3 Atlanta Teachers Bring the World Home
Sep 01, 2025 06:00AM ● By Patricia Schmidt
“Sava” Savaneli serves gong fu tea to Ilona Moore, Katrina Carmichael and Octavia Nasr. (Photo: Jason Dennard)
Yoga and travel have always been linked; historical texts are replete with stories of yogic pilgrimages for study and worship. Contemporary yoga cultures draw on this tradition, and Atlanta is no exception. Many yoga studios in the city offer some kind of travel or retreat experience for their students—whether shorter immersions or much longer periods away—and Atlanta’s beloved yoga teachers act as travel guides. Before they can serve in that capacity, though, these teachers travel themselves. They nourish their own practices by returning regularly to areas related to yoga origins: India, Tibet, Nepal. They deepen their personal knowledge and bring experiences of travel back to their communities, ranging from specific breath and movement practices to more subtle energy work. Whether they travel with students again or share their experiences as they teach in studio, they and the Atlanta community are deeply shaped and enriched by their excursions.
“There is a kind of magicness about going far away and coming back all changed.” Kate Douglas Wiggin, children’s author
Owner of Peachtree Yoga Studio in Sandy Springs, Ilona Moore is an experienced teacher who also runs yoga teacher trainings and workshops. While she identifies Atlanta as her home, Moore has roots in Russia and has traveled around the world, including Asia and South America. Her most recent travels took her to Tibet, but she has also spent a great deal of time in India. Moore feels her travels offer a personal experience relating to her own energy and deeper spiritual studies; this is her primary reason for travel. To her, yoga travel is first a personal experience—she immerses herself, rather than leading others on retreat.
Moore recognizes that travel can’t be for everyone. It’s not essential to having a well-developed practice or being an authentic yoga student, she feels. But she notes that for many, it feels meaningful to be immersed in cultures that have “deep spiritual roots—that have traditions that take us deeper within.” When asked about what she gets from her own ability to make so many trips abroad, Moore shares, “I guess I am changing. Travel changes my energy field.”
Octavia Nasr, another seasoned and influential teacher in Atlanta, also experiences her yoga-related travel as a personal journey first, which she feels she can then offer as something more collective when she returns home to Atlanta. She grew up in Lebanon and often imagined travelling. When she was able to, it became a lifeline to a larger world, and she became a news reporter for a major television network. Yoga was her travel companion. “It was 2003, the height of the ‘War on Terror,’ and yoga came to save me from the ugliness. It supported me; it was my medicine; it was my center; it was my North Star.” Nasr frequently travels to India and elsewhere around the world, and it feels “like renewal; like filling the cup.” Her most recent trip took her to Bosnia and Croatia, and she’s planning another trip to her ashram base in Rishikesh, India, this year.
A co-owner of Giving Tree Yoga in Smyrna, Karina Carmichael is a native of Scotland and a relatively recent transplant to Atlanta. Like Moore and Nasr, Carmichael makes personal pilgrimages to India, in particular, and then also leads students on retreat to areas in South America and the Caribbean. When she first started traveling to India, she went three years in a row with her guru, studying mantra and meditation in particular—more than just the physical postures of yoga. “I travel to remind myself where yoga came from, she says, “and when I’m at the Ganges or in Nepal or the Himalayas—all these beautiful mountains—it’s raw. It’s about the source.”
“Your practice is not complete until you give it [away],” Nasr’s teacher told her, and she, Carmichael and Moore all demonstrate that principle. As their yoga travels nourish them, they come back to Atlanta to pass on their knowledge and travel experiences and to be of service to others.
“You can’t just contain all this knowledge and experience within yourself,” says Moore. “As soon as I learn something, I feel the need to share it with people. When I come back home, I start sharing whatever I learned and experienced with my students.”
Carmichael’s commitment to traveling to India and to nourishing her practice is all about being a yoga student. Her initial travel was “mainly going to see all the spiritual places and really getting soaked into the roots of where yoga evolved from. It was a promise I made to my teachers,” she continues, “that the roots—the history of yoga—be kept alive.” Now, as a teacher herself, she asks the same thing of her own students—that they commit to the full breadth of yoga traditions and not just the postures, and that it be active, intentional work. “That’s our job as yoga teachers: to spread the mantras, the meditations, the pranayama.” In turn, she hopes her students will do the same.
