Living the Island Yoga life

As the paddleboards bob on the beautiful Caribbean waters, Brittany Waterhouse, a long way from her home in Merrimac, Massachusetts, gets ready to teach her first Stand Up Paddleboard class of the day. If you think yoga on a studio floor can be challenging, try doing it while the reliable winds of Aruba threaten to tip you over at any moment.

The Boston native, who is now living and working on the island of Aruba full time at Island Yoga, is spending her days, as she puts it, “ on the boards, on the beach, and in the studio”. 

So how does Brittany end up in Aruba living the island life?

“My grandmother is the one that got me into yoga. She’s my inspiration. She was featured in Adventure Woman Magazine backpacking across the Camino de Santiago of Spain, and she’s been to over 35 countries.”

Yay to inspiring women!

Later, while working at a tech start-up in Burlington MA, Brittany discovered Prana Power Yoga. At first, she thought, the studio, located in Woburn, would be a great way to avoid the grueling rush hour commute home, but soon found herself falling in love with what the studio offered.

“I loved the powerful classes, the benefit of the heat, and how I felt after. In every savasana, I laid there in my body, feeling so good, floating, releasing all of these toxins and stuck energy that I needed to clear out. “

Hooked on the benefits of yoga and incredibly passionate about the practice, she decided to get her teaching certification at Prana and began teaching as soon as she could.

Why she teaches? “I love sharing the experience that I first felt going to yoga, with others. As teachers, we also get to see from the outside how students are changing and growing and maybe you inspire someone to change someone else’s life in return.”

Thinking back to that time, she shares, “All of a sudden I found myself working 4 different jobs and asked myself what I am doing? I just want to teach yoga.”

Brittany began to envision what she wanted for her future.  “I’m a big believer in the law of attraction. I would journal everyday and write about how I wanted to make teaching yoga a full-time job, and I always wanted to live on an island and live the island life. Enduring the cold winters started to hurt my body on all levels, I felt myself huddling everything in instead of opening everything up.”

Brittany’s family were long time visitors and lovers of Aruba, in fact her parents just celebrated their 20th visit to the island! That’s how she came to know Rachel Brathen, Yoga Girl, and how she found the Bonaire retreat in October of 2015. She signed up, not knowing at the time that it would be the first step toward her dream.

She was all set to go when unexpectedly, her family experienced a painful loss. 

“My cousin was struggling with addiction ad passed away right before I was supposed to leave. And I thought, do I stay and support my family or do I leave them during this time? My uncle, my cousin’s father, said, ‘you know that he would want you to go.’”

Brittany arrived in Bonaire with a heavy heart but received a lot of support from the group and inexplicably felt like she was where she was meant to be.

At that time, Yoga Girl was just about to launch an online healing platform called oneOeight, a streaming service offering yoga, nutritional education and recipes, access to guidance counselors and meditation.

“Given everything that had just happened, I was so inspired by what oneOeight intended to do. It felt so right, a platform for healing. There is grief counseling and a variety of resources available, you just go on the site and filter for your specific need.”

Brittany was determined to be involved in this project, and offered to help in any way she could. Just 4 months after the retreat, she received a call to help with production coordination on set, hosting the oneOeight guides they’d be filming, who were constantly arriving to the island from all over the world, and to be an additional set of hands for this new and growing business. She said yes, quit her day job, and moved to Aruba.

oneOeight is thriving and so Brittany now finds herself able to focus more on doing exactly what she spent her time journaling about just two years ago--teaching yoga and living the island life. She is the SUP Yoga manager for all classes offered by Island Yoga and is teaching on the water, in the studio and on the beach.

“With SUP yoga, it’s so magical, being on the ocean and connecting with mother- nature. The sun is shining down on your skin, you feel the waves under your body, and you’re surrounded by all the elements.”

It seems like SUP yoga may be her favorite, but she also raves about her Full Moon yoga classes. They are offered in the evenings at 8:30, taught under nature’s light of the full moon, on the beach, with the ocean waves crashing in the background.

Based on our conversation, it doesn’t sound like Brittany will be moving back to Boston anytime soon, however she does say she misses what it has to offer, “I’m definitely planning to visit soon. Boston has so many studios and classes, you have the ability to just walk down the street and find so much variety. And teachers are very well trained, there’s a lot of access to certifications.”

Still inspired by her grandmother, who is a Reiki master, she is thinking about enrolling in training soon herself.  She also plans on hosting more of her gemstone workshops. The workshops provide students with an overview of crystal energies and their healing properties and how to use gemstones to balance their lives.

I look forward to following Brittany’s journey and seeing what she continues to do next- and you can too. Follow Brittany on instagram @bmwateryogi, and if you are planning a trip to Aruba make sure to check out her schedule at Islandyoga.com.

What is one practice that has served you well?

“Intention setting. Set your intention around that which you desire, as you do that, be unapologetic about what you desire. Whatever it is that you are wanting, welcome it with open arms. “