Kim M.
Founder/Owner, Crossroads Yoga RYT-200, Reiki Master
It’s funny how things come about. When I took my first yoga class in the late ‘90s, I had no idea and no desire to one day open up my own studio.
I was on a long business trip in California. I had a super stressful corporate job then, and needed a “workout” after the day was done. That’s when I discovered this amazing Ashtanga class—almost two hours of pure sweat. Up until then, I had never practiced any kind of yoga before, but I was hooked.
However, back home in the D.C. area, there were no Ashtanga studios. Actually, there were hardly any studios back then! I found an Iyengar studio, and I learned a lot about form and alignment (those who’ve taken Iyengar know what I mean here!) but it didn’t give me that head-to-toe “sweat” that I craved.
So I ended up practicing at home—I found a couple of books and videos and continued my practice that way…until I had a baby in 2003. (Having a baby changes everything as that old commercial used to say. So true.) My yoga practice fell by the wayside, and I didn’t practice yoga for probably five or six years.
When I came back to it, I discovered a very intense hot yoga studio (formerly a Bikram studio). Through the heat, I found I could get back into so many of my old poses pretty quickly… and that whet my appetite to get back into yoga. But then, well… LIFE. And I fell off again, preferring to spend my free time playing tennis than doing yoga.
Finally, in 2012, one of my tennis teammates told me that there were yoga classes being held regularly at a local community center in my area. That’s where I met the incomparable Kim Saunders, who started Lift Yoga at that community center, and very soon thereafter founded Lift Yoga & Body studio in Alpharetta. It’s there that the many other facets of yoga began to reveal themselves to me over the years. These are different for everyone, but suffice it to say that I learned yoga can be so much more than that workout that I originally wanted.
In the years since, Kim has been my teacher and mentor, but has also become my friend. Going through Yoga Teacher Training under her tutelage, along with sixteen other amazing souls, was one of the biggest and most rewarding highlights of my life. Kim Saunders is an amazing yogi, with a heart and soul like no other. And I’m so honored to have her guidance (and even her original check-in table from Lift!) as I start this journey at Crossroads Yoga (which Kim and her hubby Stu actually named!)
Speaking of Crossroads—sure, it’s aptly named because of our location at Birmingham Crossroads in Milton, but it also fits because we ALL come to many crossroads in our lives. Change just happens. Sometimes those changes or turning points are welcome; other times they’re not. But we usually grow at least a little each and every time our journeys take us there.
And that brings me back to why I wanted to open up this studio in what I think is the true heart of Milton. Over the years, yoga has truly changed me in so many ways. Not just from the “workout” of the practice that brought me to it in the first place during that very first Ashtanga class… and not just from the more meaningful lessons that I’ve learned since. Yoga, as many of us come to learn, encompasses ALL of that, everything in between, and so much more. The layers of it are deep and infinite. I may be a teacher and a practitioner, but I’m also—and always will be, first and foremost—a student. Always growing, always learning.
I wish the same for all of you. That’s yoga. A workout. A work-IN. A little or a lot of each. Whatever you want and need it to be.