My Story
Melanie Gillum
My medium this life has been the human body. I have been fascinated with movement and healing practices for as long as I can remember. Between my love of yoga, travel, bodywork, dance, and human design, I have been fortunate to live a rich life and transmit my passions.
My yoga background is rooted in the traditions of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga and more recently Kaiut. I have been influenced by every class I have taken, but the profound teachers for me have been B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Richard Freeman, and Francisco Kaiut.
My ex-husband and I embarked on the adventure of opening the Denver Ashtanga Yoga Center in 1998. The center flourished but I soon realized I wasn’t flourishing. With 2 young children, 10 employees, a yoga boutique, treatment rooms and over 30 classes a week to manage, I was loosing what was very important to me… the deep quiet calm that practicing yoga brought me. We sold the yoga center. My family and I moved to Ashland Oregon in 2005. I started up my Rolfing practice and became a gardener, dancer, hiker, Vajrayana Buddhist, human design nut and began to develop what I call a fascial approach to yoga.
In 2017 on a visit to Boulder, I heard about a new type of yoga: Kaiut. I signed up for a class with probably 50 people in it. Which was a huge attendance for any yoga class I had ever been to. I walked out of class feeling like my nervous system was profoundly calm, my joints felt loose and I was engengized. I felt I had found a yoga that aligned with my principles of fascial yoga and the nervous system. Within 3 weeks, I moved to Boulder and began a yearlong teacher training with a Brazilian Chiropractic, Francisco Kaiut. It was a wonderful immersion into a new form of yoga that I enjoy teaching.
I began my immersion in Human Design around 2010. After my first reading, I was fascinated that a system could understand my personality so well. I have had many Astrology reading through the years that were predictive but this was more about the vehicle I was in, my ego structure. Could it be that we are each imprinted at birth with a blueprint for living our unique life and Human Design offers help with the roadmap I had been missing? After 10 years of living with this map, I would say Yes. It still isn’t easy, with the heavy conditioning of our systems & family of origin and living in a strategic world. But it is a worthwhile journey to help find peace, satisfaction, & recognition as we each develop our unique gifts and see the limitations. I am currently in a profession analysis training with the International Human Design School. I offer reading and on going support with the journey.
I feel blessed and immensly grateful for the life I have been given. I humbly offer my services; yoga, bodywork and human design.