When Hallie Stotsky graduated from Chatham College as an injured, basketball-wielding student-athlete, the “actual world” lacked the construction she was accustomed to.
Stotsky confronted a lull coming off her two-year-long damage in her sophomore and junior years. As soon as her senior basketball season ended and commencement had come and gone, she didn’t know what to do together with her life. Then, she discovered yoga.
“At the moment in Pittsburgh, yoga studios [seemed to be] the one locations with set schedules,” Stotsky mentioned.
Pitt’s Stress Free Zone coordinator is a yogi of all trades. Working with the SFZ for 7 1/2 years, Stotsky is a 200-level teacher with a decade of expertise rooted in conventional Hatha yoga. The Stress Free Zone provides college students a bodily and psychological area to de-stress and follow mindfulness meditation on campus on the third ground of the William Pitt Union. The warmly lit and incense-perfumed room hosts a smooth, carpeted ground scattered with royal blue yoga mats, blocks and bolsters.
“The area is about that quiet and peacefulness, then supplying you with the academic instruments of mindfulness meditation that can assist you if you go away right here,” Stotsky mentioned.
Stotsky’s path to this profession wasn’t simple. In 2009, Stostky graduated from Chatham earlier than heading to Pitt in 2011 for a grasp’s of schooling. Whereas working towards her graduate diploma, Stotsky famous that yoga rapidly turned an emotional want and a bodily reprieve.
“Yoga actually held me collectively inside these two years of graduate college,” Stotsky mentioned. “That is the place the bodily follow actually turned a psychological one, too.”
After graduating from Pitt, she returned to Chatham as an assistant director of Pupil Affairs. Throughout her three years at this job, she additionally pursued a registered yoga trainer distinction from Yoga Alliance. Stotsky discovered herself torn between a want to instruct yoga and a objective of ultimately turning into a dean of scholars.
“Lo and behold, perhaps it was luck, perhaps it was me placing it out to the universe and it was meant to be. I actually had a disaster. I like working with faculty college students, however I wanted to show yoga,” Stotsky mentioned. “I’m good at it. I can inform it is my ardour, and I knew I might make a distinction doing it.”
Destiny intervened when she landed a part-time place as session and outreach coordinator on the SFZ in 2015.
“The door opened to working with faculty college students within the one particular subject I’m actually keen about — serving to them assist themselves,” Stotsky mentioned.
At her job, Stotsky is devoted to selling accessibility and inspiring college students of all ranges. She additionally gives a wide range of props for those who wrestle with tough poses.
“It is such a straightforward factor when a scholar will say, ‘I can not contact my toes. I can not do yoga,’” Stotsky mentioned. “Give them two blocks to place their arms on, and abruptly you have introduced the bottom nearer to them. It is these little shifts if a pose feels actually tough. Utilizing that verbiage to assist college students really feel extra snug, wherever they’re.”
The SFZ gives varied workshops, courses and occasions on subjects comparable to mindfulness meditation, yoga and instruments for anxiousness administration methods to assist college students scale back stress, enhance their psychological well being and discover stability of their lives. There’s yoga inversion stations, daylight lamps for these battling seasonal melancholy and even a laptop computer with a biofeedback program that helps college students determine their stress ranges and decrease them.
Stotsky emphasised that although it’s a Stress Free Zone, it’s not a spot for unproductivity.
“We now have many college students that can stroll in and say, ‘Can I simply take a nap or sit in right here?’ and this area is de facto meant to be an academic setting,” Stotsky mentioned. “I assist naps and needing a reprieve, however I am attempting to show what a purposeful break is.”
Stotsky’s coworkers have additionally observed her dedication to serving to college students. Fatima Mendez Fuentes, a sophomore psychology main and one of many 4 scholar staff on the SFZ, mentioned Stotsky “makes it a degree to prioritize our well-being, serving to us with something she will.”
“Yoga is one in every of my favourite issues in regards to the area,” she mentioned. “[Stotsky] has been an excellent mentor in serving to us information ourselves and others via meditation.”
Meg Mayer-Costa met Stotsky when she began as a registered dietician on the Pupil Well being Middle in 2015, and remembers her being “very partaking, inquisitive and fantastic to converse with.” Since then, Mayer-Costa and Stotsky have collaborated on varied initiatives, together with staff coaching, vitamin and wellness programming throughout the College.
“Stotsky is exceptionally type and empathetic,” Mayer-Costa mentioned. “I believe she blossoms when engaged in her craft.”
Aside from her commitments at Pitt, Stotsky additionally spearheads the trainer coaching program for One Level One Yoga and hosts yoga occasions for student-athletes — a nod to her Chatham basketball roots. As a mom of two younger youngsters, Stotsky balances motherhood together with her ardour for yoga and dealing with faculty youngsters.
Nonetheless, she nonetheless finds time to innovate on the SFZ. Stotsky is at the moment engaged on a marketing campaign to discourage college students from doomscrolling on social media when visiting the SFZ, which she mentioned contributes to psychological exhaustion.
“Mindfulness is about specializing in the current second and difficult your mind,” Stotsky mentioned. “It’s not simply lounging out and letting your thoughts daydream whereas being in your telephone.”
She’s additionally contemplating beginning a yoga remedy program for college kids coping with grief, trauma or persistent sickness. She added that she appears ahead to the SFZ having a bigger area so it may possibly supply a broader vary of courses, comparable to chair yoga.
Stotsky mentioned she is aware of faculty may be overwhelming, and that college students face tutorial stress, social challenges and extra inside a brand new atmosphere. Stotsky’s objective is to assist college students navigate these challenges and discover peace of thoughts.
“I do know this stuff can change your life,” Stotsky mentioned. “These practices can meet each single particular person, wherever they’re.”
