How it all began…Tuesdays w/ Teresa

Sedona AZ, Teacher Training, July 2019

Tuesday with Teresa started back in 2018 from the suggestion of a friend. She was a yoga teacher at the community yoga clubhouse. When we were walking one day she asked me if I would be interested in hosting a weekly donation-based meditation class.

She knew that I meditated regularly, and I often shared knowledge and techniques the clients from my small coaching business, Change Takes Place that had been growing since 2012.

I was a certified life coach, hypnotherapist and had informally taught my coaching clients simple breathing techniques to quiet their minds, so that we could do coaching sessions with ease.

I shared more in-depth style teaching with a few clients called Vipassana. It was a style I had learned from a high school teacher long ago.

Some years earlier I had also purchased a workbook set with flash cards and CDs. It was written and developed by Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein. I really enjoyed the workbook set and the opportunity to learn and grow.

Fast forward to 2017. I snapped my Achillies Tendon. It was wintertime and I had a long recovery ahead of me, so I jumped into exploring meditation with both sit bones.

I researched a few meditation teacher training companies, and I landed a spot at Sarah McLean’s Mindfulness and Meditation Institute in Sedona, AZ, and began the teacher training journey.

I had a small office at the time with no space to teach groups, but I had a desire to teach group meditation. With the new opportunity in front of me, I felt very excited to think I would have access to the community yoga clubhouse.

It was an old city property, situated on the golf course. It offered a gorgeous view of Diamond Mountain and overlooked the rolling green of manicured golf course lawn sprawled out before Emerson Lake. It was the perfect place to meditate.

The timing of my teachers training was serendipitous. MMI offered everything I needed to grow my mind and sharpen my skills. Sarah’s in-depth meditation teacher training broadened my knowledge base and inspired me to trust my intuition and say “yes” to whatever came up.

So the following year, I accepted the Tuesday night gig and started a weekly class with an eclectic group of community members who wanted and needed and really loved the relaxing meditations and opportunity to learn. And so it was, Tuesdays w/ Teresa,

We all grew together and developed a wonderful Sangha. As the year passed, we added a Sunday Sit.

As come to understand and accept, nothing stays the same. The city had a different long-term plan for the building and the community yoga classes and my meditation class were eventually cancelled.

I remember it like yesterday. I had graduated the MMI program, and I was brimming with love and joy and was so excited to bring the community together to celebrate World Peace Day. I offered to rent the building, but the city wanted to an unreasonable fee for the 1-hour donation-based event that would nowhere near cover the fee. I was sorely disappointed.

I was so driven to provide a space for myself and others to gather and sit, that I had rented a building and transformed it into a beautiful, peaceful, safe place for meditation. It was perfect and had a quaint office space in the back for my coaching.

I officially opened the meditation bottega, in September 2019 and designated Tuesday and Sunday-evenings to meditate with anyone who showed up. All my classes were donation based.

It was then I realized it was more than a hobby. Sharing meditation with others, was my passion and my purpose.

The Change Takes Place Meditation Bottega.

I loved the years of the bottega meditations, but somewhere around the end of February 2022, I received an intuitive message. It came as a feeling in my gut, deep inner knowing.

The message was to close the bottega. I felt conflicted and I didn’t understand why, but life experience had taught me to follow my intuition. I closed not only close the bottega but also my coaching business. It was April Fool’s Day 2022

In the months following some majory life-changing events took place within my family. There were medical emergencies, lifesaving surgeries, the death of my mother, and a birth of my grandchild.

It was a time of change, I watched an entire cycle of life, death, and the re-growth.

A new year began. We experienced many firsts, milestones, with the new grandbab. My husband also had a new lease on life following an open-heart surgery, and we bought a new vehicle.

Time marched on.

I began to feel a stirring excitement of something new on the horizon. After many hours on the phone with my daughter Erika, a new business idea emerged.

I had missed the connectedness of my meditation group and the beauty of having a supportive community, so together my daughter Erika and I decided to create a new space of growth, OM-AH Holistics.

After many hours of hard work from family and friends, we opened the new studio July 2024. It blossomed into a beautiful, welcoming space, where we currently offer our rural community Guided Meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, and Group Hypnosis Classes as well as Life and Health Coaching and all things holistic.

In the upcoming blog, I will share bits of my life experience, business tidbits, tricks of the trade, as well as emotional regulation techniques, a touch of humor and anecdotes from my personal life.

May we enjoy together this beautiful spring of 2025.