anxiety and I was shocked at how much it helped me. But there is like a spiritual, the meditation feels spiritual to me. I was wondering if you could speak to that, like did you notice shifts internally with that as you’re, because I feel like yoga is so beautiful. It brings in all these worlds, all these lenses together because you’re using your body, getting in touch with your emotions. Yes, it feels spiritual to me. So I was just curious what you thought.
[AMANDA]
I think it’s such a spiritual practice and it’s based in spirituality. It’s not necessarily based in one religion. It’s based in the higher connection that you feel. When doing all of the parts of yoga, the breathing, doing the poses and then weaving in meditation can really help me feel connected to my higher power and to feel something. And what it makes me feel is like feeling something greater than just myself, whatever that may be, knowing that there’s this collective consciousness that practices yoga and that we’re connected in that way and that we’re breathing together. That goes into sort of like the, I was just using the hippy side of it or the metaphysical side.

But it’s so true because that’s how people connect. We connect with other people through all of our practices. I feel connected to other therapists because I’m a therapist, I feel connected to other yogis because of my yoga practice and when I’m practicing and I’m breathing and we’re all breathing together. It’s like there’s this life force that I feel. That is the spiritual part for me, to know that it’s greater than just me. It’s greater than my experience that there is this entire experience that is happening for all of us. I think everybody might experience that differently, but I think what the meditation does is quiet our mind and allow us to connect with our higher power in a way that’s meaningful for us.
[DAWN]
I love that. I love that it’s like when you’re in a class, you do feel that energy, that collective energy and just the mindfulness, but you’re together. We need more things like that right now in our lives to connect in a calm place with other people. I think there’s so much right now that we see has been so intense and controversial. I do feel like yoga, I went to a class just a month ago and I’m like, oh, this is so positive and peaceful. I was really enjoying it. But yes, I guess I haven’t thought about that way, the collective energy and the spiritual connection, we’re all connecting into that at the same time. That’s really neat.
[AMANDA]
I think that you bring up a good point is people do feel really calm and really satisfied when they go to yoga that I think that yoga studios are going to continues to thrive and just like therapists are going back to the office, yoga studios are going to open back up. There’s going to be more classes. It’s going to be integrated into more of life. There are even schools that offer yoga and not just like the hip Montessori school. It’s like all kinds of schools are starting to incorporate yoga. I believe in high school now you can take yoga as an elective. You can know in certain high schools but these are mainstream high schools where this before, it’s like I said, I looked up like a few really progressive educational schools and it was like they’re teaching meditation in yoga and they were eating organic and they have a mud kitchen for kids. I’m like, that sounds fantastic, but that’s not for everybody but it’s available.

In educational settings it’s available, in treatment centers it’s available in a variety of different settings. I think that’s just going to continue because yoga’s becoming more accessible. I will say, Michelle is the woman who runs my vinyasa practice and I can see that’s a goal of hers. I really align with that because it is much more accessible than ever before. Even if it can’t be taught online, you can see now where it’s not just going to be this really expensive, really difficult to do thing anymore. It’s really going to be how can we really get yoga out to the masses but not in a commercialized way? It really felt like, let’s really make this accessible to those who really want to have this training.
[DAWN]
I love that. In fact, one of my therapists on my team, she taught it in a women’s prison because there were so many studies of how it really helped even the inmates with their mindset and yoga and that was fascinating. I mean it’s definitely a different setting than a school, but yes, I feel like it does need to be more accessible to everyone and not just the, like you said, the Montessori schools.
[AMANDA]
Not just in yoga studios because while I love going to yoga studios, even for my schedule can be very prohibited, because it’s either very early in the morning before people go to work or late in the afternoon and I’m like, I need this three o’clock yoga class. Where’s that at? Around here it doesn’t really exist and so it’s okay, I’ll practice here. We call this actually, the room that I’m in the yoga room because this is where I practice yoga. Even though it’s my office, we affectionately call it the yoga room. So you can practice anywhere. That’s the great thing about yoga.

