Mission Statement
Holistic Evolution Shala exists because I needed it first.
I spent most of my life not knowing why I felt the way I did. Why relationships fell apart no matter how hard I tried. Why I turned to alcohol for over twenty years just to get through the day. Why I felt powerful and capable in some areas of my life and completely lost in others.
The answer came at 39, when I learned that my mother had lived her entire life with borderline personality disorder — and that the chaos, instability, and emotional unpredictability I grew up around had shaped me in ways I was only beginning to understand. What I was experiencing had a name: Complex PTSD. And once I understood that, everything started to make sense.
But understanding wasn't enough. I had years of insight and I was still struggling. I needed something that actually changed how I showed up — in my relationships, in my body, in my daily life.
What changed everything was the combination of two things: Ashtanga yoga and DBT skills.
Yoga gave me a daily practice that reconnected me to my body and regulated my nervous system from the inside out. DBT gave me practical, learnable skills — real tools for managing emotions, communicating effectively, and showing up differently in the moments that used to break me. Neither one alone was enough. Together, they were everything.
I went from failed relationships, addiction, and feeling like I was barely surviving — to long-term sobriety and a relationship I once didn't believe was possible. Not because I became a different person. Because I finally had the tools to become the person I already was underneath all of it.
This is what Holistic Evolution Shala is built on.
I am drawn to the esoteric — the spiritual side of yoga, the deeper layers of practice. But what I care about most is practical application. Real tools. Real skills. Things you can actually do — today, this week, in the moment that's hard — to regulate your nervous system and change the behaviors that complex trauma creates.
This is not about more insight. Most of the women I work with already have plenty of insight. This is about closing the gap between knowing and doing — building the nervous system capacity to actually live differently, not just understand differently.
A huge part of that is structure. I believe healing happens when you build a life — a schedule, a rhythm, a daily rhythm — that makes space for the things that actually matter: your nervous system, your relationships, your body, your priorities. Healing isn't something that happens to you in a single session. It's something you build, one ritual, one day, at a time.
I know the depth of what complex trauma can create. I have lived inside it — the addiction, the broken relationships, the years of not understanding why I couldn't just "get better" no matter how much I wanted to.
And I also know the tools that work. I have used them to rebuild my own life from the ground up.
I created Holistic Evolution Shala to share those tools — Regulation-Based Ashtanga™, the Daily C.A.L.M. Practice™, and the integration of yoga and DBT — with every woman who is ready to stop just understanding her patterns, and start training her way out of them.
You are not broken. You are not too much. You are simply carrying a nervous system that was never given the tools it needed.
I have those tools. And I want to share them with you.
Mandi
Mandi Gardner — Founder of Holistic Evolution Shala and Author of RISING: A Woman’s Journey of Healing Through
“I don't teach women how to communicate better. I train them to stay with themselves when it matters most.”
You are not broken. You are under-trained for emotional intensity.
Mandi Gardner is a relational nervous system trainer and Regulation-Based Ashtanga™ teacher — a discipline for women who are done losing themselves in the conversations that matter most.
WHO MANDI IS
This is not a drop-in yoga studio. And Mandi is not a wellness influencer.
She is a nervous system trainer — one who has spent over two decades on the mat, twenty years working closely with women in an intimate service profession, and years integrating the science of trauma, DBT-based mindfulness and interpersonal effectiveness, and the traditional discipline of Ashtanga yoga into a single, teachable method.
Her work begins with one truth: insight does not override activation. Understanding your patterns is not the same as being able to stay steady inside them. Mandi trains the gap between knowing and doing — in real time, under relational pressure, in the moments that count.
ABOUT THE METHOD
Mandi began her yoga practice over twenty years ago. In February 2018, she dedicated herself to Ashtanga — and everything changed.
Where other yoga styles offered her calm, Ashtanga offered her capacity. The self-led Mysore method — practiced in silence, from memory, in daily repetition — trains something no class setting can replicate: the ability to stay with yourself when no one is guiding you. That is exactly what breaks down in hard conversations.
From that recognition, Regulation-Based Ashtanga™ was born. It is not yoga for flexibility. It is not somatic exploration without structure. It is daily nervous system discipline applied to the moments that shape your relational life — structured around the C.A.L.M. framework and integrated with DBT-based mindfulness and interpersonal effectiveness skills.
Body. Behavior. Identity. In that order. Every day.
