Amberly Kelley-Dotson is #MadeForKnoxville.
Amberly’s passion may have started with yoga, but it has grown deeper and wider to support whole self care.
Funding cuts, paired with the pandemic, caused Amberly’s job security to vanish in a matter of days. She recognized this loss as an opportunity to pursue a long-deferred dream, and began the process to share her passion for yoga therapy. After a couple years of working to achieve her certification, she was able to pair her passion with her lifetime of practical experience to start Amble Wellbeing. Now, she offers individualized care helping people to connect to their inner wisdom by tuning out the noise and paying attention to their own bodies.
“My goal is to help folks understand themselves better . . . so that they can listen to, reconnect with, and truly care for themselves.”
In Their Own Words…
I help folks connect with and understand their bodies, understand why they have pain patterns, and build a toolbox to improve self-care. I help them learn how to breathe and understand the connection of the nervous system with their body and their breath. I hold space for people to navigate the things that come up as they do self-inquiry and help them feel seen, heard and validated. My goal is to help folks understand themselves better (bodies, mind, emotions–whole self) so that they can listen to, reconnect with, and truly care for themselves. It’s difficult to do if you’re in chronic pain, if your mind is spiraling, or if your nervous system is dysregulated, so we use the tools passed on from therapeutic yoga to help people clear out the ‘stuff in the way’ to find what’s deep inside. To me, the whole point of yoga is to develop more awareness and then be kinder to yourself with the knowledge you’ve gained. That’s why we do everything we do. That’s the point of what all these practices are.
How it all started… As cliche as it sounds, the pandemic was my pivot, along with some changes that happened at my workplace. I had been taught from a very young age that I needed to grow up and work for someone else in order to be secure, and I bought into that for a long time. Then, in 2020, I was told that the funding for my job had been lost and that the only shift for me would come at a very dramatic pay cut. Two weeks later, the pandemic hit the US and everything changed. I knew that the sense of security I felt there was a false sense, as it had all been ripped from underneath me and I decided to finally pursue the thing that had helped me so much, Yoga Therapy. I enrolled back in school in the summer of 2020 and here we are!
What I’ve learned through entrepreneurship… Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. It’s really tricky when you’re first getting started to not work all the time, but we’ve GOT to make sure to take time for ourselves and our self-care or we’ll burn up before we can succeed!
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