For most of my professional life, service meant welcoming people into restaurants, hotels, kitchens, and shared experiences.
It meant preparing food with care, anticipating guests’ needs, supporting teams behind the scenes, and creating moments people would remember long after they left the table.
After more than two decades working internationally across hospitality, restaurants, hotels, food and beverage leadership, operations, and guest experience, my career took an unexpected turn into enterprise technology operations. Working in technical support, release management, and cross-functional problem-solving expanded my understanding of service: sometimes caring for people also means building reliable systems, solving problems calmly, and helping teams continue their work when something goes wrong.
Through these different chapters, I began to understand that service can take many forms.
Sometimes it is a beautifully prepared meal.
Sometimes it is solving a problem before it affects the people relying on you.
Sometimes it is a room where someone finally feels able to exhale.
Sometimes it is simply helping another person feel safe, welcomed, and fully present.
Yoga has become a natural continuation of that work.
A Practice That Changed With Me
I began practicing yoga more than 15 years ago. At first, it was one part of a busy life built around demanding work, long hours, travel, and responsibility.
Over time, my relationship with yoga changed.
A long and evolving health and recovery journey required me to reconsider many of the ideas I had carried about strength, productivity, and perseverance. My body could no longer be treated as something that simply needed to work harder, move faster, or push through discomfort.
I had to learn how to listen.
I had to adapt, rest, rebuild, ask for support, and accept that progress is rarely linear.
Yoga did not become a quick solution or an escape from reality. It became one of the tools that helped me rebuild trust in my body and remain connected to myself during periods of uncertainty and change.
The practice taught me that strength does not always look impressive from the outside.
Strength can mean slowing down.
It can mean choosing a modification without shame.
It can mean resting before the body forces you to stop.
It can mean returning to the mat after a difficult week and beginning again with whatever is available that day.
This understanding continues to shape both the way I practice and the kind of teacher I am becoming.
Becoming a Yoga Teacher
After many years of personal practice, I completed my 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training with Kootenay Yoga School in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and became registered with Yoga Alliance as an RYT 200.
The training gave me the opportunity to study asana, anatomy, sequencing, pranayama, meditation, yoga philosophy, ethics, accessibility, and teaching methodology.
It also challenged me to examine why I wanted to teach.
I did not become a yoga teacher because I had mastered every posture. I became a teacher because I understand what it feels like to arrive with a body, history, energy level, and life experience that may not fit the image traditionally associated with yoga.
I understand the courage it can take simply to begin.
During my final practicum, I combined mindful movement, breath awareness, and a handpan-supported Savasana. My intention was not to create the most physically demanding class. It was to create an environment where people could move with awareness, feel supported, and experience genuine rest.
That experience confirmed something I had already begun to feel: my role is not to perform wellness for people. It is to help create the conditions in which they can reconnect with themselves.
Where Hospitality and Yoga Meet
At first glance, professional kitchens and yoga studios may appear to belong to completely different worlds.
To me, they are connected by the same fundamental question:
How can we care for the people in front of us?
A chef pays attention to timing, energy, nourishment, atmosphere, and the needs of the people gathered around the table.
A yoga teacher observes breath, movement, energy, accessibility, and the emotional tone of the room.
A retreat facilitator considers how all these elements work together: the food, the schedule, the physical environment, the transitions between activities, and the moments when people need space rather than more programming.
My years in hospitality taught me how to remain grounded when plans change, how to communicate across cultures, how to support a team, and how to notice the small details that influence whether someone feels genuinely cared for.
Yoga is helping me bring greater awareness and intention to those same skills.
I do not see this new chapter as leaving hospitality behind. I see it as expanding the meaning of hospitality beyond restaurants and hotels.
Hospitality can also be the way we welcome someone into a practice.
It can be how we make movement approachable.
It can be the care placed into a nourishing meal during a retreat.
It can be a quiet conversation, a creative workshop, a thoughtfully planned experience, or a Savasana in which someone finally gives themselves permission to rest.
A More Accessible Understanding of Wellness
My own journey has made me cautious of wellness spaces that suggest healing must always look positive, graceful, or complete.
Real life is more complicated.
Some days feel expansive. Others require patience and adaptation. A meaningful practice must be able to hold both.
The yoga I hope to share is grounded, compassionate, and accessible. It respects individual bodies and lived experiences. It leaves room for curiosity, humor, imperfection, and choice.
I want people to know that they do not need to be flexible, fearless, young, thin, pain-free, or experienced to belong in a yoga space.
They are allowed to arrive exactly as they are.
This philosophy also influences the retreats, workshops, culinary experiences, and creative spaces I hope to help develop. Whether I am teaching movement, guiding breathwork, facilitating a neurographic art workshop, supporting retreat operations, or preparing food, the intention remains the same: to help people feel nourished, welcomed, and more connected.
The Traveling Yoga Chef
This evolving path has led me to describe myself as The Traveling Yoga Chef. IG: @chefjrkitchen
The name brings together the different parts of my life rather than asking me to choose only one identity.
I am a chef and hospitality professional.
I am a newly certified yoga teacher.
I am a facilitator, traveler, creative explorer, and someone who continues to learn from recovery, change, and starting again.
I am interested in opportunities where these experiences can work together: yoga teaching, retreat facilitation, guest experience, culinary workshops, hospitality consulting, creative programming, and meaningful cultural exchange.
I am especially drawn to environments where service is thoughtful, responsibilities are clearly defined, and collaboration is based on mutual respect.
I may be at the beginning of my formal teaching journey, but I am not beginning from zero. I carry more than 20 years of experience creating, leading, adapting, welcoming, and caring for people across different countries and cultures.
Yoga has given that experience a new direction.
Continuing the Journey
I once believed resilience meant continuing no matter what.
Today, I understand it differently.
Resilience can mean changing direction without abandoning who you are. It can mean allowing the lessons from one chapter to become the foundation of another.
My journey from kitchens and hotels to yoga mats and retreat spaces has not followed a straight line. It is still unfolding.
But the purpose is becoming clearer.
I want to create experiences that nourish more than the body.
I want to help people slow down enough to notice what they need.
I want to contribute to spaces where food, movement, creativity, rest, hospitality, and human connection are treated as interconnected forms of care.
For me, cooking has always been an act of love.
I am beginning to understand that teaching, facilitating, and holding space can be acts of love too.
And perhaps that is the thread connecting every chapter of my story: being of service, creating meaningful experiences, and helping people feel a little more at home wherever they are.
My journey is still unfolding, and I remain open to where service, food, movement, creativity, technology, and human connection may lead next.
Perhaps our paths will cross—on the mat, around a table, at a retreat, or somewhere unexpected in the world.
Until then, à bientôt
Chef Jr | The Traveling Yoga Chef | @chefjrkitchen
The post Becoming The Traveling Yoga Chef: A Journey of Service, Recovery, and Reinvention appeared first on Yoga Trade.
