Heidi Sormaz
City
New Haven
Biographical Info
Heidi Sormaz, Ph.D., E-RYT 500, is the founder, owner and director of Fresh Yoga Studios. She has studied yoga for 20 years and taught for 15. A Forrest Yoga (FY) Guardian, Heidi currently teaches the FY 200-hr, the FY Advanced Teacher Training, teaches and designed the Fresh Yoga 200 and 300-hr Trainings, travels nationally to present workshops and trainings, has taught at Kripalu and Esalan and in the Yoga, Meditation, and Recovery Conferences and the Windhorse FY Conferences. Heidi has been featured in Yoga Journal and was selected by The Great Course to design their first course on yoga; Yoga for a Healthy Mind and Body. Heidi's first love was the study of the mind. As an academic, she experimented with unwinding cognitive habits (habitual thinking) through specific attention and meditation work. She brings these principles to her classroom, encouraging students to work with their minds as specifically as they work with their bodies. Working this way helps you understand and transform the habits that keep you stuck in your body and life. This way of working helped her move through her own challenges of dealing with severe anxiety and recovering from an eating disorder. Heidi also has extensive training in the martial art Taijiquan and the internal art Qigong. She is a senior student of Master Steven Bennett and has taught Taijiquan and Qigong at Yale University. Heidi received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale. She is an expert on the influence of arousal and attention on performance, how anxiety affects thinking and performance in pressure situations. HDR Press published her book Performing Under Pressure, and Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine published her article "Meditation can Reduce Habitual Responding." Heidi specializes in teaching Pragmatic Meditation, Forrest Yoga as Trauma-Informed yoga, Forrest Yoga for Recovery and Interdependence in Teaching and Hands-On Assisting.
Attended Trainings
• Foundation Teacher Training - Rhinebeck, NY, 2003