Yoga Fabulous- Kate Daley

The wood studio smells of grapefruit, lime and organic cleaning products. Heat emanates from the floor as people contort their sweat-drenched bodies. The concentrated nose-breathing of 20 students echoes eerily like a group of scuba divers underwater. The room temperature sits at a balmy 40 degrees and it’s just beginning.

Most children don’t say they hope to be a yoga instructor when they grow up. “At first, my family thought I was insane,” says Annette Mellor, 49, the manager and yoga instructor at Moksha Yoga London.

While Mellor now teaches people about their inner strength and how to stretch into a back bend, she wasn’t always so Zen. Coming from England when she was 30-years-old, Mellor says she worked as an executive assistant to a vice-president at a top Canadian bank. She began to practice yoga to help balance her hectic career.

Ironically, Mellor hated her first Moksha yoga class. Moksha yoga is an intense style of yoga postures in a heated room where you never leave the mat, says Mellor. But she came back to try another class and fell in love with the practice.

She felt ready to leave her corporate job during a takeover by another bank and colleagues suggested she teach her passion— yoga. Her two adult children thought she was having a mid-life crisis, Mellor says with a smile.

“It’s fulfilling in a different way,” says the muscular strawberry blond instructor. Being a yoga instructor is definitely not the 9 to 5 job that Mellor once had, but she doesn’t regret her decision at all.

“I love that it’s not corporate here…They let me treat it like my own,” she says of the way she manages the Mill Street studio.

Mellor describes Moksha yoga as a community— she greets almost every student by name and barely has a moment to sit and talk. She hasn’t sat down since 6 a.m., she says as she gulps a berry smoothie.

“People need yoga,” she says. “There is no set person [who practices]. My youngest student is six-years-old and my oldest is 81.”

Mellor is also known to have a good sense of humour as she makes apparent in some of her remarks about interesting classes.

“People fart in class,” Mellor laughs. “I teach a posture that I call ‘wind-removing’- and it’s called ‘wind-removing’ for a reason.” Some people also have giggle fits in class she says, which is fine because yoga is made for everyone regardless of their experience or age.

“I continually learn from students,” she says, “or I wouldn’t progress.”