Emily Hightower is the Founder and Lead Guide for Ondalu, where people replenish and heal with real food nutrition, custom yoga and outdoor play. In private practice since 2002, she is a trusted private yoga teacher inspired deeply by her mentor, Deborah Koehn of Yoga Adventure. With thousands of hours of teaching experience, she specializes in Adaptive Thai Yoga, Therapeutic Pranayama for Anxiety and Depression, Yoga for Recovery and Integrative Nutrition. Her extensive field work includes regular retreats for Wounded Warriors with Challenge Aspen, Teen Empowerment and Teacher Training.

Emily founded the Carbondale Yoga Society in 2012 to unite her community through yoga and service work, and to dissolve barriers of different studios, ages and abilities. Her advocacy work began during her 20’s when her passion for rivers became a position directing education for the Headwaters Institute, where she spent four years managing watershed education seminars on 28 rivers across the US and Chile.

A Certified Holistic Nutritionist, food for Emily is the “yoga of our times” as our choices with food ripple beyond our bodies into the global systems we depend on. Her ground-breaking program, “Off the Mat, Into the Kitchen” fuses yoga’s ancient wisdom with holistic nutrition. Coursing through ten core yoga principles, students integrate new personal patterns around food without dogma, diets, or external pressure. The long-reaching vision is an enlightened solution to our modern epidemic of lifestyle diseases and ongoing cultural and environmental degradation from industrial food practices. Here lives her confluence of empowering yoga, healing food and river health!

Emily offers public speaking, group work, private coaching and retreats through www.Ondalu.com and coaches in person or via Skype from anywhere. She lives in love with her husband Brian, their 8 year old son, Oz, and their emerging Urban Homestead and studio in Carbondale, Colorado.