HomeFlow Yoga

How Online Teachers Become Part of Our Lives

Those of us who practice at home come to love our online teachers — and lean on them — in a way they will never fully know.

I have a teacher named Jackie. She has seen me through times when I felt great and times when I didn’t. She was there for the strong mornings and the shaky ones, for the seasons when practice felt like flying and the seasons when it was the only thing holding the day together.

She is always there for me. That’s the thing about her. Always.

If you practice at home, you have a Jackie. You know their voice better than you know some of your relatives’. You know their cues, their jokes, the exact way they land the end of savasana. They arrive through a screen, and somehow they’re the most reliable presence in the room.

Last winter, mine came with me to Ireland. She had no idea.

The trip that never happened

My mother and I left for Germany on the twenty-ninth of November. It was to be a six-day trip — the Christmas markets, mulled wine, wooden ornaments, home by the end of the week.

Six days turned into six weeks. We never saw a single market.

We landed in Frankfurt, and before we ever left the airport, my mother was badly hurt. Instead of a hotel, we went to a hospital.

The two weeks that followed were pure survival. I spent them working day and night to get us out of the country and safely home. I slept in snatches. I learned to navigate a hospital in a language I don’t speak, in a city I’d never seen, on no sleep, while being steady for her every hour I was in the room.

Eventually she reached a pain level where she could fly. Our insurance company sent two nurses to accompany us on a commercial flight; she would lie on a stretcher in the back, and an ambulance would meet us at the airport at home.

We never made it to that airport.

An hour into the flight, she took a serious turn. We made an emergency landing in Ireland.

Thirty-six hours

For the better part of thirty-six hours it was touch and go. The doctors worked to find out what was wrong, and there was a stretch in there where I understood, very clearly and for the first time, that I might lose her.

Then they found it. They treated it. She lived.

And it was only after they found it that I started to come to — that I noticed I had been holding my breath for a month.

She was discharged into a rehab center, and things went quiet. Quiet in the way that lets everything catch up with you. Four more weeks in Ireland. Christmas came and went. New Year’s came and went. My husband and my children were four thousand miles away, and I was alone in a hotel in a country where I knew no one and nothing.

I had been frightened for over a month. I was lost. And somewhere in that quiet I understood that I had to find my way back to myself, and that I had to do it soon.

The first customer of the day

One morning I went out into the streets of Limerick to find a store where a yoga mat might be sold.

I remember that morning so vividly. The streets were empty. The shops were just unlocking their doors. I found a sporting goods store, and I was the first customer of the day. They had exactly one kind of mat — cheap, aqua blue, fourteen euro. It was all they had. I have never been so happy to walk out of a shop.

I carried it back to the hotel under my arm and rolled it out immediately.

Then I put on Jackie.

The pose

I chose a classic: Good Morning Flow 2: Embodiment. Thirty-five minutes. It’s a favorite of mine because of one pose I had never done before I took that class — from tabletop, you lift your leg up and over to the floor on the opposite side, then bend your front body toward it. The first time I ever did it, I didn’t want to come out of it and move on to the next thing. It felt that good. I’ve taken that class so many times since that I could easily run the whole thirty-five minutes on my own, from memory.

But I didn’t. And I wouldn’t.

The class began, and I knew the pose was coming. I could feel myself anticipating it. And when we finally arrived there — on a fourteen-euro mat, on a hotel floor, in Limerick — it felt like the first time my body had unclenched since the whole thing began.

I started to cry.

It was a happy cry. It was also a cry that my mother almost died, that we missed Christmas entirely, that I missed my family and my home, that I had been afraid for weeks on end. But mostly it was relief and gratitude, and something like genuine happiness that I was still in there somewhere.

Jackie walked me through it. In that country, in that situation, on that day. And she had no idea she was doing it.

How a voice moves in

I’ve been practicing yoga for fourteen years. I started in studios and went to every studio I could find, just to keep learning — different cues, different styles, different voices. Eventually I settled into practicing at home. I still go to the occasional retreat, but I’m what you would call a home yogi now.

I found Jackie Mahrou on YogaDownload years ago, and not even for myself. I had come home from my first yoga retreat, where I’d seen other women bring their husbands, and I wanted to introduce mine to yoga. Jackie had a five-class beginner series that was so good I took it alongside him — ten years into my own practice — and learned more than I expected to.

He was hooked. Her gentle, inviting style is exactly what every new yogi needs. He did what he could, and she never judged him. When we moved on to more advanced vinyasa flows, we went looking for her classes specifically, because she took the same care with us there that she had taken in the beginner series. With him, and, it turns out, with me.

That’s how a voice moves in. I hear her all the time now, in poses she isn’t teaching:

In June of 2025, I met her in person for the first time, at a YogaDownload retreat in Scotland where she was one of the two teachers chosen to host. It was like meeting a celebrity. Six months later, she was the only familiar thing in a hotel room in Ireland.

It counts. All of it.

Some people will tell you a screen can’t hold a real teacher-student relationship. Those people have never unrolled a brand-new mat in a foreign country, alone, after the worst month of their life, and pressed play on the one voice that could make a strange room feel like home.

The mat doesn’t know the teacher isn’t in the room. Your breath doesn’t know. Your nervous system, softening on cue after all these years, certainly doesn’t know.

My mother came home. She did not come home unchanged — there are things she will carry for the rest of her life — but she came home, and I don’t use that word lightly anymore.

Home was never the place. Home is the feeling — the one where your shoulders come down and your breath goes back to its normal length and you recognize yourself again.

I found it four thousand miles from my house, on a fourteen-euro mat, on a hotel floor in Limerick.

Someone had to get me there. She has never set foot in my home. She didn’t know I was gone.

— LoriAnn