Jacob Studinger

I first started practicing Yoga a little over 30 years ago. My mother practiced Yoga well before I was born and had books and VHS tapes when I was young. I thought Yoga was a lot of fun and liked how my body felt doing the postures so I would either ask my mom to help me or ask her for a VHS or book to help guide me. When I started my practice, I practiced Classical Hatha. A few years of doing Hatha (around 12 years old by now), I started to get into Vinyasa and Power Yoga. Then around 13 years old is when I started to buy Yoga Journal Magazines. I don’t know if they still print but they used to do quarterly releases and I would eagerly await the end of year release because they would have a huge directory in the back of the magazine that listed tons of Yoga schools around the world. I used to sit there and look through every single one and if they practiced a style I didn’t know, I would ask my mom what that style of Yoga was like. My love for Yoga just continued to grow looking through those directories and I wanted to teach Yoga more than anything in the world.
When I was around 15, I was sure I was going to one day go to one of those schools and learn to teach Yoga. It was while looking at those magazines that I started to get interested in Ashtanga Yoga. I started to study all I could about that particular style of Yoga and some of the key teachers, my favorite at the time being Bryan Kest. I loved the physicality of that particular practice and how much strength I was getting in my practice but that also came with some hardships as well. It was during my years of Ashtanga practice that I sustained my 5 big injuries. Each time, those injuries set me back further and further. Once I healed up, I left Ashtanga and got back into Vinyasa and Hatha.
I still wanted to go on and become a Yoga teacher but when it was time for college, I felt the pressure of society that the only way to make a living was with a college degree. I had a hard time settling with what direction I wanted to go and fumbled through college, eventually settling with getting a BFA. But I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do so directly from graduating, I went into Massage School and became a Massage Therapist. But even through that journey, I still secretly just wanted to go and learn Yoga. Throughout the years, I kept to my personal practice and continued to study various styles of yoga and just tried to be satisfied with that while making a living being a Bodyworker. In 2020, I stumbled into Yin Yoga and that changed everything for me. I used to be very flexible and could get myself into any position but over the years of sitting in school and abuse I put my body through with working, parts of my body started to tighten up.
Yin opened me up. Once I got into the practice, I started to gain so much openness and flexibility in my body so quickly. It was such a wonderful feeling to have so much more freedom within that I just kept practicing every day. Even though this reignited my practice, it still wasn’t quite enough to get me to go to school to become certified to teach. The final decision to go fulfill my life long dream of teaching came about when I was sustaining injuries from doing Bodywork and I was getting into Jungian psychology and was, at the time, learning about Shadow work. I realized that, at midlife, it was time to stop suppressing my dream and to find a school that would work with my work and life schedule. Since 2020, a lot of schools went online so it was just a matter of finding a school that taught what I wanted to learn. In 2024, I enrolled in a Classical Hatha 200hr program and near the end of 2024, I completed it. I finally became a Certified Yoga Teacher. Everything else started to fall into place. I started teaching right away at BeWell and that has been an amazing experience for me. I then got certified in Yin Yoga and started to teach Yin exclusively (unless I subbed for another class). Then, I decided that I wanted to further my understanding of Yoga and went on for more advanced training. In early 2025, I enrolled in a 300hr Iyengar based Vinyasa course.
Diving deeper into this more advanced training was exactly what I needed. Everything started to come full circle for me and my childhood dreams were becoming reality. I can’t express in words what this has all meant for me except that teaching Yoga gives me a feeling of deep gratitude and purpose and being able to share this with others is such an amazing experience for me.