About Terryl Jones
Early Life
As an Air Force “Brat”, I grew up moving every few years. My family traveled everywhere, from Sacramento to Alabama, from Arizona to the Philippines, where I went to high school. Every place we lived I took up sporting activities common to that location. I was blessed to learn water skiing from a competitive skier, reaching the point of being able to ride trick skis. In the Philippines, I learned scuba diving from a renowned Master that is recognized for creating the famous Cathedral, an underwater sanctuary. I ran cross county and was blessed to be part of the varsity team that became the Far East Champions. After returning stateside, I worked as a personal trainer, and then gravitated to ballroom dancing.
(Those of you that know my beloved hubby, the man that has built this website for me, will not be surprised to find that he likes to place Easter eggs around my site to crack me up. Here is one I found that he put here for me to find, I’m leaving it in because it is hilarious! “Terryl discovered her Lord and Master, Enio, and pledged her fealty to him forever because he is smarter than her and he is always right.” Ha Ha!
Champion Dancer & Teacher
Though I have been a world-renowned instructor for decades, I started my dance training as a lark, and it quickly became my focus. I spent several years focusing on my dance training. During this time I was honing my teaching skills along side my dance skills. I understood that being a good dancer didn’t translate to being a good teacher. All you have to do is look at sports to understand that great players are not always great coaches and vice versa.
My initial competitive success was in Ballroom, where I won or was a finalist in several major competitions. Later, with my husband, I won championships in Ballroom,
Swing, Salsa, and Cabaret. I have performed, lectured, and taught in over 20 countries from Sweden to China, Spain, Germany, Italy, the UK, and many more. I have taught Olympic Ice Dancers, prepared actors for dance roles, was the lead in a music video, trained professional dancers, and had many other awesome performance experiences, but along the way I realized that what I truly loved was teaching. And the people I most loved to teach, were beginners. I put as much focus in learning how to be a good teacher as I did in becoming a good dancer. Now, more so than my awards, I am most proud of my ability as a teacher to help beginners build the foundation they need to learn something they can enjoy.
Yoga Practitioner
Spine and hip issues run in my family, and competitive ballroom is brutally hard on the body. Pile that on top of injuries collected over years of various sports, I was “prematurely creaky”. After a horseback riding fall where I put a good sized hole in my hamstring, I decided to take up yoga. Not only was I in pain, but dear hubby was not too happy about me getting myself hurt – again. I wanted to do anything I could to speed up my recovery.
Figuring that stretching in a warm room would be nice and comfortable, I started with Bikram Yoga. Little did I know that it was a hard workout in a hot room! After
several years at that studio, I branched out and started taking classes from a variety of studios around the LA area. I combined my knowledge of dance and pilates to my yoga practice to understand my own body better and to facilitate my growth. I found some remarkable instructors who then started inviting me to join them in taking classes with their instructors, I was absorbing as much as I could. Many of my classes were taught by teachers of teachers, I was fortunate, I was able to ask questions, see the bigger picture, and understand the importance learning slowly and methodically.
Yoga was my selfish pursuit, something that I was doing only for myself. I was learning for me, for my enjoyment, for my health, and for my peace of mind. I also knew that when I practiced regularly, I had less pain, if I took too much time off, I hurt. It was simple, the physical issues could be managed by my own behavior. I knew that I was going to be doing yoga forever.
Certification
Multiple Yoga Certifications
My yoga had always been something personal for myself. After 25+ years of having a personal practice and being repeatedly asked to teach yoga, I decided to take the leap and train to transition from a practitioner of yoga to a teacher of yoga, though I will forever be a Student. I feel blessed to be able to bring 40+ years of teaching experience to one of my most favorite endeavors.
I started at the Yoga Shiva Shala, I then continued my training with YogaMu based in India. I am now both a RYT500 with Yoga Alliance and the World Yoga Federation. In addition, I am a Level Two Warrior At Ease Certified Instructor specializing in evidence-based techniques and trauma-informed protocols for teaching yoga and meditation.
Pilates Certification
I trained in Maria José Blom’s internationally acclaimed professional teachers program for my Pilates. The exceptional training I received from this remarkable woman, who won awards for her excellence in teaching of anatomy and kinesiology, improved my understanding of movement that I had learned as a professional dancer. She taught me to see my students through new eyes and gave me the tools to articulate the adjustments they needed to make to improve. She completely transformed my teaching. I took these new skills of teaching to all my classes, both dance and pilates. Movement teachers usually tell students ‘what’ to do, but I learned to help students with the ‘how’. Now these skills are being applied to my yoga classes.
(Who is Maria José Blom? Creator of SmartSpine® Wellness System, President of SomaSom, and former faculty member at Southern CA’s Loyola Marymount University)
Lifetime Achievement Award
My husband and I had been running a large dance studio for nearly two decades when we decided to expand. Our large classes had outgrown our studio, people were traveling from all over the world to take from us. We opened our Granada dance club/studio and ended up teaching thousands of dancers over the next 12 years. Learning to dance is more than learning ‘moves’, it is about learning respect. Respect for the music, the musicians, the dance, yourself, your body, your partner, the other people on the floor, and the community itself. This respect needs to be taught in a healthy environment. I was awarded this Lifetime Achievement Award at the the World Salsa Congress in 2004 for my contributions to the Latin dance community over the decades.
