Meet Elizabeth House | Yoga & Barre Instructor and Intrinsic Core Reset Facilitator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Elizabeth House and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Elizabeth, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
I help people breathe easier.
I used to be super into politics (from the sidelines) reading daily about the growing division in our country and the odious ways people treat each other. One day, midway through yoga teacher training in 2014, I realized I don’t want to work *against* something, I want to work *for* something, and I knew in a flash what that something was.
It’s said that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather fear (or indifference). Already reliant on yoga as a tool to quell my own anxiety, I recognized that I have the potential to help people feel less afraid. I have the power – via yoga, breath work, and my lifelong love of teaching – to help people feel safe enough to open their minds and hearts, and to stand up for themselves and for others in need.
I have the honor of teaching a variety modalities and demographics, including but not limited to: freeing up students’ best posture, spinal mobility, and dance moves via energizing barre classes; helping private clients release breath dysfunction and chronic pain; guiding yin yoga, helping students release deeply held physical, mental, and emotional tension; teaching Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction to adults with developmental disabilities at Civitan’s social day program; training Life Time’s active aging population to breathe deeply and establish intrinsic core strength, improving balance and relieving low back pain; and teaching Yoga at Arizona State University, with an emphasis on embodiment, self empathy and stress reduction.
My belief and hope is that my work creates a ripple effect in our community, as we all learn to treat ourselves and each other with more patience, more tenderness, and less judgement.
Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Studying Forrest Yoga in Bali in 2018, a peer joked, “You can’t swing a cat without hitting a yoga teacher in this town.” It can feel the same way in Phoenix. What sets me apart is my background in Forrest Yoga (which has nothing to do with trees). Forrest Yoga (and my studies with Forrest Yoga Guardian, Jambo Dragon) ignited my awareness of the intrinsic core. That awareness led to the invention of the Intrinsic Core Reset work I facilitate for 1:1 clients and weave into my classes. A combination of Forrest Yoga, barre, yin yoga, and anatomy and body work trainings has taught me to use (and free up) the body to pump breath.
Forrest Yoga is a truly breath centered practice. In Forrest Yoga, we invite our exiled parts to uptake nourishment from each breath, leading to deep integration and release. Featuring longer held poses, self empathy, and intelligent core work, Forrest Yoga guides practitioners to ignite their spirit, center in personal power, and exist (and act) with integrity.
Working with diverse populations and modalities has taught me to bring an element of play to my classes, guiding students to embrace sacred curiosity. Curiosity calms the nervous system, allowing students to more freely access their innate intelligence, on and off the mat. One of my favorite after class compliments is students telling me they’re grateful for my encouragement to explore what feels best for them.
Another favorite compliment comes from barre students: “That was a really hard class! But so fun!” I relish planning and delivering classes that feel good, deepening breath capacity and ease, while improving posture and eccentric (reach) strength through what feels like dance.
My whole life, I’ve been told, “You’re such a good listener. I’ve never told anybody this,” and, “Wow!!!! That’s a really good question!!” In 2018, I doubled down on this super power; The Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (SWIHA)’s Transformational Life Coach Training taught me to be deeply present with others. This depth of presence enables me to ask transformative questions and hold space for clients to hear their own truths, thus empowering folks to rise to their full potential.
Through leveraging yoga to heal my own lifelong anxious breathing patterns, and thanks to illuminating anatomy & physiology and bodywork training with Jambo Dragon, I developed Intrinsic Core Resets. An Intrinsic Core Reset session releases dysfunction around a client’s diaphragm, reuniting client with their deep, easy, peaceful breath. You can think of it like releasing deep core knots, and waking up the muscles that (due to the knots) got locked long (unable to flex), freeing you up to be your empowered, intuitive, silky self.
Compensation patterns (which our body acquires to avoid pain and/or avoid energy expenditure) are typically felt as tension in the neck, jaw, and deep core, or as shallow anxious breathing. In Intrinsic Core Reset sessions, I partner with clients to release compensation patterns and intelligently strengthen their intrinsic core. Generally, one side of one’s core muscles – Transverse Abdominus, for example (our corset muscle) – is weaker, while the other side gets stronger and stronger, pulling the body and breath into imbalance. My work involves convincing the strong side to chill out, while strengthening the weaker side.
