When you meet someone who lives in the now, two things happen. The first is that you, too, get pulled into the now. The second is that you begin plotting how to keep that feeling after they leave. If you’ve met Denver yoga teacher Lisa Schlelein, you know exactly what I mean.
Lisa has an uncanny ability to speak her truth no matter who’s looking and no matter the situation. And the key is simple: trust, completely, that in every moment the Universe is conspiring to bring us everything we need.
Lisa was one of my teachers during my yoga teacher training two years ago, and I continue to frequent her classes today. She’s taught at Om Time, Core Power, Rishi’s Crossing, Samadhi Center for Yoga, Spiral Yoga & Wellness Center, and at one time was teaching 15 classes a week. Now, the full-time yoga teacher calls Karma Yoga Center home.
But 11 years ago, she was just getting started. This is her story—how she came to yoga, found love and met her guru, all by trusting the Universe.
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It’s 2000 and Lisa is living in San Francisco when a coworker suggests she attend a Bikram yoga class. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my entire life,” she says. “I’d always worked out, but I was sore in places I didn’t know existed!” The instructor told her to make sure she came back the next day to work out the soreness. Lisa did. And she was hooked.
“I started getting up at 6 a.m. to practice. I wanted to eat all the things that were good for me. It was a huge shift. My body changed and my mentality changed. I felt wrung out from the inside out,” she tells me on a couch at Gypsy House on 13th in Capitol Hill.
After a solo European trek and a surfing stint on the shores of Santa Cruz, Lisa landed in Denver and began cleaning the Core Power on Grant studio in exchange for yoga. By day she worked at a doctor’s office, where she was often told she’d done something wrong; at night, she’d hop on her mat and be told that everything she was doing was right.
And then she took a class with Denver-teacher Angelique de Silva, who, unlike other teachers Lisa had previously practiced with, spoke in Sanskrit. “I’ve always been someone who enjoys challenges and the challenge of the heat in yoga class was what I thought it was, but once I heard her talk about Sanskrit I thought, ‘What is that?’” Lisa soon followed Angelique’s classes to Samadhi.
It was 2005. Within two years, after cleaning Samadhi in exchange for yoga and eavesdropping on countless teacher trainings, Lisa applied to be a yoga teacher.
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There are 10 of us piled into a big white van that we littered with prayer flags and magnets that read “Peace” and “Save the world.” We’re coming back from Enchanted Tadasana, a yoga, hiking and music retreat in Wyoming that Lisa and Katrina Gustafson, owner of Karma Yoga Center, put together last August. As yogis do, we got to talking about love – romantic love or lack thereof.
Lisa was at the wheel, headed down I-25 in northern Colorado, when she matter-of-factly stated that she’d meditated for 40 days to bring love into her life. After spending years comfortable being by herself and not in a relationship, she decided she wanted to experience herself in a relationship. “I wrote down everything I wanted in a partner, and then, no matter what I was doing, I made time every day to chant Aham Prema [ah-hum pray-mah]” which means I am divine love.
She did this for 40 days. Three months later, Aaron, her boyfriend, came into her life.
When Lisa tells this story, you get the sense that she doesn’t feel like she’s a miracle worker for having called love into her life. Instead, you see a glimpse of the dedication she brings to any endeavor, and an utterly disarming and complete trust that the universe will indeed provide, as long as you intend it.
“You put out intentions and you have to wait for them to be fulfilled,” she says. “It gives me more reason to love what I’m doing now, until it changes, because I know it will. If [yoga] is really done to the heart of what it’s intended to be, it can transform everything.”
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Between bites of egg sandwich at Gypsy House, Lisa tells me how she determines who to adjust in her classes.
“There’s a fine line between helping people along their path, giving them guidance and letting them guide themselves,” she says. “I’ll look at somebody and if they’re following what I say, I’ll go over and help them. If they resist right away, I’ll just hold their leg or touch the back of their heart. So much gets said in all that, the gesture. Words can mess a lot of things up, people can hear a lot of things in words, but gestures are easier to understand.”
When Lisa speaks, her hands are always involved, even now as she extends her palm to me to demonstrate. It’s something that I’ve had to work at since becoming a yoga teacher. As a writer, I fall easily into words and continually remind myself to be more hands on. And then Lisa reminds me “sometimes we look to others and want to do ‘that thing,’ but ‘that thing’ may not be what’s yours,” and I feel like myself again.
