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"Yoga makes your heart carefree, and radiant like starlight. 
And it frees your mind from wanting things."

- Patanjali Yoga Sutra 1.36-37 (from The Essential Yoga Sutra)

Anya Arax-Melnick is a dancer, yogini, and artist who first discovered yoga as a teenager to compliment her rigorous dance training in ballet and modern dance. Over the decade that followed, Anya danced in several companies and was a member of various art, dance, and music collectives in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Miami and DC. Anya rediscovered yoga as a way to heal from a very painful dance injury and has been practicing ever since. From this experience she learned about the powerful healing that can occur through yoga and hasn't looked back. She is a certified AcroYoga teacher, a certified yoga teacher with the Jivasara Yoga School, registered with Yoga Alliance, is a Thai Yoga Therapy practitioner and is the founder of the Karma Yoga Initiative, a program that helps create a way for people interested in yoga to give back to the community.

 

Anya brings a warm and open energy to her teaching and believes that yoga is a way for people to tap into their true natures and find the inner happiness and peace that is found within us all. She says "Yoga helps uplift the spirit and lets us remember our true nature, which is love." Anya loves teaching yoga, acrobatics and gymnastics with all of her heart and feels so honored to be able help people of all ages find delight in connection, movement, stillness and everything in between. She brings a creative and intuitive flair to her classes which both inspire and motivate her students to help them embrace the divinity within through movement. She teaches uplifting, fun and challenging classes that focus on various yogic techniques including vinyasa, asana, partner yoga and acrobatics, music, pranayama, meditation, alignment principles, and spiritual teachings.

Anya is so grateful to all of her teachers past and present who have helped her along on this amazing journey including Marni Task, Cheryl Wallace, Sharron Gannon, David Life, Sri Dharma Mittra, Rolf Gates, Max Strom, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, John Friend, Tiffany Fraser, Jenny, Jason & Vanessa from AcroYoga along with many others. She is especially grateful to Jason & Jenny from AcroYoga and Marni Task from Jivamukti Yoga who have taught her spirit to fly. Anya's wish as a teacher is to share the happiness, healing and love that she has found through yoga with the world. She currently resides in the Washington, DC area and teaches throughout the United States.

 

 

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