We learn by doing as much as we learn by watching. Part of my most recent yoga training included observing several hours of advanced yoga classes. Invariably, I would watch the most poised, clarified, and graceful student in the class — watching the placement of their hands, how their feet lifted off the floor, the direction of their gaze during arm balances. These observations were both informative and instructive. Years later, I was practicing in a class beside someone who was so focused, precise, and fluid that I found myself wanting to stop, observe, and learn. This was my experience with Maya Magennis.
Maya’s committed focus was internal; she seemed to reflect devotion, itself. In time, I learned that she was also a yoga teacher, and soon studied with her. I also came to learn that we have the same crucial and foundational teacher, the late Maty Ezraty, the founder of Yogaworks. Our common bond brought a deeper understanding of Maya, as she invokes the same rigor and specificity which initially ignited my own practice.
Born and raised in Hawaii, Maya is a graduate of Duke University, and currently lives in Los Angeles. She recently spoke with me about her seemingly circuitous path beginning with her early yogic studies with her mom to working on Wall Street to now serving as the President of Yogaworks’ Digital Platform. Maya also delved into the more subtle aspects of asana — the intention of being present, the practice of presence.

MY YOGA LINEAGE is inextricably linked to both Hawaii and my mom – I grew up in Hawaii, and my mom was my first yoga teacher. My mom started practicing yoga in the ‘80s when a lot of the original Eastern teachers stopped in Hawaii on their way to the mainland. She would wait for a phone call on Friday to find out where they were going to practice on Saturday. People would then convene at somebody's house and go through the Primary Ashtanga Series with the visiting teacher. And so, I grew up seeing my mom do this thing, that I didn't really understand at the time, and, I thought, Why are you doing those weird things with your body?

Meanwhile, I was a ballet dancer, and had started taking ballet classes when I was two and a half years old. I think that's why I now gravitate toward the technical aspects of yoga. I always was used to moving my body in a technical way, trying to figure out the micro movements and know exactly where the body needed to be in a specific position. I think that informed the way that I moved my body, and how I thought about yoga as I started studying the practice more deeply. But for me, the depth of my yoga studies didn’t come until many years later.

My mom started teaching me when I was 12 years old. I was resistant to it at the time, which looking back, I wish I had been a little bit more open minded because it would have helped my dance so much. But I wasn’t ready for it. And as they say, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears.’

I continued dancing and danced through my sophomore year of college, but when I realized a professional dance career was not in the cards, and stopped dancing, I needed something else to fill that gap. I was so used to relating to my body in an intimately connected way every single day that I needed something to fulfill that connection. And so, I started practicing yoga in my college gym.

And as I started practicing more and more, I realized how much yoga needed to be a part of my life. Like a lot of people, I went initially from being interested in the physical practice but then as I started to explore more, and to feel my way into it, the philosophy became a lot more relevant, a lot more interesting, and the overall lifestyle has become more important to me. Yoga eventually has become my safe space. It is the one thing that has stayed constant in my life as I’ve navigated so much change, especially the uncomfortable stuff.

WHEN I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE, I moved to New York City to become an investment banker. I worked in banking for quite a few years which was wild, you know, especially coming from a childhood with parents who were kind of hippies. Banking felt rebellious, for sure. Radical. But I am mathematical – that’s what comes as natural to me, technique and systems and breaking things down and understanding how the various pieces fit together.

When I was in New York, I was living on the Upper East Side and there was this tiny little yoga studio a few blocks away. It was always there for me, even though at the time in my life I didn't have a lot of space for yoga. It was like I was hanging on by a thread. This was during the financial collapse of 2008, working at a boutique investment firm, where my job was looking at distressed assets, trying to sell distressed assets, looking for companies to buy distressed assets and so on. I learned a lot during that time, but it was really stressful, and definitely wasn't the right profession for me. I got totally burnt out. So, my yoga practice for a while just consisted of crying in the back of the room. And that was important to me. I needed that space.

I took my first class with Maty in 2009 in New York. I had never come across a teacher that was so technical and so specific and so adamant about things being done a certain way. She was so clear in what she was asking, but at the same time, she had so much love in her delivery. It was always from the place of, ‘I'm presenting you with this so that you can deepen your own understanding of yourself.’ For me, that just touched my heart in a way where I knew that she had to be a bigger part of my life going forward. So, I continued to practice with her.

When I was on leave from banking, I took my first 200-hour teacher training with a teacher who was one of Maty's students from LA. I felt like I continued to learn from Maty, and indirectly, her philosophy. That's the thing about the 200-hour programs – people go through them just wanting to learn more, but the learning continues. And when it was completed, I still wanted to learn more. I couldn't get enough. I still feel that way. Like I can't get enough.

THE OCEAN IS MAGIC. I feel so privileged to grow up in a place with the most unbelievable ocean on the planet. I could swim before I could walk. I was on a surfboard when I was a toddler. The ocean was a big part of my upbringing, and I didn't even realize how important it was to me until it was taken away. I went to college, inland in North Carolina, where there's no ocean in sight at all.