Intrinsic Core Reset can help release pain in the body. This includes pain that doesn’t even seem to have its root in dysfunctional breathing. Intrinsic Core Reset is a great help to athletic types, weekend warriors, moms (filling others’ cups before their own), and desk jockeys experiencing chronic pain. Intrinsic Core Reset is for anyone wanting to breathe easier and reduce stress. Read more about Intrinsic Core Resets on my website! I’d love to help you breathe more easily.
Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
So, I’m writing a book and am thus a bit of a homebody. I do love The Giving Tree on 7th Street for coffee, lunch, and good vibes. Both Sip Coffee locations are excellent as well. You can’t miss a Camelback hike (though I recommend going during the week when it’s less likely to be crowded), or opt for a stroll in Phoenix Mountain Preserve or South Mountain. ASU offers some really cool entrepreneurial events (including Authorpreneur events) through the Edson E+I Institute. Or catch a concert (and killer nachos) at Crescent Ballroom. Rhythm Room is another can’t miss venue. If you’re here on a Thursday, check out yoga in the park ~an hour before sunset at Papago Bark Park in Tempe. If you’re here for longer, take a college course or two in the healing arts at SWIHA. And come see me for a Barre class at Life Time Biltmore! Or come see me at Life Time Tempe or Camelback Village for a *much* slower paced yoga class.
The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Free Arts AZ! When I moved to Arizona from Boston in 2009, I started volunteering with Free Arts for Abused Children of Arizona. I joined up with Free Arts because I wanted to add meaning to my life. Also, I had been considering a career in teaching children but first needed to discern if I liked working with kids. Best decision of my life.
Through Free Arts, I was placed as a mentor in a group home, bringing weekly art projects to the children in residence. Free Arts taught me their Harvard-backed theory: resilience is cultivated through experiencing vulnerability while skill building amidst safe, supportive relationships. Providing children with the permission and encouragement to express themselves and experience a sense of agency through making a mark on this world via their art has been a deeply rewarding experience over the past 15 years. I now have the privilege of working for Free Arts as a Professional Teaching Artist, bringing my art of Yoga and Mindfulness to underserved youth.
Baked into Free Arts’ theory is the belief that everyone is an artist. In training, they teach, “If you go into a kindergarten class and ask, ‘Who here is a dancer (singer, painter, artist)?’ every child will shoot a hand (or two) in the air. Ask a roomful of adults, and a couple hands might go up. When and why do we lose that belief about ourselves?”
For years, working in finance while volunteering with Free Arts, I thought, “Yes, of course everyone is an artist! But not me!” Thankfully, after years of enthusiastically teaching and insisting to children of all ages that everyone is an artist, I finally opened to believing it about myself, too.
When I was a little girl, my favorite toy was a Fisher Price speaker with a microphone. I’d happily sing and chat into it, amplifying my voice for hours. At some point, I lost that confidence. Thanks to Free Arts bolstering my resilience, sense of self, and agency, when I recognized my passion and knack for helping people to breathe easier, freeing themselves from pain and limitations, I had to follow that path.
People, seeing yoga and finance as vastly different fields and ways of thinking, often express surprise that I left finance for yoga. To me, teaching yoga, barre, and mindfulness is, in a way, a continuation of the logical, systems thinking I earned with my Economics degree at Syracuse.
It is so rewarding to teach intelligently sequenced, trauma informed, high and low energy classes. I now find great fulfillment and intellectual stimulation in helping people transform their body, breath, and relationship to stress. I am so grateful to Free Arts for helping me reconnect to the courage to create.
Website: https://www.downdoganddirty.com
Instagram: @housiepants
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrilliantelizabethhouse
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DownDogAndDirty
Image Credits
Faces of Mitchell and Duck Book