The Inner Fire of Yoga

My Personal Yoga Journey: Addiction, Resilience & Self-Belief

• Liz Albanis • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In this episode, I share my personal yoga journey. From my very first Bikram (hot yoga) class in 2011. To becoming a yoga teacher and eventually embracing a home practice. While I initially started yoga for fitness and flexibility. I soon discovered that its most profound benefits had nothing to do with weight loss or fancy poses. Tune in as I share the unexpected ways yoga changed my life, helped me quit smoking, and led me to a career in wellness.

Key Topics Covered:

  1. My First Yoga Class & Early Misconceptions
    • How I got hooked on Bikram yoga for all the wrong reasons.
    • The intense experience of practicing hot yoga I(40-degrees celsius).
    • Why I thought yoga was about burning calories and flexibility
  2. The Unexpected Benefits of Hatha Yoga
    • Quitting smoking after years of failed attempts
    • How yoga became a powerful tool for stress relief and mental resilience.
    • The moment I realised yoga was about more than the physical poses
  3. Breaking Free from Stereotypes
    • The shift from a studio-based practice to home practice
    • Why I no longer feel the need to "do all the poses"
    • Understanding that yoga is a state of being, not doing
  4. The Evolution of My Teaching & Practice
    • Discovering other styles of Hatha Yoga. Such as Yin Yoga and Vinyasa yoga. My journey into teacher training and yoga therapy.
    • Discovering yoga for mental health and integrating it into my work
    • How my approach to yoga has changed with time. Such as injuries, and self-awareness  
    • My home yoga practice. Partly due to less yoga classes near me.
  5. Yoga as a Tool for Self-Discovery
    • Lessons from Bakasana (Crow Pose) and the power of self-belief
    • How yoga mirrors our mindset and teaches us resilience
    • The real goal of yoga: cultivating happiness and reducing suffering

Episode Summary

My journey with yoga started with a focus on the physical. But it became a powerful tool for self-growth, resilience, and mental well-being. In this episode, I share the pivotal moments that shaped my practice. The myths I had to unlearn, and why yoga is so much more than asana. Whether you're new to yoga or looking to deepen your understanding. This episode offers insights into how a personalised practice can transform your life. On and off the mat.



Hey there I'm Liz Albanis 

I'm a Senior Yoga Teacher of over 12 years. Yoga Therapist in Training. Pilates and Barre Instructor, Personal Trainer . My approach focuses on helping people develop a home practice. That support their mental health. One that is accessible, portable and time efficient. That doesn't have to require a yoga mat.

After starting yoga for fitness. I quickly discovered its life-changing benefits beyond the poses. Now, I help others experience the transformational power of yoga. Whether through private coaching, online courses, or personalised programs tailored to individual needs.

If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who might be head to my website: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/podcast

Instagram: @lizalbaniswellnessau
Join the Facebook community: www.facebook.com/groups/yogaformentalhealthyinyoganmyofascialrelease/
Visit website for more about what I offer: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/


It was one of the hardest things I'd ever put myself through. 90 minutes in 40 degree heat. I could not wait to run out of that room, but it gave me strength. It made me start to believe in myself. But what was the most interesting part was I didn't become a pretzel. I didn't lose weight. Something even more important happened.

My body has changed like most people's do with age. I've got arthritis in my spine. I don't really do the vinyasa practice I used to do. If I do, I've got to tape my foot up to do jump backs and downward dog and Chaturanga and that's okay. I'm not less of a yogi because of it

Welcome to the Inner Fire of Yoga, a podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albanis, senior yoga teacher and yoga therapist in training. This podcast was born in 2024 after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but as a metaphor.

It has asked me to burn away what no longer serves me, to transform, and to rise stronger each time. This podcast is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow. I still remember my first yoga class. Bikram Yoga had just come to Canberra. Well, I'd only been there a few months. It was a new thing in 2011 when I started.

A good friend of mine said to me, Oh, you need to try out this yoga, this hot yoga. It's the new fad, but it's, it burns lots of calories. You'll get flexible, you'll lose weight. And I was in because that's what I wanted. I wanted to lose weight and I wanted to get more flexible for my horse riding. And the detoxification sounded interesting too.

I went along with her. She said to me, we have to sit here in this spot. And I said, why? Because it's the hottest spot in the room. So we will burn the most calories and work the hardest. And I couldn't move because the teacher just came in and it was very strict. It was one of the hardest things I'd ever put myself through.

90 minutes. In 40 degree heat, I could not wait to run out of that room, but it gave me strength, it made me start to believe in myself.] I didn't know when the class was going to end, it's a set sequence, but because it was my first class I had no idea and I kept thinking, when is it over, there's no clock in the room.

And I was really relieved when the class finished. I didn't understand the importance of Shavasana, I just wanted to get out of that room. But I felt amazing. I couldn't sleep that night. It was then that I discovered that yoga doesn't always help you sleep, it can do the opposite. Bikram yoga is not going to do that to everyone.

