Ashley Turner on the Power of Yoga, Mental Health Work, and Moving Through Trauma

Here at the I Heart My Life community, we believe mental health should be a priority.

“The breath is the link between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies.” – Ashley Turner

Your mental health is one of the few things in life that you can’t ignore because the consequences of doing so are just too grave.

You see, nothing matters more than your own personal joy and happiness. Not work, not money, nothing…

And if anything, taking care of your mental well-being can help you grow in your professional life, even if you have to take a day to breathe every once in a while.

Someone who knows this better than anyone else I know is the amazing Ashley Turner.

Ashley is a longtime yoga meditation teacher and licensed psychotherapist. She’s been in private clinical practice for over a decade, and during that time, Ashley has combined yoga, meditation, and breath work with classical mental health psychology to help her clients.

Ashley now primarily teaches yoga and meditation professionals how to incorporate more psychological work and exercises into their services. She also works with mental health professionals and teaches them how to integrate yoga and breathwork into psychology.

Today, Ashley and I will be talking about a loooot of interesting subjects, such as the power of yoga and breathwork, moving through trauma, entrepreneurship, her fertility journey, and more.

Are you ready? Because I know I am!

All right, let’s dive in.

In This Episode:

[00:00] Introduction
[00:35] Let’s welcome Ashley in the show!
[02:09] How Ashley discovered yoga and what led her to use it for mental health work
[08:31] How Ashley healed her confidence wounds
[18:43] How Ashley decided to move forward as an entrepreneur in the yoga space
[24:07] Ashley shares the shadow work she had to do as she stepped into entrepreneurship
[30:44] Let’s talk about motherhood and Ashley’s fertility journey
[44:33] One final question for Ashley

Quotes:

“Your life is your curriculum. You don’t have to study books. Just be in your life and do the best you can and you will be forced into soul lessons.” – Ashley Turner

“I met a friend who was really into yoga and he introduced me to it and it started to change my life. And I don’t think at the time I knew that I really was depressed and I had suffered these rejections that really dropped my self-esteem. I sort of had like this idyllic eighteen years and then as soon as I got to college, I really lost my sense of self and my confidence. And so then after college when I found yoga, it started to heal me from the inside out.” – Ashley Turner

“Yoga really is a psychology. Yoga is a study of the soul, it’s a study of how we optimize living this human life, this body, [and] how we master our minds and emotions.” – Ashley Turner

“One of my teachers would always say the goal [of therapy] is to move from judgment to understanding. So how do I move from judging myself maybe for having that trigger to really understanding and having compassion for why that might be here?” – Ashley Turner

“If you’re just addressing the physical level and you’re working to get fit and strong and flexible [through yoga], it will still have an effect on your mental health and your energetic capacity.” – Ashley Turner

“The breath is the link between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies.” – Ashley Turner