Leah is a registered yoga instructor and founder of Sacred Space Yoga Studio in Frisco, Texas as well as YogaTales for Kids, a Yoga-based enrichment program for kids in DFW-area schools.

Leah began her yoga journey while working in humanitarian relief and development in Southeast Asia. Focusing her efforts on the plight of those affected by human trafficking, Leah worked with women and children who had been sold into both sex and labor trafficking. She served in a regional role building a network of community-based organizations that worked with human trafficking survivors.

Through networking, training and research dissemination she was able to empower these front line workers to build best practices in their local initiatives in Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Nepal and Vietnam. Leah has a Master’s Degree in International Development. In 2009, Leah started her own non-profit organization called Freedom Stones in order to assist survivors of human trafficking through income generation projects, training and rehabilitation. This international organization worked with artisan survivors in Ghana, Cambodia and Thailand through a jewelry making initiative which generated income for them as they healed and transformed.

Leah began practicing yoga during her 5 years in Southeast Asia in order to ground and decompress her heart, mind and body as she was exposed to so much secondary trauma. After returning from Thailand, her practice became a means of reintegration as she healed from post traumatic stress disorder.

Her current passion, as she has been planted for the last 10 years in Frisco, is to provide a means for people who serve others to be able to continue their work sustainably. She knows that many in professions or life situations in which they serve others can be perilous to their mind, body and heart. She has been designing classes and curriculum based on yoga, meditation, breathing techniques, sometimes co-teaching with other healing practitioners, in order to help her clients build sustainable life rituals so that they can continue their important roles. She believes self-care is key in serving others in any meaningful and long term capacity. Burn out, compassion fatigue, post-traumatic stress, and the bodily manifestations of these conditions keep first responders, educators, social workers, therapists, physicians and other healers from their important mission. She has created a beautiful and nurturing space in which people can feel, heal, transform and build community.

Her vision for the future is to continue building out curriculum, retreats and programs that will further her mission of transformation and authentic community. She believes the pattern of transformation can be taught and demystified. She has lived through several transformations of her own and understands that “we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through usually a painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or ‘resurrection.’ This is the pattern that connects and solidifies our relationship with everything around us” (Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ). She serves her clients with a heart full of love and generosity, willing to see and bring out the best in everyone.