Nasr sees herself as both storyteller and space-holder when she returns from time away. “When you travel, you’re collecting stories and experiences to share. For me, storytelling is natural, and traveling is oxygen for that. It gives you the fuel.” As she travels, she “receives” the teaching of the cultural immersion. It’s “not just me meditating by a river, under a tree, at the top of a mountain,” she says. It might take the form of postural yoga, “but more often, it’s a conversation, a book, a meal, a gesture. That’s what yoga is. Yoga is not just going to a studio and practicing—and I think that really informs my travel, which then informs my teaching. When I come back, I’m richer.”
This past June, Moore taught a summer solstice event, and the energy work she experienced on her travels served as a starting point for the spiritual enrichment to her students. “I had a slideshow telling people about my travels to Peru, to India, to Tibet. And after that, I gave them a very simple but powerful practice to take home to help them start experiencing the energy within themselves.”
A student’s inner energy is key to their practice, she explains, and it can be encouraged through sharing her personal experience of inner energies. For example, when she comes into a ritual with Ganesha in an Indian ashram, she finds that tapping into her first chakra and her pelvic energy helps make it meaningful. “Just performing a ritual in a foreign place doesn’t really give that. If I want that ritual to have some kind of impact, I need to tap into the energy of Ganesha within myself.” This knowledge and deeper practice are what Moore hopes to impart to her students.
“The first time I went to India,” she says, “I was introduced to a school that was in trouble—it was closing down. And that’s where my yearly festival came in, because I started using my yoga: we raised money to buy new land, and we sponsored some of the children there.” She asked her students traveling on retreat with her to make this service a part of their practice, too. “Yoga students who had travelled to India had a picture of themselves with their sponsor child, and they helped the child attend school, get fed and get the bus. Some of these students came two or three times with me to India and really felt connected.” Through her annual festival, Carmichael can continue to raise resources and support for the school in India, where she served originally, as well as local communities here in Atlanta.
Nasr’s first travel mementos were sound recordings of her teacher’s Vedic chanting. They were her first souvenirs from India, and for two years, she immersed herself in the sound. “Every single day on the way to work and on the way back from work, I would be chanting with those CDs in my car. So it was learning Vedic chanting that was my gateway to yoga.” She now passes that mantra practice on to her students during regularly held satsang—sacred gatherings—and monthly workshops. “Every month, we start with loosening the joints, a lot of yin yoga, then a yoga nidra, and at the end, I chant the shlokas not just once, which is eight verses. I chant it 10 times. So that’s 80 verses.” From the richness of Nasr’s own initial travels and her first mantra practices, her students now receive the opportunity to walk through the same gate to find their paths to deeper yoga practice.
Moore likes to take photographs of her travels and, while she’s traveling, share them through slideshows and social media to engage her home community. “People always ask me about the travels, and when I travel, I usually make posts so they can observe and see what’s happening.” When she returns to Atlanta, she shares her images of travel and yoga, which, like the marble Nandi, serve to open conversations around the depth of one’s practice and the non-postural aspects of yoga. They also function as invitations to local students to widen their own inquiry.
But beyond physical keepsakes, energy is the most potent of souvenirs. All three of these yoga teachers feel that the energy of the travelled space comes back with them to Atlanta, deep within their identity as teachers, storytellers, servants and space holders. “Sometimes you don’t have to say anything—you can impart richness and expansion, love and compassion and humanity without opening your mouth,” says Nasr. That expansion has depth as well. “There is an expansion in who I am. I come back a richer person, not in money, not in title, not in belongings. Just richer in humanity.”
Moore elaborates on this idea. “When we have a practice together, be it a meditation, a breathing exercise or any kind of an energy practice, we get the full pie of that energy, as opposed to everybody having a little piece—carving it out, taking it home. We are exponentially becoming bigger.” ❧
Traveling for the Self
Octavia Nasr in Rishikesh, India.
