About Me
My name is Lewy Finnegan, I’m 29 years old, a professional bodyboarder and a certified Yoga, Pilates and Breathwork Teacher from Perth, Western Australia. My life has taken many turns to eventually lead me to teach Yoga and here’s how it came about.
In my teenage years I was partying a bit too much, not eating a particularly healthy diet, throwing myself into dangerous slabs and launching big airs, determined to be both a professional bodyboarder and a rock star. At the age of 16 I broke my back bodyboarding which left me bed ridden for 3 months. The 3 months I spent lying in bed feeling sorry for myself also gave me a lot of time to think about life stuff and I realised that I wanted to be a professional bodyboarder more than anything. I figured out that if i wanted to give myself the best chance of achieving this goal, I needed to become an athlete. Fit, strong and flexible. I knew I had a huge journey ahead of me to achieve the level of health and fitness that i wanted to reach and i was occasionally questioning how willing i was to get there. Once I (kind of) recovered from my broken back I just fell back into the old routine, with an occasional home workout when i felt like it, but nothing changed drastically.
Over the next few years I sustained many other injuries including a suspected broken neck, dislocations, cuts, stitches, all due to my reckless approach to achieving my dream of becoming a professional bodyboarder. By the age of 18, after all these injuries, i was living in constant pain. I couldn’t hang my head down without a searing pain in the back of my neck, i couldn’t touch my toes unless i wanted to feel like my hamstrings were tearing apart. sitting still made me anxious yet i couldn’t even run 5km without feeling like i might actually die. I needed change. I wouldn’t give up on my dream of being a professional bodyboarder but i was in so much pain from my neck injury that I couldn’t actually bodyboard.
So I tried Yoga. I went to a class in a gym with a bunch of older people and i didn’t like it. It was slow, boring and easy and the best part of it was when it ended so i could leave. I didn’t try Yoga again for a while but continued to stretch at home on the carpet in my living room. Within a few months I was becoming a bit more flexible and the pain in my body was easing.
It was about 6 months after i tried my first Yoga class that one of my close friends dragged me, almost literally, to a popular Yoga studio near my house. I practised a 60 minute hot Vinyasa class and it was one of the most physically challenging things i’d ever tried. I pushed myself and followed the teacher’s words, stayed connected to my breath and willed myself on through the class even though my mind was telling me to rest, and by the time i lay down into Savasana i was toasted. But i felt so calm, so light, so content and i felt like i was floating for the rest of the night. I signed up at the studio that day and started practising Hot Vinyasa about 2-4 times every week.
Yoga initially taught me the importance of being connected to the present moment. I learned how to breathe properly and move mindfully. I learned how to observe my thoughts and emotions without reacting and attaching to them. I realised the limitations in my body and began expanding them every time that i stepped on my mat. I began connecting every aspect of my being and channeled this focus into becoming the person that i wanted to be.
After 2 years of practising Yoga i felt incredible. My body felt light and free, my mind calm, i had an abundance of energy, and i was completely pain-free. My bodyboarding career was also going really well and i was competing on the world tour. Yoga had become a way of life for me, rather than something i did on a mat for an hour a day and as my love and passion for Yoga grew so did my eagerness to complete a teacher training so that i could share this path to better living with others.
I completed my first month of Yoga Teacher Training in India, the birthplace of Yoga, and came back feeling like a completely different person. I learned so much about Yoga and about myself, it was like waking up into a higher level of consciousness that i had never experienced in my life. Flowers were now glowing, riding a wave was magical, eating food was sacred, life was so incredibly special. And i felt as fit as i’d ever been.
Fast forward 3 years and i’m now the person that i envisioned becoming when i first started out on the Yogic path. I’m happy, i’m balanced. Oh, and i’m a professional bodyboarder. People say i’m lucky because i’m living my dream. I definitely do feel lucky, but this life of mine didn’t just fall into my lap. I’ve been striving to become a better bodyboarder for 13 years and Yoga was the tool that helped to make a clear path for me to reach my goal.
This website is simply and naturally the next step for me in my life’s journey. I’ve created it to share the knowledge that i’ve learned through my own experience of years of studying, practising and teaching yoga so that you can become the person you’ve always wanted to be and achieve your dreams and aspirations in life. This knowledge has enabled me to develop and maintain an elite level of fitness without any need for gym equipment, a calm mind in an era of global anxiety, an abundance of energy without relying on coffee and other stimulants to keep me going, a pain-free body without taking pills, and, most importantly, a balanced lifestyle.