Sanieh

An eternally devout student herself, Sanieh has accrued close to 750 hours of teacher training time and over 2300 hours of actual teaching time in the classroom. Having learned the importance of a smile and loving encouragment from her first teacher, Cori Martinez, she continues to carry and pass on these lessons genuinely from her heart. Outside of the basics of yoga asana, she has also studied anatomy, somatics, tantric philosophy, Kashmier Shavism, and ayurveda all with her long time primary teacher, Shiva Rea and James Bailey at Samudra, Global School for Living Yoga, where Sanieh is humbly a mentor on behalf of Shiva Rea and her yoga teacher training school.

Sanieh was born in California but grew up in Austin. In 2002, she moved to the healing Big Island of Hawaii and started on the path of yoga. She was on her way to move to Los Angeles when the tidal wave of life led her to Austin instead and she couldn't be more grateful. When she initially started practicing yoga, she was a little discouraged because she couldn't touch her toes. On top of that, she had been a semi-competitive weight lifter and found the strength needed for yoga was completely different. The desire to maintain her physical well being while stepping out of the gym initially brought her into the studio to first try yoga, but as she dove deeper into the ocean of yoga, her quest veered away from the physical to work toward the spiritual aspects of this ancient practice and methodology. She also loves and has respect for the challenge of breaking through the barriers of the samskaras, or habitual patterns of the mind and the Austin community surrounding yoga offers her endless joy and support in doing so.

Sanieh, a life-long singer, comes from an artistic and musical family as the arts play a vital role in her teachings and life. While her mother dabbled with the guitar, she was also a singer, artist, and pianist and her father plays and teaches the santoor, an ancient eastern instrument, to this day. Since finding the devotional side of yoga, also known as Bhakti Yoga, the marriage of the two has proven a natural one. Sometimes this devotion comes with her voice through mantra and other times with her fingers and the guitar, but it always arrives as an emotion that comes from the pure source and teacher of her heart. For Sanieh the practice of yoga embodies her whole life. In her own words – "For me, yoga is not something I DO, it's something that I AM. Every day is another opportunity to start anew, practice love, compassion, steadiness, ease and comfort and it's in difficulty and life's challenges where the practice really comes to play. Both on and off the mat."


Recommended:
Living Your Yoga by Judith Hanson Lasiter
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Inspirational Quotes:
"Built into Every storm is the peace you are seeking" - Swami Muktananda.
"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become" - Carl Jung.