Rev It Up: Yoga for Body, Mind, and Soul

Pastor

With a faith background rooted in Italian-Catholicism, Julie was pulled to the United Church of Christ in high school and deepened her Christian faith through engagement with scripture, mission, and community. She has explored a diversity of faith traditions through her studies and hospice ministry, and always returns to a foundation rooted in the biblical text and an expansive, loving God. She grew up nearby in Southborough and graduated from Algonquin Regional High School. After a few moves back and forth between San Francisco and Boston (and many road trips, train treks, and too many flights to count) she found herself back in her hometown territory when she returned to Southborough to serve as associate pastor at Pilgrim Church. In that position, Julie was director of pastoral care, led mission trips to Haiti, officiated retreats and family programs, and managed a thriving Sunday School program. Prior to this church position, Julie was a hospice chaplain, visiting dying patients and their loved ones in their homes all over the San Francisco Bay Area where she was ordained in 2003 at First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Most recently, Julie served as a chaplain at VNA Hospice and Rose Monahan Hospice House in Worcester, until the pandemic hit, her children were home from school, and home health care changed dramatically. During the pandemic, Julie served at United Congregational in downtown Worcester as their interim pastor, learning how to creatively weave that community together through new ways of worship. Following that adventure, Julie was led to pursue a strong nudge from the holy to serve in West Boylston and now at First Congregational Church of Auburn.

Throughout all of this, Julie maintained a sense of balance and flexibility through a devoted yoga practice of over twenty, trying everything from vinyasa to power yoga to aerial yoga (this made her queasy, not a match). Somewhere along the way, Julie was blessed with an opportunity to complete the Yoga Teacher Training at Common Ground Yoga in Framingham.

Julie is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Divinity School and completed her chaplain training through a residency at the University of California, San Francisco. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the Boston University School of Theology, focusing on the spirituality of death and dying.

Julie and her family live in an antique colonial in downtown Northborough, slowly restoring it and appreciating its quirky “character.” In addition to a daily yoga ritual, Julie is a long-distance runner and cyclist, lover of books, nature, witty jokes, quality coffee, and anything chocolate. Julie and her family travel all over, often camping in tents and distracted by tacky roadside attractions. Their three cats are very busy cuddling...or catching mice! The recent addition of Rex, a bearded dragon, completes their home.

Yogi

My yoga journey began in 2001, shortly after waking up to airplanes smashing into the Twin Towers. I was living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, when enough Summer of Love hippies were still meandering the streets and mingling with the technology revolution, clashing more than mingling. I was in love with San Francisco, and discerning what to do with my M.Div degree, I landed in a chaplaincy training program. It was intense work, rotations in the ICU and ER, psych hospital and pediatric oncology, and my walk home through colorfully detailed victorians led me by an especially vibrant victorian on a corner lot with a fabulous turret, the home of the Sivananda Center. This is where I began yoga, back before anyone had mats (we used their matching yellow towels, kept onsite) and in place of fancy yoga pants and sports tanks, we all wore very loose sweats and old t-shirts best reserved for bedtime or painting walls. We learned about spirituality as we found shapes in asanas, the interior lessons to match the exterior ones. Following yoga, we chanted and drank hot tea together, breathing in the spicy smells and incense, released into the foggy evening San Francisco air with a centeredness. It was that centeredness that carried me through chaplain training, the intensity of observing death and grief up close, of baptizing babies who were no longer alive and those who may not breathe for much longer. Yoga was true to its name, all about union and yoking and bringing body, mind, and soul into harmony so everything else had permission to shed. And, when there wasn’t harmony, that was important information: stumbles and imbalances, a mind with ruminating thoughts about a stupid interaction on a bus or a conversation that could have taken a different course, the struggle to find a bodily shape that would calm the mind enough so there was no longer many thoughts.

It wasn’t long before the Sivandana prophecy from the 1890s came true: Americans would someday love yoga, and overnight, there seemed to be a yoga studio in every neighborhood and people “discovering” yoga and themselves, lining up with their mat and bag and latte on weekend mornings. I joined them.

In my thirties, my yoga journey shifted towards prenatal yoga, as I prepared for natural births for my three children. I found prenatal yoga classes all over the city, and those teachers were my lifeline and source of information as I squatted, stuck out my tongue in goddess pose with a release, practiced holding poses with curled under toes for way too long as practice for the endurance of labor. It was yoga, I believe, that allowed me to have three natural births with a midwife outside of the hospital, one on a stool, one in a rage of a side plank, and another gentle beginning in the water. I wish that post-natal yoga was equally successful, but my oldest was of the high energy variety, and yoga did not calm him, but led him to demand more movement, loudly.

