Abby Bassett is a Yoga Alliance Certified 500-RYT with more than 300 additional hours of training in various modalities including Yin, Restorative, Iyengar, Advanced Sequencing, Vinyasa, Anatomy and Myofascial release techniques. She’s studied with a wide variety of well-known teachers including Christina Sell, Jason Crandell, Carrie Owerko, Jillian Pransky, and Judith Lasater. She lives and teaches in Los Angeles, and offers regular weekly donation-based classes online via Zoom and YouTube.
Abby is a veteran journalist who came to the practice of yoga at an early age when a friend took her to her first yoga class at the local library. An athlete her whole life, Abby practiced yoga in order to offset the intensity of training as a collegiate swimmer and rower at a Division 1 school in Los Angeles. She found that the balance of movement and breath helped her focus and perform better when she was in or on the water.
After college, she moved to New York where she worked as a high-profile Senior Producer for major news networks including CNN and ABC. During her time in television, Abby’s yoga practice fell off. The rigors of the job, travel, and a bad marriage were too much and eventually took a toll on her physically and emotionally. In June of 2014 Abby went through a series of major life-changing events, including a tumultuous divorce, and headed south.
She eventually landed in Austin, Texas. In early 2016 she began to return to her mat with regularity to help heal the emotional and physical trauma that life in New York had wrought. She found happiness in her practice and decided to begin her first 200-hour training in September of that year at the highly respected, Practice Yoga Austin. As she trained, she discovered that there were very few yoga teachers out there who looked like her and she got tired of seeing perfect bodies in perfect poses. That’s when she began, Yoga For Normal People, an online yoga platform that offers yoga for anyone willing to give it a try. In May of 2017, Abby left Austin for Los Angeles where she currently teaches and trains.
Abby approaches her classes from a number of perspectives. Her lineage is a blend of Iyengar, Anusara, and Alignment-based teachings, with an emphasis on finding safe ways to make the bodily sense of all poses achievable by everyone, regardless of age, body size, shape, ability, sexual orientation, sexual identification, religion, or strength.
Abby believes that we don’t come to our mat to be good at yoga, but to connect to our bodies. For Abby and her students, yoga isn’t just for fitness models doing the most difficult poses, wearing next to nothing in beautiful places. It’s for every body, and everybody. Every single one.
Welcome to Yoga For Normal People.
If you’d like to know more about Abby’s work outside of yoga, you can check out her professional portfolio, here.