Joleen Emery
Joleen Emery
E-RYT500
Joleen Emery E-RYT200 is the founder of Big Raven Yoga. She is a compassionate teacher and artistic visionary who is living each day with calm – but not quiet – determination. She has been a practitioner of yoga for 17 years and a yoga teacher for 8.
Big Raven Yoga is doing things differently as-a-result of the arduous journey of its founder and CEO, Joleen Emery. In the fall of 2016, Joleen was involved in a terrible bicycle accident that would alter the course of her life - and business - forever. He leg was so severely broken that it required 4 surgeries, 2 skin-grafts, 2 metal plates attached to her bones and 14 screws to put her back together. But, that was just the beginning.
It was during the 9 months of grueling recovery that followed that Joleen realized just how much her yoga practice was a part of her identity. While progressing from wheelchair to walker to crutches, her desire to regain use of her body became a tremendous motivation to heal, so she could ultimately return to her yoga mat.
When she was, finally, able to bring her beloved yoga mat out of storage and return to her practice Joleen faced another type of challenge…heartbreak. Her well-worn, beloved yoga mat that had been with her through thousands of sun salutations and chaturangas and held her mark in the subtle imprints her feet and hands had made over time was mistakenly picked up by a fellow yogi never to be found again. It felt to Joleen as though a part of her - her personal yoga-history - was lost.
Inspired both by the loss of her mat and by the words of the Bhagavad Gita, “Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self”, the idea for Big Raven Yoga was born. Joleen’s passion became creating beautiful, inspirational mats with customized, original artwork. Yoga mats as exquisite and unique as the person on it, a true reflection of self.
Big Raven Yoga mats both inspire and serve their owner with the cushion of a natural rubber base with the grip and absorption of a microfiber top. Big Raven Yoga mats are washable and will become a constant companion and partner in your practice
