It is fun to open the paper and read good things about one of our own. This week Natasha Stevens, a yoga instructor and personal trainer at the Lake House, was quoted and pictured in an article entitled “Building a Network for the Disabled” in the Charleston Post and Courier.
The Post and Courier article is about a nonprofit organization, Adaptive Expeditions, that helps people with physical and visual disabilities in the greater Charleston area enjoy activities such as, yoga, surfing, sailing, kayaking, cycling and swimming.
The article describes how Natasha is helping visually impaired people practice Yoga. Her involvement with Adaptive Expeditions is a new challenge for her. She says, “When the opportunity came up to teach the visually impaired group, I was interested to add another element to my teaching”. She taught the fall session and now is teaching the current session.
Natasha has taught yoga since 2011 at Seabrook. She conducts group classes of gentle and restorative yoga, flow yoga, semi-private classes of Yin yoga (a slow, floor-based, deep stretch yoga), and chair yoga for those with permanent or temporary physical limitations.
However, yoga was not her first love. From the age of eight to seventeen, Natasha was a tetrathlon athlete. This competition involves running, biking, horseback riding and shooting at a target, much like pentathlon but without the fencing. An attack of appendicitis, which led to a perforated appendix, left her with a stiff, messed up body. No longer able to compete in the tetrathlon, she took up yoga but her injuries forced her to adapt it while she recovered. So empathy for helping others who are challenged to practice yoga comes from her own experience.
She is also helping this worthy organization in another way. It is an annual tradition for Michelle Duplessis from the Club to request that Natasha give an hour-long yoga class to benefit some charity. This year the beneficiary is Adaptive Expeditions to help keep the class for the visually impaired going.
The class will be April 23 at 9:00 am at the Ocean Terrace, which is next to the outside pool at the Club. This class is appropriate not only for those who have already enjoyed Natasha’s classes but also visitors on the Island and those who just want to give yoga a try. There will be more about this event on Tidelines as the date approaches.
—Sally Kimball
Tidelines Staff Writer