Today we’d like to introduce you to Sytera Field.
Hi Sytera, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, how can you bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frighten us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you, and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously permit other people to do the same. Our presence automatically liberates others as we are liberated from our fear.”
– Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Now that I have built two recognized brands (SyteraYoga and The Nadi Ball Method), I can see that what may have seemed like hardships in life can be a catalyst for one to find ways to heal outside of the traditional path. That was the case for me. Growing up, I had a very modest and, at times, difficult upbringing. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, with two younger brothers. My mother was a bus driver, and my dad was a carpenter, and they both struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. In the environment I grew up in, there was no talk of college or planning for the future. Most of the validation I received from my family was around my physical appearance. My mother enrolled me in pageants as a pre-teen. When I was 12 years old, I won Miss Pre-Teen Texas and then traveled to Disney World in Orlando for the Miss Pre-Teen USA contest. Ironically, this helped me realize that I didn’t want to play the part of being a pretty girl. I started to recognize that I could do more, but I had no clue what that might be. No one in my extended family had ever gone to college. Like many Gen X’ers, my parents divorced when I was young, so I was a typical “latchkey kid.” When I was 17, I left home and lived with friends. I didn’t have good role models or much adult supervision, so as a teenager, I spent most of my time doing stupid things. For half of my friends, it ended poorly in death, drug addiction, eating disorders, and teen pregnancy. For the other half of us, surviving all of that pushed us to become stronger, more resilient, and more focused. This is what happened to me.
In 1994, when I was 19, I fell off a cliff while rock climbing and broke my leg. Two bones tore through my skin, and I ended up in a wheelchair and endured a thigh-high cast for months. I didn’t have feeling in my foot for a while, and I had to teach myself how to walk again. I had grown up as a dancer and had a lot of confidence in my body. So, being restricted physically really shook me, both physically and mentally.
I had to find a way to regain my confidence and learn to trust my body again. Because money was tight, I received only two hours of physical therapy, so I turned to yoga to redevelop strength and mobility. Yoga quickly became more than just a means of physical therapy. I saw it as a way I could take control of my life. It provided me with a framework of ideas and values that I did not have growing up. It was the first time that I felt like I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. I was in charge of my health and healing and on to a new physical trajectory that would lead me to become a yoga teacher.
I did not realize it then, but the physical therapy I had after my broken leg was not enough because I needed deeper long-term healing of the fascia. The myofascial tissues, my proprioception (a sense of where my body is in space), and my interoception (a sense of my internal state) had all changed due to the injury, and the way to heal was through a slow, gradual changing of the fascia in my right side. My tissues stored the memory of my injury, and I unconsciously avoided putting weight on the injured side. This is a common theme for people; we avoid the spot that hurts, so we stop using it. Then these areas are no longer in the mind map of our body, which leads to using these previously injured areas even less.
When I started doing yoga, I didn’t know anything about it, so I tried different classes and styles. As you might imagine, yoga in my hometown of Austin (home of Whole Foods and many alternative health trends) in the early 1990s could be weird and wild. So, my very first introduction to yoga just happened to be a “clothing optional” class! After the first few moments of being behind a naked person while they were doing Downward Dog, I took my fully-clothed self out of the class. I then found an Iyengar yoga class that was very therapeutic and introduced me to “real yoga.”
My now-husband and I moved from Austin to Washington, D.C., in 1996. A couple of years later, I enrolled at the University of Maryland and became the first person in my family to graduate from college. Right after we were married in November 2000, I decided I wanted to study art history in Italy for a semester. It was my first time in a foreign country with no family or friends. During that time abroad, I decided that I wanted to become a yoga teacher when I returned home. After my teacher training, I cleared out all of the furniture from our small living room so I could start teaching classes to my friends; the only space I had access to was big enough for a yoga class.
I gave birth to my first of three children in 2004 and spent the next decade focused on my family and teaching yoga. I quickly built up a group of private clients. With their encouragement and the help of supporters in a Kickstarter campaign, I opened my first of three yoga studios, SyteraYoga. Then I created my yoga and fascia release method called the Nadi Ball Method. I am living a charmed life, and considering my childhood, things could have turned out differently, but instead, it has been a rewarding and exhilarating journey. An Ayurvedic practitioner might say that I must have had good Karma in another life.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Covid brought so many struggles to the yoga and wellness industry. The number of yoga studios that closed is breathtaking. We opened our doors five years ago, on January 1, 2018, with the help of 61 supporters in a Kickstarter campaign. This act was in itself a great leap of faith because the way a Kickstarter campaign is structured is that you preemptively declare the funds you need to raise to bring your dream to life, and if you don’t meet your goal within the designated time frame, you get nothing – $0! So, we set our goal and reached out to the community to ask if they would step up to create this space we call a yoga studio. A shared vision that brings people together who are willing and ready to work on themselves to explore in body and mind what it means to aspire to be better human beings.
