ABOUT STEPHANIE
My life has been a journey of returning to myself.
Yoga came into my life when I was twenty years old.
Long before Heart Love Yoga had a name, before I understood energy healing or the intuitive gifts that would later become part of my work, there was yoga.
It became a place I could return to again and again—a way of listening to my body, quieting the noise around me, and finding something within myself that felt steady and true.
THE PATH INWARD
What felt like being stopped was actually an opening.
Nearly two decades after I first found yoga, I felt called to deepen my practice. In 2019, I became a certified yoga teacher, excited to begin sharing something that had already given me so much.
I began teaching.
And then the world stopped.
When the pandemic arrived, the path I thought I was beginning seemed to close almost as soon as it had opened. At the time, I felt discouraged and blocked. I couldn't yet see that my relationship with yoga—and eventually my understanding of healing—was about to change completely.
In November 2020, I experienced a near-death experience that profoundly changed my life.
The recovery was long. For two months, I was largely bedridden. In the months that followed, I slowly worked to regain aspects of my mobility, speech, memory and independence.
My body required patience.
My life required a different kind of listening.
In the summer of 2021, after returning home from a family trip to Costa Rica, I spent a period of time alone. I stayed close to home. I prayed. I chanted. I practiced yoga. I meditated.
And something within me opened.
During meditation, I experienced what I understand as a profound Kundalini and spiritual awakening. It changed the way I understood my intuition, energy, consciousness and parts of myself that I had not yet known how to name.
The experience was powerful and, at times, overwhelming. I knew I needed guidance rather than trying to understand it alone.
Through my meditation teacher, I was introduced to a teacher who helped me begin making sense of what I was experiencing and introduced me more deeply to energy healing. I began learning, practicing and developing a relationship with this work for myself.
What had begun years earlier as a yoga practice was becoming something larger.
And Heart Love Yoga was quietly beginning to reveal itself.
THE PATH INWARD
What felt like being stopped was actually an opening.
Nearly two decades after I first found yoga, I felt called to deepen my practice. In 2019, I became a certified yoga teacher, excited to begin sharing something that had already given me so much.
I began teaching.
And then the world stopped.
When the pandemic arrived, the path I thought I was beginning seemed to close almost as soon as it had opened. At the time, I felt discouraged and blocked. I couldn't yet see that my relationship with yoga—and eventually my understanding of healing—was about to change completely.
In November 2020, I experienced a near-death experience that profoundly changed my life.
The recovery was long. For two months, I was largely bedridden. In the months that followed, I slowly worked to regain aspects of my mobility, speech, memory and independence.
My body required patience.
My life required a different kind of listening.
In the summer of 2021, after returning home from a family trip to Costa Rica, I spent a period of time alone. I stayed close to home. I prayed. I chanted. I practiced yoga. I meditated.
And something within me opened.
During meditation, I experienced what I understand as a profound Kundalini and spiritual awakening. It changed the way I understood my intuition, energy, consciousness and parts of myself that I had not yet known how to name.
The experience was powerful and, at times, overwhelming. I knew I needed guidance rather than trying to understand it alone.
Through my meditation teacher, I was introduced to a teacher who helped me begin making sense of what I was experiencing and introduced me more deeply to energy healing. I began learning, practicing and developing a relationship with this work for myself.
What had begun years earlier as a yoga practice was becoming something larger.
And Heart Love Yoga was quietly beginning to reveal itself.
THE STRENGTH WITHIN
I had been powerful all along.
Strength has been a thread throughout my life.
When I was young, I learned what it meant to stand up for myself even when the people who should have protected me did not. I found my voice. I advocated for myself. And I kept going.
That strength followed me into adulthood.
I became a mother young. I built a career. I carried responsibility before I fully understood just how much I was capable of carrying. When life brought circumstances I never could have anticipated, something within me continued to rise.
Again and again, adversity asked something of me.
And again and again, I found the strength to meet it.
For many years, I thought strength meant surviving. Holding everything together. Fighting for the people I loved. Enduring what was difficult and finding a way forward.
But as my healing deepened, I began to understand strength differently.
The woman emerging within me was not being created for the first time.
She had been there all along.
There were parts of myself I had learned to quiet. Parts I had made smaller. Parts of my intuition, my voice and my power that had been buried beneath years of survival and the expectations of others.
