Boundless Yoga Studio Featured Teacher for May: Who is Katie McHugh Connolly?

As you roll out your Yoga mat and sit down to clear your mind; what do you ponder?  Are you searching for a deeper meaning within your life, or within yourself?  Is the practice of Yoga a way of stress release or does it energize you?  Are you asking the big questions?  We are searching, learning, discovering, and challenging our minds and bodies in ways we never thought possible.  Your answers may be a combination of different reasons, but nonetheless the pursuit is all the same.  The challenge is to turn off the inner dialogue. 

The very practice of Yoga is like expressing a poem through physical movement.  Poetry in motion; which is the best way to describe a yoga class with Katie McHugh Connolly. 

The Poem:

It's all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song—made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian—something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady's
eyes—waking
centrifugal, centripetal.

By William Carlos Williams

Katie’s Saturday morning classes are anything but typical, be prepared not only to practice Yoga but to challenge your mind, not a single class will be exactly the same.  Katie’s signature is her love for poetry,  she gifts her students at the end of each class with a poem or sometimes a short story.  She usually finds something that marks the trend of the week, a poem which marks the end of winter or a poem which represents in some small way the sequences of movements she teaches in class.  Katie has a talent for challenging both the mind and the body and she ties everything together so eloquently.  She loves the practice and her students which is evident in manner in which she knows each and every student by name. 

Katie’s 8AM Saturday class is a great beginner sequence, she warms you up and gets you ready to start the day.  During her 9:15 Open Level class she breaks down each posture into a series of variations yet somehow she manages to never repeat a single sequence twice in a row.  In the words of Robert Frost; “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Katie has a passion for life which is expressed through her Yoga practice, she is multi-talented and extremely humble at the same time.  She started practicing Yoga in 2005 and moved from Buffalo, NY PA in 2007, when her husband Tim completed his PH.D.  Katie worked in housing and homelessness policy for ten years; a career which she had aspired to make big changes yet she became rapidly disheartened by the politics of her career, so she decided to make a life change.  Shortly after moving to East Stroudsburg, she started practicing Yoga with Jenn Allen and Chris Loebsack at Sundari.  In 2008 she became a mom and now has two beautiful daughters, with whom Katie spends her days home and teaching them that the best things in life are found in books and outside in nature.  Ironically, Katie finds that they are the ones teaching her about life, she calls them “her wise little teachers”.  In 2010 Katie took her 200 hour training under the instruction of Jenn Allen and Chris Loebsack.  She completed her training in 2011 and started teaching at Boundless Yoga.

Katie describes Yoga as “A divorce of the ego.”  In other words, she strives to teach her Students to safely practice Yoga in their own way without enforcing self-inflicted expectations on themselves .  The practice of yoga is about accepting your body and mind in the present moment.  There is no one way to practice Yoga and this is why Katie has created her “Cultivating A Home Practice.”  She wants to teach her students how to use some fundamentals to establish a strong home practice.  Her work shop takes place on May 17th from 1:30PM to 5:30 PM.  Join Katie as she guides her students through a four hour sequences and ideals which will help set fire to your own home practice.

Article By Teri Barton