Tree Sa Bio

YACEP/E-RYT 200/RYT 500

Bio

Tree is a playful yogi and acrobat who is committed to empowerment through inspired movement. She is a skilled and supportive circus arts & yoga teacher & therapist, and a teacher of teachers. Tree maintains a personal Ashtanga Yoga practice that she reverently calls her super healer training. She also performs and produces inspirational events as MysTree with Soma Tree Cirque (her production company), Voler Thieves of Flight and ReKinection.

MysTree is a passionate expressive artist who loves to flow and is an avid seeker of “the zone.” Tree produces artistic, uplifting, and healing events with her production company, Soma Tree Cirque. Currently, Tree has just completed her Yoga Therapy training with Inner Peace Yoga Therapy School, specializing in joint hypermobility, aerial yoga therapy, and trauma informed yoga therapy. Trees’ teaching style is encouraging, inclusive, and fun, and inspires confidence in her students.

Photo by Ashley Cain

On Hypermobility 

MY STORY (an excerpt from a paper I wrote on joint hypermobility)

I grew up a gymnast, a dancer, and an acrobat. As I began to realize my own bendy nature, I had a difficult time understanding how my body could ever move with symmetrical engagement. The joints were so lax that they had my body moving a bit like the wave. Ankles and wrists would sprain easily and I just felt (and looked) different from others. Gymnastics was harder. I put SO much effort into it and it seemed to take me much longer than others to progress. Hypermobile joints led to pain before I was 20 years old. At the time I was told that it was arthritis. In yoga I seemed to progress quickly and was even seen as somewhat of an expert, even early on in my practice because of my extreme flexibility, however, I was unable to sit up straight for even short periods of time in order to meditate. In 2011 I blindly followed my sister to Italy and serendipitously did my 200 hour ashtanga yoga teacher training without having practiced any ashtanga yoga previously and I am beyond grateful. The practice is intensely strength building and my intuitive energetic connection and beneficial alignment started to be realized. 

I have kids and they are much more interested in circus arts than in yoga. Performing and teaching aerial arts has me, my very hypermobile 20 yr old daughter (aerialist and contortionist), and my 22 year old zebra daughter (has Ehlers Danlos syndrome, is an aerialist and a fire dancer) become very strong and capable but still we struggle to gain strength at the rate of our peers and students. With two even tiner super bendy daughters, hypermobile sisters, and moms, I am really invested in discovering what is good for us. Through focused self massage, regular body work, regular ashtanga practice, adding new and diverse practices regularly, keeping things moving, and my own personal yoga therapy I continue to receive insight into how to work with hypermobility. I do consider circus arts and yoga to be two separate endeavors that I sometimes fuse but still they are distinct. In yoga, the hypermobile bodies need to focus on strength. In my experience, in circus arts, the hypermobile bodies also need to focus on strength, until we are performing and then we let it show.  

The bendy variety of yogi, acrobat, and athlete, seem to be drawn to me. I’m grateful to get to work with this population and this emerging understanding of our special and distinctly different connective tissue. I’ve discovered, first hand, that “circus strong” is medicine for those with lax connective tissue.