Our next HYAcademy workshop will be offered by our longtime instructor Raphaela Fritz, whose HYA teaching career stretches back to 2015 and overall teaching career reaches back 25 years. She brings a wealth of knowledge to her teaching and eagerly awaits the chance to share it in workshop form. Spine Health 101 will be a deep dive into the anatomy and energetics of the spine, how it moves and flows in your yoga practice and supports you in daily life.
Raphaela is trained in numerous yoga lineages, including Vinyasa, Anusara and Bikram Yoga. She is also a massage therapist, artist, former yoga studio owner who has funneled her passions into retreats and online programs that combine yoga, meditation, dance and self-care. At HYA since 2015, Raphaela has blended that into her unique style.
“I’ve evolved personally and the studio has also evolved since I’ve been here, which is beautiful. When I started teaching here, we weren’t even teaching Flow yet, which is crazy to think,” Raphaela said. “I think I’ve evolved in just really connecting to an individual’s uniqueness and sharing from that place. In the yoga community and in the world so often people will parrot or copy another teacher. There’s a difference between being inspired by a teacher vs. mimicking. I’m turning 50 in December and I’m at a place where this is who I am and owning that.
“I want to inspire and support other people in doing the same.”
Her focus on the spine in the HYAcademy workshop will start with anatomy and then go deeper.
“We will work on proper alignment and how, when the spine is aligned, it supports a healthy body,” she said. “I will also touch on the energetics of the spine and then we will put it into a yoga practice, where we will move through different parts of the spine, connecting to it through asana. When you align your upper back and shoulders, you can walk through your life with confidence and fully inhabit your body. It also supports moving into backbends in a way that just feels really fluid.”
Sign up for the workshop here and read more about Raphaela’s yoga journey:
HYA: How did you get started in yoga?
Raphaela: I got into yoga when I was 15 years old, living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My mom thought it would be good for me. So I took a six-week evening yoga class in the basement of this Quaker House. I remember being there and everybody seemed really old because I was 15. That was the first imprint. When I was 17 and went to college, I went to art school. I would take yoga while I was in college and that is when I took my very first Bikram yoga class. I was 17 in Tucson, Arizona at this place called Yoga Oasis, which is still there. I kind of dabbled through college.
When I was 19, I got hired to teach yoga and art at a crisis center for abused children. It was a grant and they were supposed to help raise the childrens’ self-esteem. So I would go in one day a week and work with the children and teach yoga and one day a week and teach art. That was my pre-teacher training yoga. I ended up moving overseas to Poland to go to an art academy. In that era, I was 23, that ended up being a very challenging era in my life, a little bit of a dark night of the soul and that is when spirit was like, “You need yoga.”
HYA: How did you begin teaching?
Raphaela: When I got back to the States, I ended up in Houston, Texas and I went to the Bikram studio. At the time I had zero money so I would clean the studio for free yoga and that’s where I met Jess Zoller. The owner of the studio shortly after said I would be a very good teacher. So Jessica and I went to teacher training together in 2001. I have been teaching since then. Jess and I taught full-time there for a few years running the studios. Then I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and taught Bikram yoga there and that is when my world started opening up. I went to massage school in 2004 and I started studying Anusara yoga, learning a lot about the biomechanics of the body and Tantric philosophy and my whole world started opening up that way.
HYA: How did you come to North Carolina?
Raphaela: We moved here in 2009 right after our son was born and I opened up a yoga studio in Saluda called Nectar. Lee and Gail Stockdale (HYA students now) used to come there. It was a little town and the people who came were very grateful it was there. It was a small town and maybe we were ahead of our time. It was a yoga studio and healing arts center and when my daughter was born Navarra and we decided to move to Asheville. So that studio was open for four and a half years.
When I moved to Asheville, I started teaching at local studios and I saw my clients for healing arts. While both of the two methods, Bikram and Anusara, informs my teaching, there was a lot of drama with the leaders of those two methods and after awhile I knew I have enough knowledge that now I teach what my heart wants me to teach.
HYA: How did your personal online courses and retreats come about?
Raphaela: In 2018 I started doing women’s yoga and embodied wisdom retreats. Our whole family moved to Barnardsville and after years of renting out spaces I was like, why am I spending thousands of dollars to rent out a retreat venue when we have all this land. So we built out a small sweet yoga space on my mother’s land. I was doing retreats out there and mini retreats that were a day long.
At the end of one retreat this name Sovereign Pearl came to me. It was the conception of this women’s course that I now offer. It took a couple of years to work on it but now it’s one of my main focuses. It’s called Sovereign Pearl, Reclaiming Feminine Radiance and Fullness. It is a 10-week online embodiment immersion for women. After spending 20 something years as a bodyworker, 25 years teaching yoga and all these other things, I feel like there are like different worlds: the healing arts world, the yoga world, the meditation, the sensual world. It blends a lot of different components into one. I’m in the middle of my third round of it. I launched the first round the night before the hurricane last year. Currently, more than in-person retreats, that’s where my heart is.
Sovereign Pearl blends self-care, yoga, meditation, dance prompts, journaling, sensual care, all into one. It’s a themed journey through the ocean. They get something each week from those categories. We learn a lot from each other as we go through our processes.