And it doesn’t have to be an hour. That was something I really, really, really had to work on because in my mind, yoga was an hour or an hour and a half. If I did yoga it had to be an hour. I learned, especially during my pregnancy that yoga could be five minutes. If I just needed to stretch out my hips and release some tension or I needed to center, it could be 10 minutes. It didn’t have to be an hour. That is something I still struggle with. Even the other day I was like, I should do yoga. I’m like, I don’t have an hour. I’m like, Amanda, it doesn’t have to be an hour. But traditional classes are, traditional classes are usually about 75 minutes. I’ve worked around like it does not have to be an hour.
[DAWN]
That’s good to that’s good to know because my personality’s similar when I’m like, I have to have an hour to do this. It’s like, no, even 10 minutes of yoga, stretching and meditation is going to be helpful.
[AMANDA]
A great resource for your listeners. There are two people that I follow on YouTube, Yoga with Adrian and Yoga with Cassandra.
[DAWN]
Cassandra, I don’t know her.
[AMANDA]
Yoga with Adrian is great because she is somebody who really teaches for the beginner and she really, you can jump in any class and you’re not really going to feel lost. She’s got a great personality and she has her dog and it’s just an experience. Yoga with Cassandra is also just as accessible, but it’s like one step, I don’t want to say up because I don’t want to dismiss Yoga with Adrian. I am a super fan of hers, but it’s like a different level. Yoga with Cassandra is a little bit more —
[DAWN]
Like intermediate, maybe like this —?
[AMANDA]
Like a beginner, an intermediate, yes. Just in the way she teaches different, Yoga with Adrian, you really feel like you know her. She’s your friend. I feel like I know her dog and we do yoga together. With Yoga with Cassandra it’s like she is a yogi, she is teaching me and I’m getting whatever the theme of the class is. I’m getting that theme. So just two different styles. Those are two great places to start if you’ve never done yoga and you don’t want to necessarily walk into a yoga studio down the street though. I would encourage people to, people are usually very inviting, very friendly, very encouraging and no matter where you go, most places have all different levels. That’s not all experts unless you’re going, usually the way that yoga classes are outlined in studios is that they will say whether this is like an expert class, if it’s a 90-minute like vinyasa flow class, it’s probably a little bit more expert than the half yoga 60 minute at lunch. So you know some of the terms, you can see what classes might be a little bit more difficult. Some studios will put disclaimers like not for beginners or an intermediate class, which can be very helpful.
[DAWN]
Thank you so much for your time. I just have one more question. If you were to say how yoga has impacted you internally, what would you say? What’s the biggest way it’s impacted you internally?
[AMANDA]
I have a type A personality, and I have a competitive streak even if that competitiveness is just with myself. I’m always pushing and striving and when I go to yoga I’m reminded not to do that. I’m reminded to stay focused and present in the moment. Just like I said, whenever I’ve gone to yoga classes, there’s always like the person next to me who’s doing headstands and doing things that my body just, I could practice yoga for another 50 years and my body just would not do that. It is not designed in that way. Then I look to my right and there is a beginner and they’re just learning. It reminds me to honor where I’m at and not to strive and not to compete and not to think about what’s the next step and how to get better, just to be where I’m at in that moment. That’s the thing that I really have taken away from yoga. It’s the one place where I don’t have to be the best or I don’t have to have this or I don’t have to do anything. I can just be where I’m at.
[DAWN]
I love that. It’s funny, as you’ve been talking, I’m like man, this is really helping me personally because I have a similar personality and I was literally looking up yoga around the area because I’m like, I have to get back into that. It just helps my head space on many levels. Of course, I’ve looked up how can I be a yoga instructor, but I’m like, I don’t really want to teach yoga. But this has been so helpful on a personal level to hear your process because I feel like, yes, I really have enjoyed just getting to know about it and you, and I think I’m going to, I literally wrote down my vinyasa practice and then I’m going to go next door because we have a yoga thing down the street. I’m going to check it out.
[AMANDA]
Oh, that’s awesome. Well, I’m so glad it was so helpful to you and I hope it’s helpful to your listeners.
[AMANDA]
Yes. If people want to get ahold of you, can you say your practice name or your website again if they want to reach out to you?
[AMANDA]
Sure. My website is caringtherapistsofbroward.com. My email address is just amanda@caringtherapistsofbroward.com. If you have any questions about yoga, want to connect and if any therapists, I have a Facebook group called My Private Practice Collective. That’s a great place. Yes, that’s a great place to connect.
[DAWN]
Say more about that. What do you do? Is that consulting or what do you do for that?
[AMANDA]
That really started out just as a marketing group for private practice owners really in South Florida and it just exploded over the years. I mean, I’ve had that now, I can’t remember exactly, but at least probably about six years. It just went from a hundred people and now it’s almost 18,000 people. It’s exploded and it’s just everyday people are asking questions about practice building, so we give a lot of feedback and information about practice building and support. Then I do private practice consulting for people that are looking to build primarily group practices.
[DAWN]
What’s that called again? What’d you say, the Facebook group?
[AMANDA]
My Private Practice Collective.
[DAWN]
Okay, great. Is that your consulting website too?
[AMANDA]
That is.
[DAWN]
All right. Well, we will make sure we put that in the show notes so my listeners can reach out as well.
[AMANDA]
Awesome. Thank you so much again for having me. I hope I inspired some people to either start yoga or become yoga instructors.
[DAWN]
Yes, I think you did. At least me. I will definitely check some stuff out. But thank you so much Amanda. I’ve had a good time.

Thank you for listening today to the Faith Fringes podcast. For those of you wanting to take a deeper dive into your own faith journey, you can grab my free email course, Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. If you’re a therapist and would want to work with me, I offer sacred space holding for you through my consulting as well as my soul care retreats. To find out more, go to my website or email me, dawn@faithfringes.com.

I love hearing from my listeners. Drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can also connect with me on social media. I’m on Facebook and Instagram at Faith Fringes. As always, if you’re enjoying this podcast, I would love it if you could show it by your reviews. Go to Apple Podcasts and leave your review so that others can find this podcast and get curious about their own spiritual journey. Thanks again for listening.

Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

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