Move Ambassador - Katerina Marshall

Katerina has always been an active person, dancing from a young age to rowing at the end of high school. She struggled with an eating disorder, and rowing helped her to enjoy food as nourishment, but the high energy sport played no roll in helping her keep the weight on. Katerina discovered yoga and was determined to get into it, finally discovering how much self love and drive it gave her. Katerina has now been practising yoga for 5 years and completed her 200hr certification in Bali at the beginning of 2016.

Read Katerina's amazing story below:

I’ve always been a pretty active person. Since 4 years old, ballet to netball to jazz to hip hop to cheerleading to rowing to yoga. Except, funnily enough, I never liked participating in physical education at school - I had one too many excuses to get out of that!

I rowed for my last year of high school, and it played a massive part in transitioning my mindset out of my eating disorder. I was so determined to do well that I started looking at food as FUEL and nourishment for me to perform at my best.

It was impossible to recover from my disorder while being apart of such a high energy sport - the weight just wouldn’t go on and I was vulnerable to running my body into the ground. But I loved it, so it gave me motivation for life.

I found yoga before rowing - my first class being when I was 15 - but it didn’t stick to me like competitive sports did. After rowing and leaving high school, yoga found me again. It didn’t mean a lot to me at first - to be honest, I wasn't super into it. It was just a time filler.

But somewhere in the back of my mind I was determined to make myself like it. Yes, it was a “forced friendship”! Which, by the way, I don’t recommend anyone to force themselves to like something. But for some reason after a while it wasn’t forced, it was like I had known the moves my whole life.

Now, the tricky thing with yoga, that still battling an eating disorder I felt that I had to “look the part”. Skinny. Flexible. Skinny. The more my practice developed, this mindset started to fade - yoga is such a deep self loving practice that all judgement of myself dropped away. Instead, I started to look at my body as my strength - how amazing I could hold these poses, how amazing there was something new to learn each class, how BEAUTIFUL I was to move with such fluidity.

All I wanted was to share this practice with EVERYONE so we could all move together and create a safe space of unconditional love. I’ve seen people come to my class - men and woman, young and old - with all body shapes. I look at them and don’t see how they physically look but rather how they move. And I watch in awe, no matter what shape, size, height, weight, gender, age, we all manage to somehow look the same (give or take a few falls here and there). When we move in a class, we move together.

While yoga is very much about self-exploration, we do it together. And I find that is the most powerful thing about practicing and teaching yoga - this togetherness. Creating a community where we can collectively gather our energy and just see where it takes us.

The journey will never stop. Along with yoga, I found compassion in the way I eat (no animals enter my body), my lifestyle and my relationships. I want to move through life knowing I am changing lives - even just one persons - and, ultimately, changing my own life. I choose to be authentic with people - yes, I am still struggling with mentality (depression, anxiety, eating habits), but I choose to move forward from a place of love. I very much believe yoga has given this to me.

Website: mindbodyfree.com

Instagram: @mindbodyfree

Facebook: /mindbodyfree