Miss Amanda is what the neighborhood kids called Amanda Anderson when she moved to New Orleans, Louisiana to get her MFA in fiction writing.  In New Orleans, Miss Amanda took her first yoga class in 1999 and found her way to Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, a demanding practice that forced her to practice regularly.  With this regularity, she began to reap yoga's benefits: weight loss, increased muscle tone, and a little less crazy-mind. 

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Miss Amanda returned to a crazy-mind city that needed yoga more than ever.  Since all the yoga studios were closed in her flood-ravaged Mid-City neighborhood, she began teaching her friends yoga out of her house.  The endeavor whetted her appetite for sharing her yoga practice with others, so in 2008, she did a Vinyasa Flow yoga teacher training in southern Italy with Frog Lotus Yoga International.  She came home to New Orleans to begin teaching professionally, where she branched out into teaching Restorative Yoga, gentle yoga, and beginner-level Ashtanga Yoga as well as hatha and vinyasa classes. 

In 2010, Miss Amanda's love of yoga took her on a six-month journey through India, where she sampled yoga from exotic traditions such as Tantra yoga, Tibetan yoga, and Kriya yoga while also intensifying her practice under the guidance of skilled yoga teachers in Rishikesh and Mysore.  She also studied Buddhist meditation at a ten-day silent retreat, attended a yoga philosophy course, and experienced Ayurvedic medicine at a family-run healing center in the south of India.  

Captivated by India, Miss Amanda has returned twice to connect with the warm-hearted people, to be in the spiritual culture, and to drink chai tea. During her trip in 2015, she earned a Level 1 Certification in Thai Yoga Massage from Padma Healing Arts in Kerala, India. She also spent time researching sites for a future India Yoga retreat, such as this 500-year-old ashram in Rajasthan: 

After her first trip to India, Amanda left New Orleans and moved to rural Barnard, Vermont in 2011 to write a memoir about her travels and the power of yoga in her life. Inspired by the beauty of the tranquil woods of Vermont, Miss Amanda began leading Yoga Hikes in 2013 as a way to share the blessings of doing yoga practice in nature. Her creative approach incorporates trees, rocks, logs, sticks and whatever else the woods has to offer to deepen the physical practice, and she leads these hikes in silence so participants can be present to the sights, sounds, and smells of the world around them. Students find this practice to be profoundly rewarding.

After eight years of teaching vinyasa flow yoga, Amanda wanted to focus more deeply on the energy body, so in the spring of 2017, she got certified to teach Kundalini Yoga from 7 Centers Yoga Arts in Sedona, AZ. After additional training in 2020, she received her 500-hour teaching certificate. Kundalini yoga, with its emphasis on internal awareness, has deepened her teaching into an invitation for her students to transform. Her own practice includes daily Kundalini poses and meditation, which make her unstoppable! Miss Amanda’s Thai Yoga Massage practice has also shifted, taking on a therapeutic focus after studying with the Coaching the Body program in Evanston, Illinois since 2017. In her bodywork, she now uses assisted therapeutic techniques and tools to help clients to heal themselves.

Miss Amanda still lives in Barnard, Vermont, with her husband Peter and his fifty+ bonsai trees. As she keeps learning, she continues to write her memoir and hopes to publish it before she dies. However - whether on a Yoga Hike, in a Kundalini class, on the Thai Yoga massage mat, or in her weekly inspirational emails, Miss Amanda’s mission remains the same—to inspire you to connect with your fundamental goodness and strength. Through the use of yogic techniques and philosophies, you too can come into a state of deep peace and lasting ananda, the Sanskrit word for bliss.