Yogi Syl: Bodhi Yoga™ Founding-Director
Syl Carson is an internationally recognized teacher, healer and poet, who founded Bodhi Yoga in 1998, when she was invited to share her personal yoga practice with several residents of then Robert Redford’s Sundance Resort. Shortly following, she opened the first yoga center in Utah Valley, located 45-miles south of Salt lake City.
Syl opened the very first yoga studio in Utah Valley just as she was preparing to leave her 18-year career in the financial industry, where she authored many training programs and served on advisory boards to the Utah State Office of Education writing the first financial literacy program, now required for high-school graduation state-wide.
Syl translated her innate “how-to” knowhow and optimism, along with her natural business acumen into the healing practice of Bodhi Yoga™ that had helped her overcome health challenges and heal childhood trauma. It began with just two classes weekly, where she authored a year-long study, the Bodhi Yoga Class Series, that eventually became the very first yoga teacher training offered in Utah.
Syl’s style of teaching is inspired to help her students tap into a fuller measure of their own potential in this wonderful practice of yoking body, mind, and spirit to work in the best way possible, and begin to inhabit that awakening into every aspect of their lives from a place of Steady Joy.
She has taught classes of 250 students at once, as well a one-on-one and small groups, either way, lives are changed by learning from her 30 years of expertise and her love for yoga, as she continues to mentor and inspire yoga students and teachers across the globe every day.
Syl has been referred to as “The Guru’s Guru”. In truth, she is simply experienced at helping other’s bring to the surface their own inner wisdom and realized potential in a very unique and profoundly life-giving way.
Syl cares deeply about the reputation of yoga and the healer’s arts. Her life’s dharma is helping others not only realize the potential of their gifts, but legitimize the quality of their work through accreditation, that raises the standing and reputation of all healers everywhere.
Bodhi Yoga’s founding, director, Syl Carson, obtained her certification as a Yoga Instructor from the White Lotus Foundation, with Ganga White and Tracey Rich (a non-dogmatic foundation that certifies from a therapeutic Hatha yoga approach).
She returned to White Lotus for advanced training in yoga instruction as well as a Thai Partner Yoga Certification. Syl has also completed 1000-hour apprenticeship in lymphatic massage therapy, with accreditation pending as an LMT. She has chosen, deliberately, not to obtain her massage therapy license, and keeps her work in the realm of yoga study and practice.
Through her practice, Syl has logged over 18,000 hours of teaching and study in over seven separate yoga modalities, including: Ashtanga (with Richard Freeman and Pattabhi Jois), Kundalini (with Guru Mukha Kalkalsa), Iyengar/Hatha (with Rodney Yee), Restorative, Chakra Yoga (Anodea Judith), and “Nuad Bo Rarn”-Traditional Northern Thai Partner Yoga (Saul David Raye).
In her pursuit for a yoga practice that honored the fuller measure of her potential, she eventually developed Bodhi Yoga™. Syl uses her broad understanding of the more subtle nuances of mind-body interplay, wholehearted spirit, and naturally innovative life-approach in leading classes with brilliance, compassion and humor.
In 2004, Syl began producing and filming yoga DVDs and audio CDs, in response to students requests who could not find what they were looking for elsewhere. During her 30 years of study and practice, Syl has released five yoga, chant, and meditation audio CDs available on iTunes, nine yoga DVDs, and over twenty yoga workbooks.
In addition to the release of DVDs and CDs, Syl has written and illustrated five specialized yoga certification programs offered through Bodhi Yoga, including: Bodhi Yoga Teacher Training, Restorative Partner Yoga, 7 Chakras Mind & Body, QuanTM Yoga Nidra healer and Soul Weather PRO™ Life-coaching.
She has also been a regular guest on the KJZZ TV morning program called “The Home Team” with host Maria Carr, as well as guest facilitator in several courses on the Chakras, (that were based on her Seven Sacred Centers Chakra Therapy workbook, written in 2001).
In addition to her in-person classes, workshops, and certifications, in the fall of 2012 Syl launched gobodhiyoga.com as an online yoga resource, with over 400 yoga and meditation classes, specialized workshops, lifestyle Ayurvedic cooking and certification classes streaming here every day.
Syl is an experiential teacher, who found the deeper layers of yoga through a rheumatoid arthritis and fibromayalgia diagnosis. Any wisdom that came from healing fibromyalgia and chronic pain RA management, has been put to use in the development of the Bodhi Yoga™ curriculum.
Her approach is that you don’t have to have perfect health or an ideal body shape to practice yoga. Syl teaches that the word yoga means “to yoke”, your body, mind and spirit to work in the most ideal way possible for you. She is living proof that yoga is an incredible life-therapy and vital tool in managing chronic physical conditions, facing all kinds of adversity and recovering from illness or injury.
In addition to her previous physical health challenges, during 2011, with no family history, Syl was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. She spent the year in treatment and is happy to say that over a decade later, she is still going strong, steady and centered.
Through this experience, her compassion and wisdom in the practice of yoga has, yet again, deepened. She has dedicated a section of gobodhiyoga.com to “The Yoga of Adversity” for others who are going through cancer treatment, along with their care-givers, and would like to find support, in their conversations with cancer.
Syl’s life work is dedicated to helping others find both passion and contentment, regardless of your circumstance.
In 2014, with the help of friends from around the country, Syl built a 45’x45′ walking labyrinth in her backyard, where she leads Bodhi Yoga™ Summer Teacher Trainings and special workshops, as well as her Annual Winter Solstice Meditation.
Syl traced a printed labyrinth during cancer treatment, to help her stay clear and focused on her healing path.
This lovely space in the backyard of her private home in Provo, also holds stones donated by others from Stonehenge and Avebury, Machu Picchu, Base Camp from Mt. Everest, The Acropolis, Nazareth, The Sea of Galilee and the Garden of Gethsemane. There are also stones in her labyrinth that have traveled the entire Camino De Santiago, as well as rocks holding the space for different people facing challenges. The love on this beautiful path is palpable and life-changing for all who walk it.
This beautiful 11 circuit labyrinth is patterned after the one built in 1252 A.D. in the floor of the Chartres Cathedral just outside Paris, France.
Learn more about this amazing space she created by clicking here