I still clearly remember sitting in the first class of my eighteen-month yoga teacher training four years ago. I was dumbfounded to realize that I committed to this new pursuit. The unexpected twists and turns the path of life takes me on are just remarkable. For the past twenty years I had supported myself as a metal smith, creating my own original designs. I loved my work and never imagined that I would or could do anything else. And then suddenly everything changed when a part of my body failed me. I began to have constant pain in my arm and eventually my arm simply refused to go on. Those countless hours at my jeweler's bench, with the worst posture you can imagine, and making endlessly repetitive little movements had eventually damaged my ability to grip anything. On some days I couldn't even manage to turn the key in the front door! When you live alone and you are self supportive this type of minor disability might seem like a really major problem. And yet, the transformation that has come about because of this difficult life experience has now convinced me that the old adage, "Problems are just opportunities dressed in work clothes," is so very true. Here's what I mean: A person cannot work as hard (and play as hard) as I always had done without paying a price. Luckily, I was given an early-warning "heads-up" with this arm injury and a dose of metal toxicity. I'm thankful I did not have to wait until I had developed even more serious health issues before I chose to make some lifestyle changes. About this time I began my deepening involvement with yoga. My daily practice awakened in me an awareness that it was time to take much better care of Cathy. Slowly, I began to dig my way through my incessant busyness to find my way back deep inside. I rediscovered that quiet place within myself, where I could focus on what really feels important. My priorities clearly began to shift, and as they did, I began to feel more truly open, alive, and accepting than at any other time of my life. Today, four years after that turning point, I can honestly say that I have never been happier. In fact, as much as I loved making and teaching jewelry, nothing in my life has ever used my natural gifts as thoroughly and as well as teaching yoga does today. Yoga has become my way of remembering how to bloom. Yoga's benefits are so diverse. It cultivates strength and flexibility in body, mind, and spirit. It stimulates your cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, and nervous systems. It dramatically reduces the negative effects of stress. Basically, it brings our bodies into a state that is receptive for healing. My body quickly became so happy with these changes! Have you ever experienced how profound it can be to use slow and deep yogic breathing to bring a calm alertness to your life? The effect on your nervous system is amazing. It has now become second nature for me to switch over to this type of breathing whenever I am entering a situation where I will need all my wits about me. Apparently, I'm not alone. Over and over, I hear testimonials from my students about how their practice is radically affecting the balance in their own lives. Of course, knowing that I have encouraged, in some small way, their attention to these changes (and that they have been effective) gives me a lot of joy. Enthusiasm can be contagious, and I am very enthusiastic about this path! As Stephen Cope put so well in the book, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, After exposure to the practice of yoga there is simply and at times astonishingly, a great deal more of us there. More consciousness, more energy, more awareness, more equanimity, more life in the body, more connection with the mysteries of the soul. And so, what began two-and-a-half years ago as my simply offering a once-a-week yoga class for ten participants has today grown into a schedule of seven classes a week with 95 participants. And all of this takes place right here in downtown Pittsboro. I don't even have to leave Chatham County in order to enjoy this new lifestyle. It really is a dream come true, and I am eternally grateful.

In March, Cathy Holt will be celebrating her tenth year as downtown Pittsboro’s premier full-time yoga teacher. She’s not the only one who will be celebrating. Her 85 students are pretty happy about it too.

One student comments that Holt has “a unique ability to make everyone in her class feel loved and cared about.” Another says, “When you sign up to be in her class you are signing up to be cared for--and to be on a path that transforms your life.”
Transforming lives is part of what yoga is all about, and Holt’s path to a career as a yoga teacher, and her subsequent success, have been an ongoing transformation for her as well.

Holt came to Chatham County in 1991 with no plans to be a yoga teacher—she was a full time metal smith, creating original jewelry designs in gold and silver, with a national reputation she’d built up over a twenty-year career as an artist in Florida and Georgia. Why did she pick Pittsboro? A Chapel Hill gallery owner told her that Pittsboro had a terrific artist community. In search of that community, Holt became Chatham County Arts Council director and sought out other artists to create the first annual Chatham Artists Studio tour in 1994 (now in its 15th year).

 Flush with the success of her art work and the studio tour, Holt had no reason to change horses. Pittsboro had begun to feel like a “hometown” to her. Though she had kept up a personal yoga practice and studied with local teachers through the years, she had no ambition to emulate those teachers. Then, in 1998, came an opportunity for another transformation.
“I developed a debilitating repetitive motion injury,” Holt says, “with nerve damage in my neck and arm. Doctors said I’d have permanent paralysis if I continued as a metal smith.”

