How quitting my job to teach yoga in Europe saved more than my career
The First Decision I Ever Made for Myself
For most of my life, I didn’t make my own decisions. I followed orders. I listened. I obeyed.
When I veered off the path, it was only out of survival. My family framed it as protection, but the reality was that they didn’t see me as a person with choices—just a little sister who needed to be shielded from herself.
So when I hit a breaking point, quitting my corporate job and moving to Europe to become a yoga teacher—it wasn’t a rash decision. But it also wasn’t a fully thought-out one. It was something in between: a leap that wasn’t logical, but necessary.
The Breakdown
I was living out of hotel rooms, working 40+ hours a week, and barely sleeping.
Everywhere I turned, I felt pressure:
- Pressure at work to not only succeed but thrive in a space where I constantly felt like an outsider.
- Pressure from my family to “settle down.”
- Pressure in dating, where rejection made me feel like I wasn’t enough.
The one outlet that had grounded me for years—yoga—was gone. Hotel gyms with broken treadmills weren’t the same. Without yoga, my mind never turned off. I was constantly spinning, replaying my failures in an endless loop.
I lost confidence. I lost direction. At my lowest, I lost the will to keep going.
The Seed of a Different Life
Being a yoga teacher was always just a tiny seed I kept hidden in the back of my mind. Something I wanted but never dared to say out loud.
I had been taught not to follow my interests. As a kid, when I told my mother I wanted to be a teacher, she immediately shut it down: “Teachers don’t make enough money. Pick something else.”
So I did. I picked a safer more acceptable path, pharmacy. When I switched majors in college, I didn’t even tell anyone until after it was official. And even then, I told my family that the “B” in my program stood for Business—so it would sound like my sisters’ majors, not what it actually was Building Construction Management.
Everything I ever chose was filtered through the question: Will this make my family proud?
But at my breaking point, I did something different. I reached out to my old yoga teacher. I asked her if it was a crazy idea to quit my job and teach yoga. She didn’t think so. And in that moment, I realized I didn’t need my family’s permission—I just needed one person to validate that I wasn’t completely losing my mind.
So I quit. I moved. I didn’t tell my family until everything was already arranged. It was the first decision I ever made entirely for myself.
What I Learned
Throughout my life before this trip, I never celebrated myself, not even my own milestones. Even when I paid off my student loans, I didn’t buy myself anything—I bought my parents a trip to Mexico. Because I thought my happiness was supposed to come from making other people happy. That’s what my parents believed: In order to find happiness, you need to please everyone else around you. And I lived that belief for far too long.
Being completely disconnected from them in a different country—after years of bending myself to their expectations—was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I cried every day for weeks. I doubted everything in my being.
But little by little, I found what I had been searching for my whole life.
Myself.
The Takeaway
Quitting my job and moving abroad didn’t just give me a new career path. It gave me permission.
- Permission to listen to myself.
- Permission to take up space.
- Permission to decide.
For the first time, I wasn’t chasing anyone else’s approval. I was choosing myself. And if I hadn’t—I don’t think I’d still be here.
And that decision—the one I made in fear, uncertainty, and tears—turned out to be the first true act of freedom in my life. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t a perfectly calculated plan. Sometimes it’s choosing yourself, even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.