Yoga with Cindy McCarty

Cindy completed her 200-hour teaching training in 2012 with Birmingham Yoga under Akasha Ellis, and her 500-hour teacher training in 2021 under internationally renowned teacher Jason Crandell. She has been practicing yoga for 16 years, and teaching for 12 years. During that time, she has taught group classes and private clients, but the majority of her experience is with patients struggling with eating disorders. She has worked with students from the ages of 12 through 60. She teaches both classes focused on body movement (yoga poses), as well as mindfulness classes that focus on balancing the nervous system.

Cindy’s movement classes are detail-oriented, and focused on the needs of the practitioner. Her asana classes are taught in a gentle, rhythmic flow style. She teaches from a careful, alignment and anatomy-based methodology, that has been enhanced by her continuing education with the Jason Crandell Vinyasa Yoga Method. She recognizes that each student’s anatomy is individual and works to create a practice to meet the needs of the yogi, rather than attempting to conform the yogi to the practice. Her work is trauma-sensitive, and she invites the practitioner to engage with their experience on an embodied level, rather than from an outward aesthetic. Injury prevention and management are an important part of her class structure, and she works to make sure the practice meets each student where they are, rather than the student changing to meet the practice.

Cindy has experience with many different mindfulness meditation techniques, ranging from classic yogic breathing exercises to Buddhist meditation practices. She has over a decade of experience of working with clients in mindfulness techniques to help calm and balance the nervous system and release anxiety, as well as gentle yoga practices such as restorative yoga, vinyasa krama, and yoga nidra, to help move trauma through and out of the body. Her private classes are carefully tailored to the individual needs of each student. Cindy has studied the works of Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., Bo Forbes, and Dr. Bruce D. Perry on the effects of trauma in the body, as well as the impacts of trauma as regards the energetic chakra systems. Cindy is fascinated with the connections between modern trauma brain science, studies of human emotions by scholars like Brene Brown, Buddhist psychology, and the chakra and energetic systems of the body, and often includes approaches that incorporate all three systems in her work with clients.

Cindy’s classes are lighthearted, and she encourages her students to not take yoga, or life, quite so seriously. As a born and bred southerner, she firmly believes in the mantra “Y’all means all,” and her classes are a welcoming and safe space for everybody.

Cindy draws from her own life experience to inform her teaching. She has three children, ages 19, 13, and 10 – all of whom exist way out of the neurotypical mold. She enjoys hanging out with her kids, knitting, reading, writing, roller-skating, oversleeping, and wondering why her house is chronically messy. She is a survivor of bipolar disorder and remains determined to live a full, happy life – and hopefully inspire and help others to do the same.