Yahoola's teacher and philosophy
Hello, I am glad you made it to my page. I have lived in our beautiful town of Dahlonega since 2000, never wanting to leave! I fell in love & have practiced Yoga for 20 years plus. During my working years and since I have retired, practicing yoga has helped me with flexibility and ease of movement, along with strength and a calm mind, needed to function in my daily life at work and play. I wanted to share my love and benefits I found practicing yoga with my community by becoming a yoga teacher. I completed my yoga teacher training through North Georgia Yoga Center under Akasha Mindy Searcey. I am a RYT-500, Registered Yoga Teacher with Yoga Alliance with 500 hours of training.
My style of teaching welcomes all levels inviting you to stretch, strengthen, balance, move energy, release stress and tension to take back with you into the world, helping you function with more ease. My teaching is grounded in classical yoga with a few creative movements thrown in. You become your own teacher for your own body to become your best self.
I view Yoga as a practice of powerful benefits and can personally attest to it's value. To see Yoga help students come alive by challenging, strengthening, and rejuvenating the mind and body connection is a beautiful process to watch unfold. Realize your full potential with balance, vitality, strength, and joy!
See you on the mat for personal growth, and fun, of course!
With Gratitude, Martha Dickerson Teacher/Owner RYT-500
Why Practice Yoga?
Here are some of the possible benefits you may experience by having a regular Yoga practice and the impact. Yoga is an integrated practice to help expand and create awareness in your mind, body and spirit! Yoga helps the internal body stay in a steady state, when the external environment is good, bad or ugly.
​
-
Practicing Yoga with mindful movement and holding postures for several breaths, builds strength, flexibility, energize concentration, develop muscle tone and improve metabolism.
-
In as little as 90 seconds of deep diaphragmatic breathing, you can initiate your parasympathetic nervous system, which shuts down the stress response by lowering cortisol (stress hormone), blood pressure and heart rate while increasing oxytocin and endorphins (happy hormones). Yoga helps the sympathetic nervous system to settle down.
​
What is the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system? The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for intense physical activity and is often referred to as the fight-or-flight response. The parasympathetic nervous system has almost the exact opposite effect and relaxes the body and inhibits or slows many high energy functions sometimes referred to as the rest and digest response.
​
-
A daily Yoga practice can influence and rejuvenate your skin. Many Yoga postures rejuvenate and revitalize the body which in turn firm and tighten the skin. Mindful movements and meditation help relax your body and reduce stress.
-
Devoted yogis will tell you that Yoga is not only the path to enlightenment but also happiness. Numerous studies support this claim, pointing to yoga as a general practice for quelling stress, easing anxiety and elevating mood.
-
Brain power – Our brain takes up 30% of caloric content, the brain has to be efficient with all the autonomic functions it handles without us even having to think. What and awesome machine we have in our body! Autonomic functions (survival functions) are managed by the brain stem, 95% of what our brain does is below the level of consciousness.
-
Yoga practice brings our unconscious mind to the conscious level to help us become aware to make decisions without practicing habits created since birth because we just do what we do. We become more aware of our mind, body and spirit causing us to be more open to change in positive ways.
-
Taking over our autonomic breathing in Yoga we breathe deeper and exhale longer affecting the health of our lungs in turn affecting the health of our body.
-
Yoga practice can help optimize the functions of the hindbrain, improves balance, coordination, muscular strength, respiratory, and cardiovascular function, promotes addiction recovery and improves sleep.
(C. Woodyard 2011)
Empower Your Body * Light Up Your Brain
The Meaning Behind "Yahoola"
Yahoola (Valley)
​
It is from the Cherokee word ”Yahula-i” or “place of Yahula”, a Cherokee trader who was taken away by the Nunne-hi or spirit people.
​
Nûñnë’hï
​
The Nunnehi are a race of immortal spirit people in Cherokee mythology. In the Cherokee language, Nunnehi literally means “The People Who Live Anywhere”, but it is often translated into English as “The People Who Live Forever”, or simply “The Immortals”. The Cherokee believed the Nunnehi to be a type of supernatural human being, completely distinct from ghosts and nature spirits, as well as from gods. In this sense, the Nunnehi (along with the Yunwi Tsunsdi, or “Little People” in the Cherokee language) are the Cherokee equivalent of fairies in traditional European folklore. The belief in fairy-like beings is universal among all races, including all American Indian tribes.
According to Cherokee folklore, the Nunnehi had many underground townhouses throughout the southern Appalachian Mountains, and they were particularly fond of high mountain peaks where no timber ever grew. Hunters would often hear the Nunnehi in the mountains, singing and dancing and beating drums, but when they would go toward the sound, it would shift about and suddenly seem to be coming from behind them or from some other direction, so that the person hearing the sound would never be able to find where it was coming from.