Heidi Sormaz, PhD, E-RYT 500, is the founder and owner of Fresh Yoga in New Haven, Connecticut. A Forrest Yoga Guardian Teacher, she has been teaching yoga since 2001. Her classes are a unique combination of her expertise in psychology, meditation, and yoga.
Sormaz teaches the Forrest Yoga 200-hour and advanced teacher trainings; designed and teaches the Fresh Yoga 200-hour and 300-hour teacher trainings; and has taught a 300-hour advanced vinyasa training with Rolf Gates. She has been featured in Yoga Journal and was selected by The Great Courses to design their first course on yoga: Yoga for a Healthy Mind and Body.
A former university psychology professor and author of the book Performing Under Pressure, her first love was the study of the mind. As an academic, she experimented with unwinding cognitive habits (habitual thinking) through specific attention, focus, and meditation work. She brings these principles to her yoga classroom, encouraging students to work with their minds as specifically as they work with their bodies and sharing the very practices that helped her move through her own challenges of severe anxiety and recover from an eating disorder.
Somaz received a master's and a doctorate in psychology from Yale University.