Jessica Lizardo
Jessica first discovered her love for yoga and fitness in 2010 after training to be a classical cellist starting at the age of 5. She spent years and even her first year of college training at a conservatory of music in Manhattan, New York, and realized she wanted the experience of not just being the accompaniment to dancers on stage but to embody these movements herself. She came back to the Bay Area where she’d grown up in 2009, took her first yoga class and transferred those years of practice and dedication as a musician into becoming an avid yoga student. Eventually, she yearned for something more than just the physical practice of yoga and so became trained as a registered yoga teacher in 2012. And that was just the beginning. She discovered another exciting path to explore during her college career, which was her love for pilates. It is the way that these movement-based practices incorporate a form of art, healing and discipline that brings deeper awareness and strength, that led her to become a lifelong student of yoga and pilates. She has been teaching yoga since 2014 and became trained in the Power Pilates Mat series in 2019. She has taught classes at studios and community centers in Orange County, as well as a trauma-informed yoga series at her alma maters, the University of Southern California and UC Irvine and at a mental health facility in Burlingame. She has proudly been part of the Rise BodyWorks community since 2019 and carries the same trauma-informed lens and approach in her teaching through the use of language, modifications and safe exploration of exercises in one’s body. When she’s not teaching pilates or yoga, she is deepening her understanding and knowledge of both practices, exploring the greater outdoors and great music, and developing her clinical skills and working as a community-based psychotherapist for youth, with hopes of merging both practices to help others experience a sense of freedom and alignment in both body and mind.