But they were never gone.
They were waiting.
And as I healed, something ancient and familiar began returning to me.
My voice.
My intuition.
My strength.
My power.
I did not become a powerful woman.I remembered that I had always been one.
THE PATH OF THE ROSE
I was learning that power could be soft.
For much of my life, strength had meant surviving.
It meant standing up. Holding on. Protecting what I loved. Finding the courage to keep moving when life asked more of me than I thought I could carry.
But as my healing deepened, another understanding of strength began to emerge.
I was being introduced to the Rose.
My best friend, Jennifer, a Sister of the Rose herself, was an important part of that unfolding. Through her friendship and sisterhood, I found myself drawn more deeply into the teachings of the Divine Feminine, Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene.
In July 2023, that path brought me to Sedona.
On Mary Magdalene's Feast Day, I was initiated as a Sister of the Rose in a gathering led by High Priestesses Keleena Malnar and Shekina Rose.
The Rose began teaching me something I had not understood before.
Softness did not diminish my power.
Grace did not make me weak.
I did not have to harden myself in order to be strong.
There was another way to inhabit the woman I had fought so hard to remember—one rooted not only in resilience, but in tenderness, intuition, devotion and grace.
And sisterhood became part of that remembering.
A few months later, I traveled to Egypt on a sacred journey led by Keleena.
I arrived during a season when I was beginning to understand that remembering myself would eventually require me to live differently.
Egypt became part pilgrimage, part initiation, part homecoming.
Among ancient temples, sacred places and the women walking beside me, the language of the Rose became something I was no longer simply studying.
I was living it.
On the final night of our journey, beneath the Sphinx, Keleena offered me a personal blessing.
I received it quietly.
There are experiences I do not feel called to explain or make larger through words. That was one of them.
I gave thanks, and I carried it with me.
The Rose became a symbol of something I was learning within myself:
A heart can remain open and still have boundaries.
A woman can be soft and still be powerful.
She can move with grace without making herself small.
She can love deeply without abandoning herself.
And perhaps that was the lesson I had been moving toward all along.
My strength had taught me how to survive.The Rose was teaching me how I wanted to live.
THE LOVE I CARRY
Some teachings become part of the way we live.
Mother Mary holds one of the most tender places in my heart.
I experience her as one of my most precious guides—a presence of love, compassion and grace that has accompanied me through some of the deepest parts of my becoming.
There are times when I simply turn my heart toward her and the tears come.
Not from sadness.
From love.
From recognition.
From a tenderness I do not always have words for.
She continues to remind me that there is extraordinary strength in gentleness, that compassion does not require us to abandon ourselves, and that love can be both soft and powerful.
HEART LOVE YOGA
This is the work I carry forward.
Heart Love Yoga was not born from one teaching, one certification or one moment of awakening.
It grew from a life.
From the practices that held me.
From the experiences that changed me.
From the women who walked beside me.
From creativity, intuition, movement, healing and the long journey of learning to return to myself.
Today, these threads live together in the work I share.
HEART — Heart heals.
HEART is the space I hold for healing, energy and the quiet wisdom within us. My own journey taught me that healing is not always about becoming someone new. Sometimes it is about creating enough space to hear what has been within us all along.
LOVE — Love creates.
LOVE is where creativity becomes expression. Art, botanicals, writing, the Rose and the things made slowly and intentionally by hand all have a place here.
For me, creating is another way of listening.
Another way of loving.
YOGA — Yoga moves.
Yoga is where this story began.
It has been part of my life since I was twenty years old—a practice I have returned to through motherhood, change, illness, healing, loss, awakening and becoming.
What began as movement became a way home to myself.
And after everything I have lived, learned, lost, remembered and created, I continue to return to something very simple:
The heart knows how to heal.
Love knows how to create.
The body knows how to move.
Heart heals.
Love creates.
Yoga moves.
That, to me, is Heart Love Yoga.
YOU ARE WELCOME HERE
There is no one way home to yourself.
I don't believe there is one way to heal, one way to practice, or one way to find your way home to yourself.
I only know that sometimes we need a place where we can become quiet enough to listen.
Heart Love Yoga is one of those places.
Come exactly as you are.
You are welcome here.
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