Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Andras.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Thank you for this amazing opportunity to reflect on what I would call “My Story.” I feel like I have learned that, ultimately, how we feel about every single day comes down to whether we see ourselves as the heroes of our saga: whether “our story” is a love story or a tragedy. This, over the years, has really become my personal definition of Karma. Rather than the I did something bad, so the world is going to punish (or good and reward), I believe it’s really more about the energy we are marinating our hearts, minds, and bodies in every single moment. In the end, it’s that marinade that flavors the next moment and the next, so though there was a time that I would have thought my life a tragedy, I now feel utterly blessed to see this sometimes-harrowing journey through humanness that is “My Story” as something wild and amazing. I imagine that though the content may be different, the story, the journey, the raw, unbridled humanness is the same for all of us. There are triumphs, and there are failures. There is heartbreak, and there is overwhelming love. There are beginnings and endings, connection and disconnection, strength and weakness, death and rebirth, but no matter who we are, no matter how much money we make, no matter our titles or our statuses, our stories of our humanness connect us all. They help us see, know, and understand ourselves, our place in this beautiful world, and each other. So, what’s my story? I started as a Type-A Perfectionist daughter of divorced parents. My perfectionism served as sweet, albeit confused, way to feel important and relevant in a world that many times just didn’t seem to make sense. I grew up in 2 loving households, doing absolutely fantastically at just about anything I tried, graduated top of my class, and moved to Atlanta to start my undergrad degree at Georgia Tech when my life radically changed. Growing up, I was able to feel special, relevant, and important because my high achieving. Georgia Tech gave me the startling, painful, untethering reality that I was absolutely average. Surrounded by thousands of other high achievers, all of a sudden, “perfect” didn’t really mean anything. Despite eventually graduating with highest honors, being accepted into the PhD program, and having my thesis research published on the cover of a scientific journal, I was depressed, anxious about my future, and never quite felt enough. This was the greatest blessing in disguise, and the FIRST time one life, version of myself, and dream died to birth into something new.
After finishing my graduate degree, I walked away from a job offer, my partner, and the lease on my apartment to spend a month a Buddhist monastery with my grandmother. It was here at 25 that my whole understanding of myself, of life and living, and my connection to the world changed radically: a change that has only more deeply rooted and flowered over the last 12 years. A change that I believe awakened me to the REAL journey, the real story, the deeper wisdom of our what and why that gets played out day after day: Who are we really? Why are we here? What is our purpose and our value? Why do we do ANYTHING we do? And how can I live so that when I inevitably die, I will look back and feel with no hesitation that I lived well? For me, the answer to every single one of these questions is LOVE.
When I returned to Atlanta from my month of meditating, working the grounds of the monastery, and spending a week in complete silence, I returned having felt true love and peace for the first time. There was no way for me to go back to the hampster wheel of driving for success for the sake of success, and instead, I began to follow what has been the most wondrous, unexpected, and unfathomably beautiful journey of learning and teaching what I would ultimately call this exquisite, debilitating, and miraculous gift of being human. The long and the short of it is that over the last 12 years, I have become certified as a yoga teacher, secular Buddhist teacher, mindfulness teacher, and trauma-informed in yoga and mindfulness. I worked as a bicycle delivery woman for a sandwich shop while I got myself certified and began working at yoga studios while I got married, built a business, and raised an incredible son. Like so many of us, I found failure at the door of nearly every success, experiencing things like selling a car to pay bills until my business got off the ground, missing family dinners and helping with homework while I worked nights at the studio, and finding that even then it was hard to make ends meet. When my business did finally get off the ground I was, as any entrepreneur will tell you, working even more. Owning your own business is a 24/7 job, but I absolutely loved it. Working for myself, teaching what I was and am most passionate about was a blessing, and having a beautiful family to be home with on nights and weekends was the most wonderful thing I ever could have imagined. By all accounts, I had made it. We bought our first home in 2017, and in 2021, my son’s 7th grade year, were actually doing well enough to buy a 2nd home in order to turn the first one into my wife and my workspace.
And then…
Like being human demands for most of us in one way or another…
It all crumbled.
