Float Suspension Yoga

In 2011, Amber Gotzmeister was looking for something more fun than the intense and regimented yoga style she was used to teaching when she saw peculiar-looking coloured straps hanging from the ceiling of a Toronto fitness studio.

“The woman teaching the class told me it was something they were calling Aerial Yoga. It was a sling that hangs from the ceiling and you do different yoga movements called suspended inversions using this sling,” she recalls.

Intrigued, Amber decided to give it a try — never dreaming the experience would leave her so raw, so vulnerable and so emotionally naked that it would put her on the road to not only mastering the art, but teaching it herself.

“I hung upside down for the first time and I freaked out. It was the most intense experience I'd ever had,” she remembers.

Though she'd always been incredibly flexible, and yoga poses always came naturally, as a child Amber was never comfortable doing cartwheels or any kind of gymnastics, so hanging upside down with nothing but a sling holding her was her worst fear.

“It was unbelievable the feelings that poured out of me,” she says. “Just letting go of this lifelong fear and an entire life of avoiding being upside down.”

Determined to conquer her worst nightmare, she hung in that sling over and over again until the thought of being upside down sounded like fun. But it wasn't just her mind that had transformed; her body had too.

“I was noticing that I wasn't having the same back and neck muscle spasms that I normally got from repetitive work injuries. I was pain-free for the first time in a really long time, so I decided to take the teacher training and open my own practice.”