YOGA EDUCATION & LINEAGE
Ashtanga Lineage. DBT-Based Skills Training. Built for Real Conversations.
Ashtanga is a living tradition. It is not learned from a book or a weekend intensive. It is passed from teacher to student — directly, devotedly, over years. Mandi honors that lineage with care.
Mandi completed her RYS-500 hour teacher training through Be Joy Yoga School (2014), with a focus on Hatha, Vinyasa, Restorative yoga, and Anatomy — building the foundation that underpins all of her teaching.
She completed her RYS-200 hour teacher training through YogaLife at The Front Climbing Club (2022), with dedicated study in Ashtanga Mysore style, Vinyasa, Yin, Restorative yoga, and Ayurvedic Medicine.
Her Ashtanga lineage began with Sarah Jane of The Front Climbing Club in Salt Lake City, Utah — the teacher who first introduced Mandi to Mysore style practice. Sarah Jane guided Mandi's practice for over a decade, offering the kind of patient, long-form mentorship that this tradition demands and deserves.
When Mandi began teaching Ashtanga, she sought a teacher to deepen her knowledge and experience as a teacher. Since the summer of 2025, she has been studying under Angela Jamison — a teacher with over thirty years of experience who has traveled to India many times to study the practice yoga in its homeland. Angela's depth, precision, and devotion to the traditional method are woven into everything Mandi brings to her students.
This is not a yoga certification Mandi completed over a weekend. This is a lineage she has been living inside for years.
When Mandi discovered that her mother struggles with Emotional Dysregulation Disorder (also known as borderline personality disorder) in 2020 she learned from, was trained by and volunteered for the Family Connections program of the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder (NEABPD). The mindfulness and interpersonal effectiveness skills were so impactful in her ability to be successful in relationship that she now shares them with women who can benefit from the knowledge and couples it with tradition yogic practices.
Practice with Mandi here —>
THE BOOK: RISING
RISING: A Woman's Journey of Healing Through Rituals is Mandi's debut book — a deeply personal account of rebuilding identity, reclaiming self-trust, and discovering that the path back to yourself is not found through willpower or insight alone. It is built through ritual. Through repetition. Through the quiet act of showing up to your practice even when — especially when — everything feels uncertain.
RISING is for the woman who has done the therapy, read the books, and still finds herself collapsing in the moments that matter. It is both story and invitation: to stop waiting to feel better, and to start training steadiness from the inside out.
Read the story. Then train the method. (Click the book cover for link to purchase.)
HOLISTIC EVOLUTION SHALA — IN-PERSON PRACTICE
An Ashtanga yoga shala (gathering place) is coming to Herriman, Utah.
Holistic Evolution Shala will soon open its doors as an in-person Mysore-style Ashtanga shala — a quiet, devoted space for serious practitioners who are ready to train the way the tradition intended: self-led, in silence, in daily repetition.
This is not a drop-in studio. It is not a fitness class. It is a place where practice becomes daily grounding — and where the steadiness you build on the mat becomes the steadiness you carry into every relationship in your life.
More details to be announced. If you'd like to be the first to know, join the list below.
WHY THIS WORK
For twenty years, Mandi sat across from women — first as a hairstylist, then as a yoga teacher — and heard the same quiet frustration, said a hundred different ways: I know better. Why can't I do better in the moment?
The answer was never more insight. It was never a better script or a different communication strategy. It was always the same thing: a nervous system that hadn't been trained to stay.
That is what Mandi teaches. That is what Regulation-Based Ashtanga™ is. And that is what Holistic Evolution Shala exists to offer — to every woman who is ready to stop collapsing and start training.
Stay connected. Without collapsing.
CREDENTIALSRYS-500, Be Joy Yoga School
RYS-200, YogaLife at The Front Climbing Club — Ashtanga Mysore, Vinyasa, Yin, Anatomy, Ayurvedic Medicine
Ashtanga Student of Sarah Jane, The Front SLC — 10+ years
Ashtanga Student of Angela Jamison — who has 30+ years experience, traditional lineage from Mysore, India
Trauma-Informed Yoga Educator
Founder, Regulation-Based Ashtanga™
Author, RISING: A Woman's Journey of Healing Through Rituals
Founder & Director, Holistic Evolution Shala
Current Teaching: Tuesday’s 6am Zoom Yoga Ashtanga Foundations