From Hot Rooms to Healing: Leaving Harmful Lineages and Finding Real Practice

Harmony Slater is a Spiritual Wellness Coach whose mission is to support spiritually-curious entrepreneurs with “science-backed woo” to create a deeply fulfilling life and a business they love.

She's a National Board Certified Health Coach, Certified in both Quantum Coaching and in the Mastery Coaching Methods. She's also Certified Ashtanga Yoga Teacher, one of less than 20 women in the world to hold this honour, after training in India for 15 years.

She began travelling to East Asia in 2002 to study Buddhism, after completing two degrees in Philosophy and Eastern Religious Studies. In 2004, I began a life-long love affair with India, spending the next 15 years living there for extended periods of time immerse in Yoga practice, Vipassana meditation, Ayurveda, and Philosophy.

For the past 20+ years Harmony's been focused on sharing these deeper teachings + practices of multidimensional wellness to support women around the world in eliminating midlife burnout + restoring joy, to create a life and wellness business that nourishes both their soul and bank account. She's taught workshops and retreats in over 30 different countries.

She’s the host of the Finding Harmony Podcast, an active Board Member for the non-profit organization Yoga Gives Back, and has been featured in two anthologies on yoga, pregnancy, and motherhood in: ‘Yoga Sadhana for Mothers’ and ‘Strength and Grace: A collection of Essays by Women of Ashtanga Yoga.’

I was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. My birth certificate listed my father’s race as “white” and my mother’s as “yellow.” Gotta love Texas.
At Mayde Creek High School, I graduated with honors, though by the end I was more interested in marijuana, psychedelics (especially the free ones growing in the nearby cow pastures), and avoiding athletics. I wasn’t flexible—every year I failed the sit-and-reach test, and I’d walk the mile in 15 minutes just to frustrate my PE coaches. I mention this because people often tell me they “can’t do yoga” since they’re not flexible. Neither was I when I started, and thank goodness I wasn’t on social media at the time or I might have believed the lie of what a yogi was “supposed” to look like.
In 1998, I graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio with a degree in biology. Not ready for more schooling, I joined the Student Conservation Association and spent a season protecting sea turtle nests on Cape Lookout National Seashore. That led to a paid role with the National Marine Fisheries Service, working alongside pound-net fishermen in North Carolina, tagging turtles and collecting samples. From there, I contracted with NOAA, monitoring bycatch on commercial vessels—shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico, longliners in Hawaii and the Northeast. For weeks at a time, I lived at sea, weighing, measuring, and recording both catch and bycatch.
After four years in fisheries and no more patience to watch amazing animals perish, I shifted into tourism. I started as a deckhand on a snorkel boat in Koʻolina, then earned my 100-ton US Coas… Read More