Abby Bassett is a Yoga Alliance Certified 500-RYT with more than 225 Continuing Education hours in various modalities including Yin, Ayurveda, Trauma-Informed, Restorative, Iyengar, Anatomy, Vinyasa, and Advanced Sequencing. She has nearly 700 hours of teaching experience in a variety of settings including retail, gyms, breweries, online, and outdoors.
Abby is a journalist and freelance writer who came to the practice of yoga at an early age when a friend took her to her first yoga class at the local library. An athlete her whole life, Abby practiced the intensity of training as a collegiate swimmer and rower at a Division 1 school in Los Angeles. She found that the balance of movement and breath helped her focus and perform better when she was in or on the water.
After she moved to New York where she worked as a high-profile Senior Producer for major news networks including CNN and ABC. During her time in television, Abby’s yoga practice fell off. The rigors of the jobs and travel were too much and eventually took a toll on her physically and emotionally.
In June of Abby went through a series of major life-changing events. She left New York and headed south to Little Rock, Arkansas, and then to Austin, Texas, and finally to Los Angeles, California. In early 2016 she began to return to her mat with regularity to help deal with the emotional and physical trauma. She found peace and happiness in her practice and decided to begin her first 200-hour training in September of that year at renown Austin-based studio, Practice Yoga Austin.
Abby approaches her classes from a variety of perspectives. Her lineage is a blend of Iyengar, Anusara, Trauma-Informed, Restorative and Alignment-based teachings, with an emphasis on finding safe ways to make the sensation of all poses achievable by everyone, regardless of age, body size, shape, ability or strength. She believes that we don’t come to our mat to be good at yoga, but to find a balance of peace of mind and physical ability. She believes in the intelligence of the body--and in strengthening the mind-body connection through a variety of "body hacking," techniques designed to reset the nervous system and help reconnect body and mind. You don’t have to be "good at yoga" to get the benefits of movement and breath.