In 2022, I lost my wife and my son, and for the first real-time in my 35 years of life, I learned deeply and painfully about grief, love, loss, and being alone, and I learned for the first time that this story is not “My Story,” it is OUR story. For if we love, we inevitably lose. If we grieve, it is because we have loved. I listened to a therapist friend talk on her Instagram story the other day, and what she brought to life was that she felt that there was one thread that was weaving continuously through the stories of all her patients, and that thread is grief. I love the Kahlil Gibran quote, “The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Never have I experienced sorrow like the loss of my family. Never had I experienced such love. For me, grief has become a mirror and reminder of love and a reminder of our collective connection and humanness. Grief has opened me deeply to my own capacity to love and the human capacity to lose, and in that, I have found the power of Glennon Doyle’s words, “This ends so stay.” 2 years later, my story has become something completely different and altogether the same. I am still teaching, but I have been given the pleasure and the adventure of working alongside other amazing humans, bringing the tools, skills, and practices of health and wellbeing to law enforcement and public safety officers around the country. At just the right moment, what has now become one of my dearest friends (who is actually currently sitting right next to me in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, as we work alongside their Sheriff’s Office) found me teaching a Georgia Tech and offered me a job that allowed me to pick myself up from my loss and stand on my financial feet again. The loss of my family came with the loss of my homes and my business, but it brought with it a whole new experience of life…one might say the second death and rebirth in my one precious lifetime. I am currently living a whirlwind one year of playfulness in Brooklyn, NY, with my partner, our dog Goose, and our cat Molly before we return to Atlanta in a few short months. Despite it feeling truly unimaginable that I could ever love again, in the most serendipitous and unexpected moment, this beautiful universe sent me the woman I am now navigating life with. Loss and gains. Grief and love. Success and failure. Death and birth. Where do I go from here? What’s next? Who knows? My answer in this moment and in every moment forward is “I will follow love. Wherever it leads.”
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
My road has been everything from floating through on a hovercraft to trying to ride sand dunes on a unicycle. I think it’s so natural that we go through periods of time where everything feels gentle and aligned and periods that everything feels like a struggle, but perhaps one of the things I’ve learned that is the most interesting is that HOW we are: our happiness, peacefulness, and life satisfaction doesn’t necessarily depend on whether the road is smooth or rough. We could be in the easiest, smoothest, most comfortable time in our lives and feel absolutely disconnected, dissatisfied, and uneasy, and we could be in the most uncertain, uncomfortable, and even painful time in our lives a be the most peaceful, tender, and love-filled we have ever been. Personally, smooth has always been “at work.” When I find something I love, dedicating myself to it has always been easy. Even with hiccups like financial struggles, changing jobs, and building a business (that went in 7 different directions), work has always felt like a smooth evolution. Being a mother was also the most wondrous gift I could have imagined. Nothing about motherhood is smooth. Having a son, even one that wasn’t my own blood, gave me a mirror to myself and the places I wanted to be better for myself and my boy in ways I never could have imagined. Being a mom was my greatest impetus to growth so I could love with more patience and spaciousness and hope to send my son out into the world with a powerful sense of self-worth, empowerment, and compassion. Again, it wasn’t smooth by any sense of the word, but it was the most beautiful challenge I could ever imagine.
My greatest obstacles have been my moments of crisis, but as Glennon Doyle says, these are also moments where if we listen slowly and with enough stillness, we also find these to be moments of invitation. My first crisis at 25 was an existential moment of recognition that invited me to step off my conditioned path and onto an intentional path of living. My second crisis at 35 was an Earth-shattering invitation to step fully into love, surrender, and freedom through loss, control, and grief. The obstacles and challenges of being human are here every single day. Contracting against the things that feel hard, opening to the experiences that feel beautiful. Doing our best to make life feel more gentle, connected, and less painful. We are all seeking love: self-love, other-love, life-love, and seeking to avoid pain. Because we are human, there will always be obstacles because so much of life is outside of our control, as is our natural reactions to what we experience and feel. The real obstacle is learning to breathe softly and with an open heart into whatever life throws at us: to ride the waves of experience, knowing that every single moment is worth it because it IS life and living and the raw, real experience of being and being human.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My current path focuses on utilizing a combination of research and education to better the human condition both individually and as a whole. Through collaborative work in the fields of developmental psychology, meditation, yoga, group and environmental psychology, and education, I aim to find effective ways of teaching personal and social growth in a direction of improved whole human health, non-violent global prosperity, and small and broad-scale peace. I have been blessed over the last 12 years to see my personal business and career evolve and expand to touch different populations, cultures, and generations, and what I have truly been privileged to learn is that there is a component to every single person’s experience that connect them to me and me to them and each of us to each other. No matter our backgrounds, our histories, our failures, our losses, our successes, our financial status, our gender, our faith, our sexuality, at our core, we are all navigating the same journey and fundamentally doing our best to find a life path that leads to more love and peace and less suffering. I believe that it is this perspective that makes me uniquely qualified for the work that I currently do, which is focused on bringing the tools and skills of mental, emotional, and spiritual health to law enforcement, corrections, and other public safety officers and professional staff.