She makes teaching yoga look effortless and it’s because she’s put in the time. After graduating from Samadhi’s teacher training, she was offered a 7:30 p.m. Thursday class right away. “The universe just opened up. Things started falling in my lap. I started subbing like crazy and teaching as much as I could to the point where I was working full time and teaching full time,” she says. “It went full on from day one because I just kept saying yes.” She pauses, “I have a tendency to take on too much and burn myself out.”
Nearly a decade after her first Bikram class and a year after her teacher training, Lisa opened up to her own self-adjustment. “I remember distinctly the night I was sitting at an intersection on my way to class and all of a sudden I wasn’t stoked about being in my class. I was worn out from my schedule. I was sitting at a red light and something has to give, and it’s not gonna be yoga.
“And so I put in my notice.”
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When the student is ready for the teacher, the teacher will appear, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Until this year, Lisa’s teachers were found in the library and on the mat – her yoga books and her students.
“Everybody around me was finding teachers, going to Shiva Rea, Baron Baptiste, Seane Corn, Saul David Raye… I would go to Yoga Journal conferences and study with these teachers, and they’re great, but I would usually leave feeling like a round peg trying to fit into a square hole,” she says. “I was kinda lost for a while – I thought, who’s going to inspire me and be my guru?”
“But there are teachers, I believe, everywhere, which is why I hadn’t found anybody like Rod until recently.” Lisa discovered Rod Stryker through his Aspen, Colo., Energetics of Sequencing workshop. Rod Stryker teaches ParaYoga, “para” meaning “supreme, ancient, highest, the culmination of all effort.”
After Lisa realized Rod’s teacher started the Himalayan Institute (all her favorite books are published by them) she got the feeling that this may be her teacher. “Just the minute I saw him… well I was coming out of the bathroom and he was going into the classroom. It felt natural and meant to be. He said he could tell I was happy to be there because he could see my glow.”
Which just goes to show that finding a teacher doesn’t have to be glamorous. And that, yes, you’ll still know when it’s right.
I attended Lisa’s Sunday class after she returned from the workshop. There was something different in her guidance – it was electric, right from the start. I felt the energy of each pose. I was the energy of each pose. And I didn’t need to be soaked in sweat to do it. “The whole idea behind the workshop was to figure out the energy behind the postures rather than doing them to do them,” Lisa tells me now. “Some yoga teachers think, ‘Let’s make it as hard as possible and when the people fall down we’ve done our job.’ I’d never heard anyone [Rod] talk about asana like this, to make the class as effective as it can be and as transforming as it can be.”
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It’s only after our get together at Gypsy House, after I get home and begin poring over our chat, that the quote surfaces in my mind:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us… As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others!” —Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love
We are all timid, sometimes, when it comes to sharing our gifts. Lisa readily admits she often needed a nudge in order to take the next step in her yoga journey, or encouragement to play her flute or chant during savasana (staples, now, of her teaching).
“I was always doing [these things] in my world but scared to share them with my students,” she says. “Now, in my public classes, I don’t know if that’s up to me to decide. I want to give it and you decide whether you want to take it or not. If you don’t want to chant to Kali, it shouldn’t stop me from chanting to Kali.”
Self doubt is at the root of withholding. But, as yoga teachers, we withhold because we’re worried that those things that mean so much to us may not mean as much to our students. So we trap them inside until someone gives us permission to shine, or until passion forces them to the surface.
Then, when we do open up and continue to live our lives with open-hearted trust — oh, how the universe provides.
“My dad always said to me, ‘Find what you love and do that,’” says Lisa. “It blows my mind that teaching yoga supports my lifestyle. I am so very grateful.”
At a glimpse
Favorite Sanskrit word: ananda
I became a yoga teacher because I… felt it in my heart.
5 adjectives to describe your class: (I hope it comes across this way!) informative, challenging, fun, cleansing, full
5 adjectives to describe you: focused, fun loving, laidback, interested, adventurous
Pose that makes you feel free: Handstand
Pose that’s challenging: Hanumansana
3 teachers who are important to you: my dad Bill, Rod Stryker, Dr. Lester Miller, the rheumatologist in Santa Cruz I once worked for (Hm, they’re all guys!)
Favorite music to play in class: Anymore it’s ambient music. Music that sets a mood and a tone but that isn’t overpowering or doesn’t become the mood.
Note: This is the first in a series highlighting Denver’s talented yoga teachers who have also inspired my own practice.