As a hospice chaplain, I returned to breath, to the breathing exercises that accompany a quality, spirituality-fused class. When you are ushering people towards their death, observing breath becomes central as its irregularities and pace signal life’s finality. I sat with families, breathing together, often replicating their loved one’s patterns as we held vigil and waited. And, I found yoga studios early and late in the day, the solace and sweat that founded the day well or shed it completely. I dreamed of teaching, but it was never the right time to sign up for a program, always a baby to care for or not enough money, other priorities. But I still found yoga classes almost daily, so polygamous as I experimented with different studios and teachers, neighborhoods and styles. I am a perpetual student, of the high energy variety, and yoga keeps offering.

After the babies, when I was rounder than I wanted to be and yearning to push myself in different ways than motherhood’s stretches, I found power yoga. I traded my sweats for second skin leggings and started doing yoga in gyms, mixing in weights and one-armed planks, burning squats and pumping music. I tried hot yoga, the famed Bikram studios painted red with flames on the side and a routine of the same asanas while dripping with sweat. I would race in to these classes, having parked in some ridiculous place blocks away after circling and circling, having a limited amount of time kid-free, and within seconds be entranced. Motherhood is so good at demanding focus in the tiny blocks of time when babies are not present, hypervigilance can subside enough for the spirit to enter in like a luxury. Of course, that spirit is necessity and not luxury when deep in motherhood’s trenches (three babies in less than four years! I needed help).

I returned to Massachusetts and never abandoned yoga. I pastored churches and cared for the dying, building a network of yogi friends and teachers around me. I replaced my lime green yoga mat, worn spots where my hands and feet had pressed into thousands of downward facing dogs, where I had considered careers and babies, transitions and moves, arrived exhausted or elated, but always left in one piece with a perspective that the day was indeed possible. That lime green mat brought me through years of an empty, anguished marriage and into a warrior stance that would be the bodily mantra for resilience for the next set of years.

Upon daydreaming about teaching yoga and perusing training programs, I accidentally/not accidentally clicked on a registration link at Common Ground Yoga. The love affair was rekindled. I never imagined, even after years and years of taking classes, that I could actually have the creativity and confidence to teach one. In small blocks of time, we practiced, teaching a sun salutation, teaching a beginning, teaching an end, teaching a restorative class, experimenting with an entire class for friends and then an entire class for whomever wanted to appear. I learned about physiology and how to articulate it, the nuances of facial expressions on students and how to quietly respond, many of the tools of ministry now applied to a different forum, yoga students are no less vulnerable and teaching is as much an honor as pastoring. The language of bodyshape is its own prayer.

The pandemic brought yoga to the outdoors and to a screen, to my bedroom and my dining room, minus the table rolled into the hallway for months on end so I could have my own studio. There are pros and cons to yoga at home - kids and cats have a way of intervening, and there is always laundry to throw in or a clump of mud from someone’s boot that should have been swept beforehand, but the safety of home is priceless for an introvert. Yoga in candlelight at home, just feet away from a cozy bed is a dream.

When it was time to complete my doctorate degree and really focus, forge through the pile of divorce paperwork, lead a post-pandemic church into the vast unknown of “Christianity Must Change or Die” nextness, all while mothering three teenagers alternately in the midst of some personal drama, I found an entirely different style of yoga - HotWorx, yoga in an individual sauna set between 120 and 130 degree. Wow, it was like a womb, and the virtual classes were so refreshingly anonymous, as was being all alone with my own emotional unleashing in a space barely large enough for my mat. I learned to swear. I learned to sweat. I learned to walk in with clutter in my brain and walk out not even knowing what day of the week it was, and from this sweaty, holistic meditation, a dissertation was produced and an autonomous woman was born. Liberation? Fullness? Somehow aligning who I wanted to be with who I was becoming? My body became stronger than ever and so did my heart and my voice.

This leads me to now, when my new self looks at the old self, and remembers old promises. I have always wanted to teach yoga with more regularity, believing in a full body approach to soul work. And I always promise to find new ways to serve and give and create experiences that are artful and well and holy. So, I invite you to be part of this next season of yoga, because I believe in you and I believe that the body knows the aches and delights of the spirit.

Join me, for finding healing or wholeness or whatever you need to know. Yoga will lead you.