Eight years ago, when I first moved here to Los Angeles, I never thought that I would jump in the freezing cold, California Pacific. I'd just been deconditioned from going to the beach by living on the East Coast for twelve years that the ocean wasn’t anything I even leaned into. Until COVID hit.

I have a group of friends that were largely connected to the yoga community, and they had been swimming daily. They invited me out one day and, basically after that first swim, I was in the water every single day. That was such an important part of my sanity during COVID. You know, when we were all stuck at home, it was hugely healing to me in a lot of ways. I had divorced in 2019, and coming off of that divorce and into COVID, I thought, ‘Oh man, this is a recipe for disaster,’ but the ocean was there to hold me.

I'm a huge believer that yoga is so much bigger than what we practice on the mat. For me, being in the ocean with the rhythmic nature of swimming and breathing connected me to something much larger. Breathing is such an important part of swimming, and it was like learning a new skill, when you become really in tune with the various components of it. When I started swimming, I got to take myself out of that overly technical analyzing mind and just figure out how to do it in real time. It was a beginner's mind thing, where I had to figure it out on the spot without overthinking it.

In a lot of ways, when I swim, it's one of the few moments where I am truly present. The other time is when I am teaching, where I'm not thinking about other things, I'm not overanalyzing or micromanaging, but I'm just present in what I'm doing. And, in that way, swimming has really changed the way I approach moving. As I started swimming, my practice became much more organic. How do I move everything in combination with each other? There’s a place in time for breaking down the alignment, understanding each individual component. But what does the whole feel like when you put all those pieces together? And for me, that was one of the first times when I felt really connected to this idea of your body being a vehicle for Prana. Prana is moving through us all the time and this awareness totally changed the way that I felt in my body. Rather than focusing on the individual parts, I experienced what it felt like to be whole, unified, in body and breath. There is no thinking involved, just being.

ALIGHTMENT IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. Alignment and clarity: they’re both synonymous with Awareness. Alignment is really the intention, the willingness to pay attention. And to me, that's what yoga is. You can package it however you want, but ultimately, the practice is about paying attention to what's happening in the present. And what better way to do it than in this meatsuit that you've been given to walk around on this planet?

Your body has various sensations, and your brain sends signals and sometimes it doesn't necessarily do what you want it to do. What a great tool to work with! What a great environment to work within! To understand what it means to be truly present and to pay attention to what's happening moment by moment. To me that's why the alignment and the philosophy are synonymous. You can't have one without the other. It’s like saying, we are going to separate the Asana from the Niyamas and Yamas. But you can’t separate these things. If you do, you will lose presence.

Even in ballet, with the shapes and with all the technique, if there's no presence there, it’s not beautiful to watch. It’s not there. It's dead. So, to me, it's important that all those things coexist together, to the best of our abilities – and that's what the practice is.

For me, clarity, especially in words, is something that I've always valued and something that I think comes across in my classes for sure. Because I do believe that it's not rocket science. But a lot of us have not been trained or we've not had practice in really understanding how our bodies move or why certain sensations may be coming up or where our bodies are in space. Proprioception: the more that you can hone in on that, the less mental bandwidth you have to worry about. I see alignment as an anchor point for our attention in the present.

In my younger years, I used to get really frustrated when my body wouldn't do the things that I wanted it to do or when my alignment felt like it wasn't right. There is no right way. It’s always a question of what you gain and what you lose in certain scenarios. But I still like to teach alignment because it gives people boundaries to work with, and there's a lot more exploration that happens within those boundaries because each of our bodies is different. We come to the mat with different emotions, bodies, and backgrounds. To me, the yoga is the willingness to discern how certain things, certain instructions affect you, affect your energy levels and affect your body. And the teacher is there to create a little bit of structure in your exploration.

Yoga is not about getting something right. It’s the process of unwinding and noticing our individual tendencies. To identify where we are, and what we need to cultivate more of and maybe a little less of…and our center, our happy place, can be somewhere in between.

THE YOGA INDUSTRY went underwent more change in the two years over COVID than I think it had undergone in the last ten years. Studios shut down, others opened, others went solely online. With all these changes, I still know that the Yoga is always going to survive, and that's all that matters. To me, the Yoga will live on and all these companies and these brand names, even the specific schools of yoga are just the oscillation of what's going on around us. But in the end, the Yoga will last.

Everybody has found different things that they resonate with these days. The cool thing about Yogaworks has always been that it has offered so many different styles of yoga, so many different approaches to asana because there isn't a single yoga that works for everybody. The yoga path is about finding your way with something that you want to do and want to continue with. That’s the most important thing. People ask me all the time, “What class do you recommend they do?” I say, the one that you will do, the one that you'll continue to go to-- that class. The one that will teach you about you.