Profile

Tanya Witman is a yoga instructor, bodyworker, integrative counselor, and musician. i look like danaHer practice combines the love of these fields into unique offerings of service to suit her clients’ needs. She is committed to assisting people in the exploration and evolution of their own health and well-being. Her primary philosophy revolves around the premise that there is value in remaining present for every experience, particularly discomfort. She uses yoga, bodywork, counseling, and sound as therapies for processing physical and emotional experiences. She is committed to empowering her clients to develop tools to assist in navigating ups and downs in their mental and physical states; in short, to connect more deeply to themselves.

Yoga: I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who can take your word for it and those who have to learn the hard way. Yoga found me after college, lost, disappointed, and accustomed to seeing the world through a cynic’s eye. My first class annoyed and frustrated me, but left me with a lightened heart. Hundreds of classes and many styles later, I find myself in Tucson both practicing and teaching yoga and no longer describing myself as an angry person.

Yoga has taught me how to exist in discomfort and choose my reaction to it. Because of my practice I purposely look to the good in situations, which balances my inner critic. I bring these lessons into my teaching, asking my students to be willing to walk carefully into difficulty and maintain awareness to navigate it more skillfully. Those skillful means include learning to move gracefully through the moments where we feel we’ve failed. Thus I bring to classes the lightheartedness that was my first gift of yoga—just because we fall doesn’t mean we fail, but neither does it keep us from coming back.

Massage: I began doing massage as a child. My mother taught me how to massage her shoulders after long days at work, and before long I was working on friends and family whenever I had the chance. In my mid-twenties, having been fired from a string of jobs that were a poor fit, I realized I was one of those people who needed to enjoy my work in order to stay in it. Massage was a natural choice.

It is my joy to help people learn about their bodies, their patterns, memories, and emotions, while on the table. I employ a host of different modalities to target and relieve client-specific issues of pain, restriction and imbalance.

Integrative Counseling: About ten years into my massage practice, I noticed a feeling of unease inside when I contemplated how often people’s emotional and psychological concerns arose in their bodywork and yoga sessions. While I felt comfortable holding space for these concerns as they arrived, I also saw myself as educationally uninformed about how best to handle them in a therapeutic way to benefit my clients and students. I went to graduate school and earned a degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling in 2020, with an internship specialty in grief and bereavement. I am so grateful to welcome these skills into my ever-unfolding practice.

Mantra: I have been singing since I was a little girl. I used to carry around a tape recorder with me and make up songs about rainbows and friends and cats and whatever else was in my mind at the time. I have been in choirs and musical performance groups nearly my whole life. In college I was part of a nationally recognized a cappella group, Off the Beat.  We put together 3 professional recordings during my tenure. In 2007 I collaborated with a fellow Off the Beat alum, Gabriel Mann, and created Chakra Songs. The album consists of 7 songs, each designed to connect to and enhance the energy of each chakra (energy center) in the body.

In 2014, Gabe and I released our second recording Ca Sarvetaratra (And Everything Else). Both recordings can be found on any music streaming service. As well, hard copies can be purchased through cdbaby, Amazon, and iTunes.  For more information, visit www.vivemusicproject.com