Curiosity fuels my creativity and brings important insight to my work. I help people remember their inner joy and invite openings which allow divine love to flow through our lives and express in our relationships with other beings and our interdependent ecosystems.
I’m Ann Hedly, an artist and grateful mother to three beautiful children. They’ve all reached teen years and beyond. I have been cultivating the sensibility of living well and being in harmony with life-as-it-is since I took my first yoga class at 18. I started with a wide-eyed, innocent hope that I might achieve a future which could prevent and solve all my discomforts. I slowly and sometimes painfully awakened to knowing it is precisely the adversity I’ve faced in life that makes me irreplaceable, valuable, and interesting.
I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, went to college at VCU in Richmond (BFA Dance and Choreography), then moved to NYC to pursue a dance career, enjoy my dream of city life, and become a yoga instructor. Now I live on a unique on-grid solar-powered homestead in Appleton, Maine.
I have been teaching and studying yoga for the past 27 years. My dance and movement background informs every class I teach. I share body sounding in yoga as taught by my first yoga teacher, Ketul Arnold and Rasa Yoga. Using pedagogy shared by Erich Schiffmann, I have begun incorporating freedom yoga in my classes. The practice begins like this: Relax, Love More, Be Brave, Trust. Repeat.
As long as I remember, I’ve been intuitively curious. I’ve been simultaneously really scared of my own intuition: Would I have to talk to dead people? What if I learned something scary or overwhelming? I began practicing Animal Communication in 2015 after taking a class with a friend (on a whim!). I had good and early success. However, my boundaries were leaky and I needed to spend several years immersed in courses, books and therapy to find a happier balance. I believe everyone is intuitive, and we can all use this gift well when we know ourselves well. All this to say, I offer both animal communication and people-centered intuitive sessions. You can find my schedule at the top of the page.
I have home-educated my three children. I love to share ideas and problem-solve around homeschooling and parenting. I look for solutions that support the entire family. I am available to guide, advise and answer questions about homeschooling and unschooling as well as share my experiences with both. Click here to schedule a consultation with me.
You can get a sense of my experience unschooling by listening to me having a conversation about unschooling with Pam Laricchia on her podcast “Exploring Unschooling” (Note: this was pre-divorce and I was Ann Rousseau then!)
While sometimes I actually forget about my alopecia, it is a shiny fact! I was a child of 5 when alopecia areata began to show up in my life as tiny round patches of hair loss. I’ve been through all aspects of this complicated auto-immunity disease and I’m an outspoken advocate and champion for people with hair loss. In 2017 I co-produced a documentary film about my hairloss experience, Mop Cap: An Alopecia Story.
Lastly, I’d like to offer you permission.
Or a recommendation, an exercise and active poetry
(An act of poetry): Exercise Freedom.
I am understanding and unraveling threads inside me that prove freedom is experienced differently depending on location, ancestry and proximity to wealth and power. At the same time, I didn’t arrive here in this body, at this time in history, to repeat conditional patterns. My goal is to belong first to myself and then to my community. I regularly feel that this particular unlearning in me is impossible.
Even still, there is something inside me that came here in this life to play with creativity and freedom. And so, in the spirit of give-what-you-want-to-receive; I hereby offer you this certificate. Post it on your wall, your fridge, carry it in your backpack – whatever you need to remind you that you are extraordinarily powerful and have more agency than you currently utilize. I deem you (and me!) worthy, powerful, and whole. Here is an award.
Ann Hedly and Water Moon Studios 