(Photo: Jules Brunois)
Owner of Peachtree Yoga Studio in Sandy Springs, Ilona Moore is an experienced teacher who also runs yoga teacher trainings and workshops. While she identifies Atlanta as her home, Moore has roots in Russia and has traveled around the world, including Asia and South America. Her most recent travels took her to Tibet, but she has also spent a great deal of time in India. Moore feels her travels offer a personal experience relating to her own energy and deeper spiritual studies; this is her primary reason for travel. To her, yoga travel is first a personal experience—she immerses herself, rather than leading others on retreat.
Moore recognizes that travel can’t be for everyone. It’s not essential to having a well-developed practice or being an authentic yoga student, she feels. But she notes that for many, it feels meaningful to be immersed in cultures that have “deep spiritual roots—that have traditions that take us deeper within.” When asked about what she gets from her own ability to make so many trips abroad, Moore shares, “I guess I am changing. Travel changes my energy field.”
Octavia Nasr, another seasoned and influential teacher in Atlanta, also experiences her yoga-related travel as a personal journey first, which she feels she can then offer as something more collective when she returns home to Atlanta. She grew up in Lebanon and often imagined travelling. When she was able to, it became a lifeline to a larger world, and she became a news reporter for a major television network. Yoga was her travel companion. “It was 2003, the height of the ‘War on Terror,’ and yoga came to save me from the ugliness. It supported me; it was my medicine; it was my center; it was my North Star.” Nasr frequently travels to India and elsewhere around the world, and it feels “like renewal; like filling the cup.” Her most recent trip took her to Bosnia and Croatia, and she’s planning another trip to her ashram base in Rishikesh, India, this year.
A co-owner of Giving Tree Yoga in Smyrna, Karina Carmichael is a native of Scotland and a relatively recent transplant to Atlanta. Like Moore and Nasr, Carmichael makes personal pilgrimages to India, in particular, and then also leads students on retreat to areas in South America and the Caribbean. When she first started traveling to India, she went three years in a row with her guru, studying mantra and meditation in particular—more than just the physical postures of yoga. “I travel to remind myself where yoga came from, she says, “and when I’m at the Ganges or in Nepal or the Himalayas—all these beautiful mountains—it’s raw. It’s about the source.”
Traveling for Others
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta, medieval explorer“Your practice is not complete until you give it [away],” Nasr’s teacher told her, and she, Carmichael and Moore all demonstrate that principle. As their yoga travels nourish them, they come back to Atlanta to pass on their knowledge and travel experiences and to be of service to others.
“You can’t just contain all this knowledge and experience within yourself,” says Moore. “As soon as I learn something, I feel the need to share it with people. When I come back home, I start sharing whatever I learned and experienced with my students.”
Carmichael’s commitment to traveling to India and to nourishing her practice is all about being a yoga student. Her initial travel was “mainly going to see all the spiritual places and really getting soaked into the roots of where yoga evolved from. It was a promise I made to my teachers,” she continues, “that the roots—the history of yoga—be kept alive.” Now, as a teacher herself, she asks the same thing of her own students—that they commit to the full breadth of yoga traditions and not just the postures, and that it be active, intentional work. “That’s our job as yoga teachers: to spread the mantras, the meditations, the pranayama.” In turn, she hopes her students will do the same.
Nasr sees herself as both storyteller and space-holder when she returns from time away. “When you travel, you’re collecting stories and experiences to share. For me, storytelling is natural, and traveling is oxygen for that. It gives you the fuel.” As she travels, she “receives” the teaching of the cultural immersion. It’s “not just me meditating by a river, under a tree, at the top of a mountain,” she says. It might take the form of postural yoga, “but more often, it’s a conversation, a book, a meal, a gesture. That’s what yoga is. Yoga is not just going to a studio and practicing—and I think that really informs my travel, which then informs my teaching. When I come back, I’m richer.”
Carmichael emphasizes, too, that “escape is not the point. The point is to take what you see, what you feel, what you learn from places and then integrate that into your everyday life.” Moore concurs. “It’s all about the practical application. You have to experience it; you have to live it yourself.” At the end of anything she teaches,” she advises her students: “I want you to actually apply this in your life.”
Ilona Moore in Lhasa, Tibet.
