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JOIN US FOR A 2024 HEALING ADVENTURE!
There are as many paths to a healing adventure as there are adventurers, which means everyone gets to choose the one that honors their own unique journey.
For some, finding a way to kickstart the healing — either physically or mentally — before taking on a new, bigger challenge can make all the difference, as Tara “Sprinkles” O’Donoghue knows all too well. “I got here on kind of a long way around that involved some loss and trauma,” Sprinkles shares. “That inspired me to dig deeper, both internal and externally, and it’s what led me to a place where I wanted to help others do the same.”
Sprinkles is a yoga teacher (500 RYT, which refers to the number of hours of course training from an accredited yoga school) and a certified trauma-informed yoga therapist with more than 1,200 hours and 8 years of teaching. She founded LOV Yoga in Denver to offer custom yoga therapy programs to help others experiencing difficult-to-process issues like grief, anxiety and depression, with a focus on helping those who have had diagnoses like cancer and MS.
“What yoga therapy does is it helps to empower us more physically by managing the side effects and the symptoms,” Sprinkles explains. “It takes us on an internal journey and an internal adventure, navigating an inner landscape that’s become bumpy. When you’re dealing with these issues, it’s like there are all these waves and rapids and mountains to climb inside, and so we’re trying to figure out, like, how do we also restore balance within.”
“Sometimes, we need to deal with those things to help us prepare to better handle adventures out in the world,” she adds. “The question is, how do we make this internal landscape feel like something that feels safe to navigate again? I want to help people find those answers for themselves.”
The First Descents community has known Sprinkles not only through her series of Mindfulness resources, but also by her presence at many FD events over the years. She also happens to be married to Ryan “Wolf” O’Donoghue, FD’s CEO for more than a decade.
As we launch a new Mindfulness series — which includes Mindful Monday social media posts and a variety of new videos, live virtual sessions and a live yoga event — we asked Sprinkles to share more about her background and how a yoga and mindfulness practice can enhance the quest for healing adventure:
I am a hodgepodge of all my moves around the country. I was born in New Jersey and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I finished high school in Plano, Texas, and went to college at Baylor University. But I moved to Colorado with my first husband, Nate, right after college, and ever since, Colorado is home to me.
I spent 17 years in the Vail Valley, where I taught elementary school and then started and ran a coffee business called Yeti’s Grind with Nate. Unfortunately, Nate passed away from cancer in 2016, and my life in the Vail Valley felt heavy without him. I moved to Denver in 2020 because the new love of my life lived in the city [that would be Wolf, whom she married in 2021].
I found First Descents through some longtime donors who had hosted an event in the same building as Yeti’s Grind. Nate had just been re-diagnosed with stage 3 melanoma, and we hoped he would go on a program, but sadly he passed away.
Fast-forward a few years later, and I was invited to the First Descents Ball in 2018 in Beaver Creek by Ryan and Trista Sutter. I was so moved by the FD mission and wanted to get involved. As a newly certified yoga teacher, naturally I wanted to share my love for yoga with cancer survivors. I shared this with Wolf, and he told me to volunteer at a program — so I did. A few months later I showed up to a rock climbing program in Estes Park and taught yoga to the participants each morning. A breast cancer thriver, Big Perm, became a close friend and yoga therapy client over the years. Yoga has also been a respite for her, and she is now also a certified yoga teacher!
The pandemic brought the gift of online yoga classes to FD, because no one could get out on adventure. Once programs started back up, there was a grant for healthcare worker programs and a big push for mindfulness programming to help with mental health and trauma from being on the frontlines, so I taught at a few of those programs.
I was nicknamed Sprinkles when I volunteered at the FD program in Estes Park in 2018. I showed up wearing head-to-toe rainbows and unicorns, carrying a tub full of tutus and costumes. I was super excited to greet the participants and give them some of my silly stuff to wear. Somehow the name Sprinkles — like the rainbow-colored, sugary kind — came to be!
When Nate was sick with cancer, he encouraged me to go through a yoga teacher certification course, because he knew how passionate I was about my yoga practice. My 200-hour certification taught me the rich history of yoga and a lot about the physical practice, postures and anatomy. We touched on the other aspects of yoga but this first training just scratched the surface. While caregiving for Nate, my yoga practice helped me navigate the uncertainties, worries, anxiety and stress.
However, after he passed away, I was left with a dysregulated nervous system, overwhelming trauma and grief that engulfed my life and identity. I continued to turn toward my yoga practice and hoped that one day I could help others. I found out about yoga therapy and chose a program through Inner Peace Yoga Therapy. Once I began the program, I realized that I had a lot more processing to do and was able to do that with support from my teachers and through the content I was learning and applying to my own life.
Yoga therapy is a deeper dive that teaches about how to make yoga accessible and beneficial for “everyBODY.” A yoga therapist certification requires 800 hours of specialized education that is focused around how to apply tools like therapeutic mindful movement, breathwork, meditation and contemplative practices like self-reflection, to common challenges that arise in life, such as chronic pain management, anxiety, depression, serious health conditions, addiction, injury recovery, trauma and grief.
Trauma-informed yoga therapy helps those who have been through micro or macro traumas connect to their body and emotions. It is common to dissociate after a traumatic event. Dissociation shows up as escapism, numbness or avoidance in feeling, which leads toward disconnection to oneself.
Trauma can also cause a hyperactive sympathetic response in the nervous system, which can lead toward nervous system dysregulation. Both dissociation and dysregulation are normal responses to PTSD and can be addressed with the right support. A trauma-informed yoga therapist creates a safe space and then teaches tools that feel supportive to the client that help work through the trauma they have experienced.
First, working through the layers of the body in a custom way that meets individual needs. We hear a lot about mind-body connection these days, and that’s because the body has multiple layers that yoga theory calls Koshas (or sheaths). This is how we work through the layers with a cancer survivor:
Then, processing the hard stuff through self-reflection and somatics:
This is my favorite question yet! Yoga therapy makes yoga accessible for everyBODY. I hear “I’m not good at yoga,” or “I’m not flexible,” or “I can’t do yoga,” or “Yoga is not my thing” a lot. This tells me that this person hasn’t had the right yoga experience yet, and I LOV working with skeptics. I guarantee that with an open mind and personalized instruction, that said skeptic will feel benefits from a yoga therapy practice. Even someone who is on bed rest because of their illness CAN do yoga — it will just look different than what is taught in a yoga class, and that’s more than okay!
Yoga therapy is a specialized, customized approach that includes these components:
Each person is living a unique human experience, regardless of whether they are navigating a life-changing illness like cancer or MS. Yoga therapy meets you where you’re at and teaches tools such as stretches, postures, mindful movements, breathwork, meditation, and mindset work to work through the body holistically and somatically.
Sometimes this requires digging deep into grief and trauma. There is an endless treasure trove of yoga therapy tools to pull from, and finding the right ones to help each person is what makes yoga therapy different from teaching yoga that is more of a one-size-fits-all approach.
Thank you for sharing Sprinkles story with us. I’m a big fan of this human. I appreciate the classes that you offer FD. Thanks for making a series that is accessible to so many.