Just ten months after opening SyteraYoga, the studio was doing so well that we relocated to a bigger space in the same building, from a tiny space on the third floor down to a much bigger space on the first floor. Again, the community kicked in to help us fit out the new downstairs space, which had a reception area and an extra room for private sessions. It was glorious, and we were so proud of our growth and the new, larger studio. A total of three studios later, if we had only known then what we do now. It has been amazing, but it has also been heartbreaking. We had to hustle in ways we never thought possible to keep the studio going. When the pandemic hit, we were unprepared to offer online classes, so we closed the studio for 48 hours while Chad created a temporary online studio inside our home for two days. Complete with our kids hand-painting the SyteraYoga logo on the walls and Chad drilling through walls and the floor for us to tap into the ethernet. We were able to invite the teachers to teach via Zoom. They would show up at our home without any interaction from us, let themselves in, and go to teach in our basement studio. Those two days have been the only two days we have closed since 1/1/2018.
Thanks for sharing that. So, next, you can tell us more about your business.
For more than 20 years, Sytera has helped thousands of students, from elite athletes to desk-job workers, realize healthy movement’s life-changing physical and mental benefits. Sytera trains massage therapists, yoga teachers, physical therapists, chiropractors, and personal trainers as biomechanics experts. Sytera developed the Nadi Ball Method® for stress reduction, pain relief, and increased mobility. The method integrates massage balls into movement, stretching, and strengthening. In a feature on the Nadi Ball Method in January 2020, Northern Virginia Magazine explained, “The balls work into the fascia lines, creating openness and encouraging correct alignment, and students can feel how sensations are connected throughout the body.”
Through her easy-to-access instruction on the complexities of movement, Sytera’s students begin to understand where they hold stress and tension. Because they can immediately feel the difference in their bodies, her students often use the word “magic” when describing her Nadi Method to their families and friends.
The key to sustainable well-being is challenging your body to stretch toward your goals without overwhelming your system. You “bend but don’t break.” Sytera’s highly individualized training analyzes your movement and postural patterns to help you achieve unrestricted movement. The result is feeling clear and energized, engaged in life instead of depleted. Sytera’s goal is to bring a creative and uplifting spirit to each session to help you meet your unique wellness goals and bring out the best of what is uniquely you. Sytera’s corporate clients include Mars Inc., the Discovery Channel, PartnerMD, Share Our Strength, and many others. She has partnerships with the National Spinal Health Foundation, United Wellness and Sports Rehab, and Inova Wellness.
How would we have described you growing up if we knew you were growing up?
I believe that what may seem like hardships in life can be a catalyst for one to find ways to heal outside of the traditional path. That was the case for me. Growing up, I had a very modest and, at times, difficult upbringing. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, with two younger brothers. My mother was a bus driver, and my dad was a carpenter, and they both struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. In the environment I grew up in, there was no talk of college or planning for the future. Most of the validation I received from my family was around my physical appearance. My mother enrolled me in pageants as a pre-teen. When I was 12 years old, I won Miss Pre-Teen Texas and then traveled to Disney World in Orlando for the Miss Pre-Teen USA contest. Ironically, this helped me realize that I didn’t want to play the part of being a pretty girl. I started to recognize that I could do more, but I had no clue what that might be. No one in my extended family had ever gone to college. Like many Gen X’ers, my parents divorced when I was young, so I was a typical “latchkey kid.” When I was 17, I left home and lived with friends. I didn’t have good role models or much adult supervision, so as a teenager, I spent most of my time doing stupid things. For half of my friends, it ended poorly in death, drug addiction, eating disorders, and teen pregnancy. For the other half of us, surviving all of that pushed us to become stronger, more resilient, and more focused. This is what happened to me.
In 1994, when I was 19, I fell off a cliff while rock climbing at Bull Creek Park and broke my leg. Two bones tore through my skin, and I ended up in a wheelchair and endured a thigh-high cast for months. I didn’t feel in my foot for a while and had to teach myself how to walk again. I had grown up as a dancer and had a lot of confidence in my body. So, being restricted physically really shook me, both physically and mentally.
I had to find a way to regain my confidence and learn to trust my body again. Because money was tight, I received only two hours of physical therapy, so I turned to yoga to redevelop strength and mobility. Yoga quickly became more than just a means of physical therapy. I saw it as a way I could take control of my life. It provided me with a framework of ideas and values that I did not have growing up. It was the first time that I felt like I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. I was in charge of my health and healing and on to a new physical trajectory that would lead me to become a yoga teacher.
Contact Info:
- Website: nadiball.com
- Instagram: @nadiball
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nadiballmethod/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@syterayoga
Image Credits
Sytera Field
