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 joyful 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 was 18 and took my first yoga class. I’ve moved from a wide-eyed innocent hope that I would be able to prevent and solve all my discomfort, pain and wounding to a wiser understanding that 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 then moved to NYC to pursue a dance career, enjoy 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 wisdom 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.
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.
Pre-pandemic I attended “Loving What Is” with Byron Katie at the Omega Institute. I find “The Work” absolutely life changing and it gives me tools for self-inquiry in a way that I’ve longed for my whole life. I invite you to investigate on your own. All the tools are available, for free, at her website below.
Lastly, I’d like to offer you permission.
Or a recommendation, an exercise and active poetry
(An act of poetry): Exercise Freedom.
I realize freedom is experienced differently depending on your location, your ancestry and your access to wealth and power. AND, you didn’t arrive here in this body at this time in history to repeat conditional patterns even though it may present itself as impossible.
I promise, you came to play with creativity and freedom. I hereby offer you this certificate to post on your wall, your fridge, carry 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 worthy, powerful and whole. Here is an award.
Ann Hedly and Water Moon Studios 