It was a devastating moment. The success of her art career had taken a toll. Bending over a jeweler’s bench for years had finally caught up with her. A single woman living alone, Holt was faced with a life in which she could not do her chosen work-- she could not even turn the key to her front door. But as Holt tells her students, “Problems are opportunities in work clothes.”

She went to work on making lifestyle changes, and after many acupuncture and Rolfing treatments, she began to heal. Then came the task of considering her options for a new way of making a living. She knew she had the kind of natural fearlessness that is required of entrepreneurs. She’d proved that before in creating a successful art career. Her local yoga teacher had closed shop, and she missed the classes badly. Holt thought there might be a place for her as a teacher. When she became strong enough, she went into yoga teacher training. Turned out, she was a natural teacher.
In March 1999, Holt opened her first class in the parish hall of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. “My goal was to have one class with 10 students,” Holt says. “Almost immediately I had enough students for 6 classes a week!” Her students came from all over the area—Siler City, Bear Creek, and north Chatham, as well as Pittsboro. “I even had one who came for six years all the way from Durham.”

Two years later she had her own private studio as part of the new WDL offices in Pittsboro, built by brothers Mark and Lyle Estill.  “They designed a beautiful room for me, with windows, wood floors, sound insulation, and a separate entrance and bathroom—all because Mark loved his yoga and wanted a studio close by.”
Holt leads her classes gently through each one-and-a-half hour session, demonstrating and fine-tuning poses, providing encouraging readings, and helping individuals focus on “breathing through” challenging poses. Certified through training in 1999, she frequently spends weekends studying with yoga masters from varied disciplines so that she can bring new perspectives to the class.

The practice of yoga builds strength, equanimity, and awareness and acceptance of personal challenges for people at any level of fitness. Each class begins with a quiet meditation, in a seated position, focusing on the breath, followed by a short reading and chant. Then the class transitions to some yoga stretches that work the hamstrings, flex the spine, and relax the shoulders and neck, and build core strength. Standing poses follow, building from such poses as “Sun Salute” to “Warrior” and “Tree,” in which students must focus inwardly and use the breath to respond to physical sensation that occurs at the edge of a challenge. The class often finishes with inversions, gentle twists, and stretches before the final relaxation, or “Corpse” pose.

In recent years Holt has led extended yoga retreats in the North Carolina mountains, Ireland, and Mexico, as well as a regularly offering intensive “Restorative Yoga” sessions several Saturdays a year in Pittsboro.

Class members are known to enjoy themselves so much that they burst out laughing mid-pose—occasionally giving an extra and humorous challenge to the task of balancing on one leg.  Holt laughs that her first days of teaching were not all smooth sailing. “My mother announced to my first class that I was a klutz! And it’s true that as a child I was the kind of kid that was always falling down and getting hurt.” Students have a hard time believing that, watching Holt demonstrate a backbend, a handstand, or a “Warrior III” pose in which she balances on one leg, twists sideways and parallel to the floor, with three limbs extended into the air. But Holt believes that much of her success is due to her down-to-earth way of handling the class. “I think my students do love me because of my ‘ordinariness.’ I don’t have matching outfits. My body is not perfect. I don’t try to pretend that I can do every pose to the nth degree.”

 Holt says that probably 25 % of her students come to her yoga classes because of pain issues. “The reason they stay is because it works!” she says. Holt teaches six classes per week, in 12-week session. Most current students are repeats, and there’s a waiting list for more.  Yoga, and Cathy Holt’s teaching, have transformed the lives of many Chathamites in the past ten years.

But the classes and the training have transformed Holt’s life as well. “Physically, I feel so much better now at 55 than I did at 30. It’s true! I used to have all kinds of aches and pains. I used to have a bad ankle, bad knees, and neck damage. Now I have full range of motion and strength—and an awareness of when I’m overdoing it.”

Yoga is more than the physical poses or “asanas” most people are familiar with. Many of yoga’s benefits come from a focus on the breath. “Long, slow, deep breaths calm the nervous system and give you a moment to choose how to respond to life’s challenges, instead of just reacting automatically,” she says.  Holt says she used to be a “hothead”—but the practice of yoga has led to equanimity in her life. “That’s an even bigger change for me,” she says, “than the physical healing.”

Cathy Holt has accomplished something quite rare in the profession. Where most yoga teachers work in gyms or for large yoga centers, she has created a successful independent yoga studio on her own, what she likes to call “a hometown yoga studio.”

A student comments that Holt has “given us the chance to continue experiencing all the gifts of practicing and being together throughout the many seasons of change that we have each lived through during the past decade.”
Transforming the lives of Chatham people, one breath at a time.
For more information about Cathy Holt Yoga, check the website http://www.cathyholtyoga.com or call 542-4103.