A student’s inner energy is key to their practice, she explains, and it can be encouraged through sharing her personal experience of inner energies. For example, when she comes into a ritual with Ganesha in an Indian ashram, she finds that tapping into her first chakra and her pelvic energy helps make it meaningful. “Just performing a ritual in a foreign place doesn’t really give that. If I want that ritual to have some kind of impact, I need to tap into the energy of Ganesha within myself.” This knowledge and deeper practice are what Moore hopes to impart to her students.
Carmichael’s relationship to travel is linked in particular to service. Her initial experiences in India more than 20 years ago were filled with service to underprivileged school children. To bring that work home, she founded an annual fundraising festival, which she’s transplanted from Scotland to Smyrna in the form of the Giving Tree Yoga Fundraiser, which runs September 20 and 21.
More Than Souvenirs
Karina Carmichael in Nepal.
Photo: John Carmichael.
Like any tourists, yoga students traveling abroad can be tempted to purchase small objects as souvenirs of their experience—a dancing Shiva statue or a practice rug, for example. But Carmichael, Nasr and Moore call on yoga travelers to go beyond simply acquiring objects of travel in order to connect more meaningfully with aspects of their practice. For them, the artifacts of yoga travel can serve as powerful reminders of the embodied experience of yoga and help to enrich and widen their yoga practice and teaching.
In fact, during a regular cleaning of a portion of the Ganges river basin, Carmichael found an intact marble statue of a bull, Nandi, who is Shiva’s animal mount and integral to his iconography and worship. Nandi has many qualities, including devotion, youth, purity and justice, and he often stands in temples as a surrogate for Shiva, the first yogi, through shared iconography. With approval from her local contacts, the statue—and Carmichael’s story about the experience of wading into the wide river basin to retrieve it—now serve as a reminder for service and devotion and help initiate conversations about the depth of yoga teachings right here in Atlanta. “Standing in the Ganges, it reminds you again that yoga is so much more than what a lot of us in the West perceive it to be.”Nasr’s first travel mementos were sound recordings of her teacher’s Vedic chanting. They were her first souvenirs from India, and for two years, she immersed herself in the sound. “Every single day on the way to work and on the way back from work, I would be chanting with those CDs in my car. So it was learning Vedic chanting that was my gateway to yoga.” She now passes that mantra practice on to her students during regularly held satsang—sacred gatherings—and monthly workshops. “Every month, we start with loosening the joints, a lot of yin yoga, then a yoga nidra, and at the end, I chant the shlokas not just once, which is eight verses. I chant it 10 times. So that’s 80 verses.” From the richness of Nasr’s own initial travels and her first mantra practices, her students now receive the opportunity to walk through the same gate to find their paths to deeper yoga practice.
Moore likes to take photographs of her travels and, while she’s traveling, share them through slideshows and social media to engage her home community. “People always ask me about the travels, and when I travel, I usually make posts so they can observe and see what’s happening.” When she returns to Atlanta, she shares her images of travel and yoga, which, like the marble Nandi, serve to open conversations around the depth of one’s practice and the non-postural aspects of yoga. They also function as invitations to local students to widen their own inquiry.
But beyond physical keepsakes, energy is the most potent of souvenirs. All three of these yoga teachers feel that the energy of the travelled space comes back with them to Atlanta, deep within their identity as teachers, storytellers, servants and space holders. “Sometimes you don’t have to say anything—you can impart richness and expansion, love and compassion and humanity without opening your mouth,” says Nasr. That expansion has depth as well. “There is an expansion in who I am. I come back a richer person, not in money, not in title, not in belongings. Just richer in humanity.”
Moore elaborates on this idea. “When we have a practice together, be it a meditation, a breathing exercise or any kind of an energy practice, we get the full pie of that energy, as opposed to everybody having a little piece—carving it out, taking it home. We are exponentially becoming bigger.” ❧
Patricia Schmidt, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, YACEP, is a certified yoga therapist specializing in pelvic health, accessible yoga and yoga for cancer support. She is a Franklin Method trainer, Roll Model method teacher and somatic movement specialist. To learn more, visit PLSYoga.com.