Didn't always do that for me later on, but it did that time. But I felt amazing. So I got hooked. I joined up. In those days you could get an unlimited membership at many yoga studios, different to today, and I was practicing about four to five times a week. I'd even go there before work, I'd get up that early as I was working.

Full time then in the public service and I also had a horse to look after. My yoga practice took over my love of horses. But what was the most interesting part? Of the beginning of my yoga journey was I didn't become a pretzel. I didn't lose weight. Something even more important happened. About three months after I started practicing, I managed to quit smoking.

A habit I had since the age of 15 or 14, I can't exactly remember. But a long time, I tried to quit many times and had managed to, maybe for a month or two, and then I would just start again when something stressful would happen to me. Because I hated my job most of the time. I wasn't passionate about it.

I had ADHD, but I didn't know it. So, concentrating was hard. Prioritising was hard. I earned good money, but I had to drag myself to work most of the time, so because I hated my job, I relied on those cigarettes and occasionally alcohol for my stress. It wasn't a healthy samskara. A samskara in yoga is a deeply ingrained habit, or just a habit, but the deeper it grooved into your psyche, the harder it is to let it go and replace it with a healthy samskara.

But that's what yoga did, even though this was a deeply ingrained habit. I managed to quit cold turkey. I was 29 and just had the courage. I think I thought, if I can survive a 90 minute class in 40 degree heat and keep practicing that, It just gave me strength and resilience I didn't know I had. It also gave me stress relief.

About 80 percent of people either start practicing yoga for mental health or they continue to practice for mental health. So, I didn't start practicing for mental health reasons because I didn't know about those benefits but I kept practicing for mental health reasons. So, I was one of those people. I didn't start for the right reasons and many people don't because yoga is confused with an exercise club, a dance routine, gymnastics.

It's not understood that poses. are optional. If you can breathe, you can practice yoga. But a lot of group classes are all about asana. We're very posture focused. It's also not understood that you can practice at home, you can practice by yourself, even without doing a 200 yoga teacher training. One of my passions is to help people do that with my work, especially since there are less yoga studios than there used to be in many parts of the world, especially here in Melbourne, where I'm currently living.

Because of the COVID lockdowns we had to have, because we were really the COVID capital of Australia, and because of the cost of living, sadly many yoga studios didn't survive. Which is heartbreaking for the owners and the community, but there is hope. So, in those days I relied on going to a studio to practice.

I also thought that Bikram yoga was the only style of yoga for me. I then did my first yoga teacher training in 2012 in Bali, and it was not hot yoga. It was a static Hatha yoga. I started then to learn that there was a lot more to yoga, even a lot more to postures outside of Bikram, and that there were other Styles of Hatha yoga.

Yoga on the mat. The yoga of action that were beneficial. It was at this teacher training that I discovered yin yoga and ‘myo-yin’, yin yoga with tennis balls, in this setting in Ubud, Bali. I came back and I started to teach and I started to practice other styles like power vinyasa. I was in awe of some of the students there because they would do these jump backs.

They would float back into chaturanga, low plank. They would do fancy poses like handstands, crow pose. And I thought, wow, to be a good yoga teacher and a really good yogi, I need to be able to do that. I was mistaking yoga asana for gymnastics. I didn't realize that we practice yoga asana for optimum health, with a balance of sthira and sukha, steadfast and ease, to help the flow of prana flow freely and in the correct direction, to prepare our body.

for meditation. To sit still in meditation. Not that you need to sit still for meditation. I felt pressure to do some of these poses. I tried Bakasana, crow pose Tried it a few times. Basic arm balance and I couldn't do it and I just thought, I'm no good. I'll just give up. But at least I discovered there was more than Bikram Yoga and I also practiced more Yin.

I then went back to Bali the following year and did the full 300 hours. Well, not the full, but it was in order to complete 500 hours of teacher training. You only need to do 200 hours teacher training to become qualified as a yoga teacher. I don't believe that is enough. I didn't then either. But it was also my insecurities that made me think I needed to do more training as well, which is not such a healthy thing.

I also did, in 2013, my first yoga therapy training. It didn't qualify me to become a yoga therapist, that is two years of study and practical work, but it opened my mind to the therapeutic aspects of yoga and I discovered Lifeforce Yoga, Amy Weintraub, a pioneer in yoga for mental health and I learned about the book she wrote, Yoga for Depression.

a famous book and that she wrote the first article on depression called Yoga the New Prozac, published in one of the yoga journal editions in America. So it opened my eyes to other styles and more about the mental health benefits. I knew there were mental health benefits though, the fact that I'd quit smoking.

I also had a career change after that first yoga teacher training. I did some work in retail and started to teach yoga, mainly at gyms first, and then at yoga studios in Canberra, where I grew up. And then in 2014, began fitness training, become a qualified personal trainer and went on to do my diploma of fitness to become a specialized personal trainer and then worked as a personal trainer along with teaching yoga and also becoming a Pilates instructor because I respected Pilates because after I fell off my horse in 2003, I rehabbed my ACL tear in my knee and my back with Pilates.

And that was wonderful teaching Pilates personal training and it became a full time career for me. I continued on to do more training. I'm not going to go into that because I'm not here to brag about the training I've done. I'm here to say it's good to have a beginner's mind, to open yourself to learning new things.