I deeply see and believe in the interconnection of all things. I exist because you are. The efforts in one space directly impact other spaces, and for almost the entire history of public safety in the United States, there has been little to no effort to resolve the massive amount of trauma-impacted by our first responders. By no fault of their own, they carry this home to their families and into their interactions with their communities the same way the rest of us do. After a long day of work, it is our culture’s norm to come home, pour ourselves a drink, and disconnect, but this is healing for no one.
In 2022, I was offered a position with a small startup called RippleWorx that based its software of peak human performance on the idea that to peak perform, we must have the Knowledge & Skills, the Motivation, and be embedded inside an Organization that supports us doing our best work (K,M,O). While Ripple had gotten great at measuring gaps, they did not yet have the resources to help fill those gaps and get us to goal. For the last 2 years, I have been working alongside National Command & Staff College leaders to build out those resources from the perspective of humanity that drive the M, motivation, factor by training and upskilling officer wellness on all 11 Rings of Wellbeing. Together we have built MagnusWorx, a digital wellness solution in service of those who serve every day.
This is powerful and continuous journey of learning, being humbled, and trying something new. Having the privilege to connect to the humanity of our public safety professionals has been such a gift. Seeing being the curtain of an often-closed culture, especially in recent years, has been an honor, and it has opened my heart and mind to the many moments that I personally see “me” and “other.” Whether it’s driving through the streets of Atlanta or Brooklyn and getting off during election season or seeing the protesters at Atlanta Pride, I try to bring the core of my work, which is connection, humanity, and love, to every moment of unconscious separateness. I think maybe this is what I’m best at whether standing on a stage in front of 500 wardens and correctional officers or shaking the hand of a first-year rookie on the street; my spot is human connection. That’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Check out my podcast too! Wake The F*ck Up (Mindfulness-Based) on Spotify, Apple, and Soundcloud.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
HA! Success. What a befuddled concept. Growing up, I bought 100% into the American Dream. Do great in school, go to college, get an awesome job, make lots of money, get married, house, white picket fence equals success…equals happiness?
What I realized at 25 (thank goodness!) is that the only reason I had bought any of that is that somewhere in me, I believed that at the end of the success rainbow was a pot of happiness gold, and after 25 years of checking all the boxes and, quite frankly, being damn good at it, I found myself no happier than I had ever been at any other moment in my life. What I realized was that “success” was a confounded notion because none of us actually gives a shit about success. What we really want, what we deeply desire, is happiness.
What I would love to share now is that even that notion has evolved over the last 12 years. The idea that what we are searching for is happiness has evolved into desiring a life of contentment from which moments of unbridled passion, joy, and happiness naturally abound, and even in moments of difficulty, it’s rare that we find ourselves dissatisfied with life and living. From that experience, my view of what we all really want has deepened even more into an awareness of LOVE. When I look at the moments that define my life, the best moments of my entire life, what I find is that they are moments when I was AWASH with love. NOT when I was loved, but when I, myself, was overwhelmed, overflowing with love. Falling in love doesn’t have to be confined to a particular person but instead can be ubiquitous throughout the most mundane moments of living. When I look back at the moments of my life I cherish the most, it is always the soft and the subtle: the first hug when my son came out of his room in the morning, drinking my coffee sitting outside on the porch in the morning, cuddling with my pups, meaningful conversations with friends. It is holding myself with tenderness in my hardest moments and celebrating with presence and connection in the fleeting, beautiful ones.
Today, success truly means a life of love: of not rejecting ANYTHING, of staying heart-open and in love with as many experiences I can. Though being human means I get this wrong ALL the time, I can love even that. Every day is a success because every day is love, no matter what it contains.
Pricing:
- $200/hr 1-on-1 Mindfulness/Joy of Living Coaching
- $300 for 1 hr Mindfulness-Based Lunch-n-Learn
- $500 for 2 hr Mindfulness Based Business Seminar
- $1000 – $3000 for 1-4 day Mindfulness-Based Wellness & Resilience Training
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amindfulheartyoga.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petitetiff24/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanyandras24/
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/wtfupodcast
- Other: https://insighttimer.com/tiffanyandras
Image Credits
Jeff Kingsfield
