I have taken group and private yoga classes from Valucha for around 15 years. Of the people I know, she is among those I respect and admire most—both professionally and on a personal level. She is an incredibly gifted teacher, and a deeply knowledgeable one. Yoga is at the center of her life, and as a teacher and practitioner she is unparalleled. Despite her impressive experience and accomplishments in her field, she is very modest and fully focused on helping others. Valucha’s blend of profound understanding of yoga and sport injuries, and her rehabilitation skills, her insight and knowledge of the body, her qualities such as generosity, strength of spirit, and warmth and kindness all augment each other to make her an amazing teacher.
She is able to calibrate her teaching and approach to any sort of student, accurately and attentively sizing up their individual needs and situation, always recalculating what would benefit them most. I have seen her do wonders with the young and flexible, advanced or beginning students, injured athletes, couch potatoes, the middle aged and the elderly, children, you name it. Even with difficult, temperamental students she is helpful, perceptive, calm, unflappable, terrific.
In 2002 I tripped and broke my ankle. I had been taking yoga classes from Valucha for several years at that point. After 9 weeks in a cast, my ankle was “healed”. When I mentioned to the orthopedist removing my cast that I couldn’t move my ankle, as it had stiffened, having been immobilized for months, his response was “I don’t believe in rehab, you’re done.” Then he shooed me out of his office. I was left with little range of motion, and a very achy shaky ankle. Upset and unsure what to do, I turned to Valucha.
She helped me rehab my ankle completely. She put me on a program to regain strength and motion, which worked beautifully. Even though I was in my 40’s when I sustained the injury, not an age where people always completely recover from a broken bone, there is no trace of the injury today. She did a wonderful job and was patient, encouraging, cheerful, sensitive and supportive, as she always is.
Valucha has taught me so much about yoga, self-care, the body, and teaching as an art. (I am a writer and a professor in the English Dept. at the University of California Irvine, so I am around teachers of many stripes as part of my work. I recognize in Valucha a rare and intensely gifted master teacher.) She has astonishing talents for healing, teaching yoga, physiotherapy, rehabilitation etc. and is as lovely an humane a person as I have ever encountered. I truly bless the happy accident that sent me stumbling into that first class of hers.