My teaching style has changed a lot since I started teaching, 13 years ago as well as my personal practice. It wasn't until I did my first life force yoga teacher training that I started practicing at home because the life force yoga teacher training of Amy Weintraub found it. There's a lot of practices there that don't involve a mat, they're portable, they don't have to involve postures, I now learnt how to incorporate it into my daily life.

And as Amy pointed out, as a yoga teacher, we need to walk our talk, as well as trying to take our yoga off the mat. Practice yoga regularly. It was especially important, this daily personal practice during lockdown here in Melbourne. We had months of it, I haven't counted how many days, I can't remember, but a lot.

I also did some online training then too, which was amazing, but yes, it was important even more so then because we couldn't go to a physical class. Yes, we could go to an online class, that was still hard for many to get the motivation to do that. I get it. My practice has also changed in that I no longer go to Bikram classes.

I don't feel the need. I don't practice all the poses. My body has changed. Like most people's do with age. I've got arthritis. in my spine and my first big toe, so I don't really do the vinyasa practice I used to do. If I do, I've got to take my foot up to do jump backs and downward dog and chaturanga, and that's okay.

I'm not less of a yogi because of it. I used to think I should be able to practice all the poses. Because I used to think that yoga was a state of doing, and there was such a thing as doing yoga. Yoga is a state of being. We want our yoga practice to get us into that state of balance, of peace, of happiness.

One of the interesting things that yoga taught me, and a great example for listeners, was Bhakasana pose, crow pose. I had this goal in lockdown of getting into CRO. I'd started to learn to believe in myself from my yoga practice because I'd learnt that I had this self -limiting belief of not believing in myself and not feeling good enough.

So when I first started to try to get into Bakasana, A very modern yoga pose inspired by gymnastics. I gave up because I didn't believe in myself, but come 2020, I thought, you know what, I just have not put enough effort into this to really know if it's possible. Because I'd like to point out that not every pose is suitable for everyone, even if they're young and fit, because of the fact that our skeletons are different, and naturally some of us have more range than others.

But I decided, you know what, I've got to give it a go to see if I can do it. And I knew it was a way to build more tapas, determination, willpower, as Patanjali describes in the sutras, a text many of us refer to as part of yoga philosophy, really describes the science of the mind, because yoga is really mind training.

I got into Bakasana but it took a lot of effort. I was darn proud of myself though. But it wasn't the fact I got into it so much, it was the effort and the practicing and going, you know what, if I don't get into it, it's okay. It's a test for my mind. to see how I cope with that adversity of, I can't get into it.

Do I feel like a failure or do I think, okay, that pose is not good for me. It's not suitable for my body and that's okay. So yoga can teach us a lot about how the mind works. That is one of the other purposes of asana. How do we react to challenges on the yoga mat? Because often how we act, or react, I should say, is how we react off the mat.

Do we get angry and frustrated? Do we get teary and feel completely deflated? Or do we keep persevering because we know it's in us? Or do we practice self-compassion to ourselves and say, It's okay. It's just a yoga pose. It's not the goal of yoga. It's just a tool for the mind to see how the mind reacts to such adversity and also the other benefits I've mentioned.

So that was interesting in itself. I started to realize that it doesn't matter if I can't practice those fancy poses that seem to come naturally to many. They don't come naturally to everyone and I'm one of them and that's okay. My practice now is at home or in the steam room at the gym at the moment because I don't have my own sauna.

The heat balances me because of my ayurvedic dosha imbalances, my constitutional balances in ayurveda, Indian natural medicine, that is really considered nowadays yoga's sister science. In the early days it was not separated from yoga, or yoga wasn't separated from ayurveda. So, it balances me. That's why I go to the effort of going to the steam room or the sauna.

But it's not for everyone. We are all different. We're all unique. So Downward Dogs, Chaturangas in the Vinyasa class are not a part of my regular practice. I don't feel like less of a yogi or less of a yoga teacher because of it. My yoga journey has taken me far. It's helped create resilience. It's helped me learn to burn away.

More of what doesn't serve me. Has it burned away everything? No. Am I enlightened? No. Am I happy all the time? No. Am I human? Yes. As Judith Hanson Lasseter said to me, or said to everyone actually, when I trained with her in 2014 on her last trip to Australia, forgive yourself for being human. And I am human.

Don't think that yoga teachers are perfect or that they're happy all the time or that they're enlightened. Most of us aren't. Most of us came to yoga for a reason and kept practicing yoga for a reason. I'm a work in progress. I think most of us are. All I know is that I would not be in this space that I'm in now without yoga.

I'm in a better place because of yoga and I continue to evolve and learn more about myself and how my mind operates to reduce suffering. Yoga is really about one simple thing and that's finding happiness. So that's just a little bit about me. More to share on following episodes. 

Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your well being. If there's a topic you'd like me to cover or if you'd like to share your to hear from you. Just fill in the form on the podcast page of my website. Your voice is an important part of this journey.

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Liz Albanis

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