Alex Holiday

How would you describe your teaching style?

Yoga had always been part of my life. I was years deep in social work, holding space for youth in crisis and survivors of domestic violence. I loved the work. It was also taking me apart.

I moved to Thailand in my late twenties looking for something, though I couldn't have told you what. Before I was certified, before I had any business teaching, I was on the beach at sunrise with a handful of friends. No studio. No credentials. Just movement, breath, and the ocean.

That's when I knew.

Not just because it felt good — because it felt true. The same thing I'd been doing in case files and crisis rooms, I could do here: help people come back to themselves.

What is your favorite class to teach at HAUM, and why?

Slow Flow. I love the opportunity to slow things down. To take the time to feel and brethe into poses. To practice in an emobideid way that allows us to get of of the fast moving hamster wheel that many of us are often on, and give the nervous system the reset it needs!

What is your favorite class to take at HAUM?

Slow Flow is my favorite class to teach because slowing down is actually the hard part.

We live fast. Most of us don't realize how much we're carrying until we're finally asked to stop and feel it. Slow Flow is that invitation. We take time in each pose, not to perfect it, but to inhabit it. To breathe into it. To let the body catch up with the mind, or the other way around.

It's a reset for the nervous system. And I love any chance to help create pathways for us to feel good in our movement and our bodies.

Is there a moment from teaching at HAUM Studios that has stayed with you?

The first time I walked into the Haight studio after it reopened, I was taken aback.

It was a space that had meant something to a lot of us for years, where we taught, where we learned, where we stumbled through our early days and found our footing. And there it was, transformed. New light, murals, plants. Beautiful in a way it hadn't been before, but still holding everything that had happened inside it.

It felt like the space had grown up with us.

That's when I knew this was where I wanted to be. Where I wanted to teach.

What can students expect when they walk into one of your classes?

Expect to be met where you are.

My classes are dynamic and somatic, there's real movement, real challenge, but the pace is intentional. We're not rushing through poses to check boxes. We're slowing down enough to actually feel what's happening in the body, to breathe into it, to let it mean something.

A lot of us come to the mat carrying the week. The noise, the speed, the weight of it. My classes are built to give the nervous system a genuine reset, not by checking out, but by dropping in.

You don't need experience. You don't need the perfect body or the perfect practice. The only thing I ask is that you show up.

You can't do it wrong.

Yoga has been the constant thread of Alex Holiday's life since she was 16: the gateway into her own body, the thing she has returned to through every season, every loss, every becoming. She began her formal training in 2010 with her first certification at the Sivananda Ashram in Tamil Nadu, India, then stepped into the Sri Vidya lineage that continues to inform her practice today. She remains a student, grateful to study under master teacher Jean Mazzei. Her classes are built around one tenet: change your energy, change your mind. Intuitive, embodied, and joyfully adaptive, Alex reads the room. If the energy is anxious, the class grounds; if it is low, it builds. She weaves breath, mindful sequencing, and moments of real play into every class, because transformation doesn't have to be serious to be real. Thousands of hours in, that presence and attunement is what students feel the moment they step onto their mat. She takes the practice seriously. Herself, less so.

Certifications:

500 hr Yoga Teacher Training - Sri Yoga

1200 hr - Ayurvedic Coach - Shakti School

600 hr - Massage Therapist - San Francisco School of Massage

BA Women's Studies - UCSC

20+ years of continued study in yoga, meditation, somatic awareness, and earth wisdom