Photography by Donovan Roberts Witmer
To this year’s Good Women, “balance” isn’t a buzzword. It’s the state they strive for on the road to happiness. Each has followed her own path, heeding the urge to share her passion and, in doing so, impacting countless lives. Each has turned her voice into a tool for empowerment.
“I have so many stories about times when I could have said, ‘You’re right. It’s not going to work,’ but it’s about staying true to something that’s telling you to do something,” says Leigh Hurst, founder of Feel Your Boobies. “It can be about any passion that drives you.”
Lisa Taylor
York and Lancaster | Founder, Evolution Power Yoga, and founding board member, Africa Yoga Project
Through yoga, Lisa Taylor has seen people lose weight, get divorced, get married, leave jobs they hate and start businesses they love. One of her yoga teachers broke free from 10 years of anorexia.
“I know we do yoga,” she says, “but we do personal transformation and community building, and yoga is sort of a side thing that makes it all happen.”
Taylor is the founder of Evolution Power Yoga, with studios in York and Lancaster (www.evolutionpoweryoga.com). Yoga took Taylor on her own journey of transformation, and today, her studios are centers of self-love and connectedness. The impact radiates from the White Rose and Red Rose cities all the way to Africa.
As a child, Taylor was painfully shy. As a young woman, she continued her reticent ways behind the shelter of musician husband Chad Taylor, from the band Live. She was happy in that space, traveling the world and meeting people, “but it was really easy to not make myself uncomfortable. I really didn’t challenge myself.”
The transformation began after the first of the Taylors’ three daughters was born. Lisa Taylor gave up traveling, delved into yoga and “just kind of fell into going to a teacher training.”
“I was curious about more, and the next step in more is sharing it with other people,” she says. She began an association with renowned yogi Baron Baptiste that continues to this day. The physical practice of yoga frees the mind to shed its constraints, Taylor says.
“Yoga is a practice. It’s not about the finish line. It’s where I am right now. Who am I being right now in the world? Is that in balance for me? Am I stepping out? Am I connecting? Am I taking care of myself? Am I replenishing and restoring myself? It’s moment by moment, checking in, creating balance.”
Evolution Power Yoga’s year-round empowerment events include this fall’s Love Your Selfie – No Edits series focusing on positive body image. Every January begins Baptiste’s 40 Days to a Personal Revolution, when students experience meditation, yoga and diet modification as tools for becoming “as much as they can be in the world,” says Taylor.
“Sure, it’s great exercise. You can come just for that. But watch out. You don’t know what will happen after that.”
Taylor is also a founding board member of Africa Yoga Project, training Africans to teach yoga in their communities. Taylor mentors a teacher named Patrick who escaped life in one of the world’s biggest slums. But even when Patrick seemed to be succeeding, he fell into hopelessness, fearing he had reached the limits of achievement. As Taylor puts it, “He got to the edge of his ability to dream.”
With encouragement, Patrick learned to dream big, and he’s now leading a team to establish Africa Yoga Project in Ghana. His experience “is true about everybody,” says Taylor.
“It’s true about having a teacher. It’s true about having a mentor. It’s true about why we need to be connected as human beings, because we are capable of so much more than we sometimes realize. What it takes is another person to help us learn to dream a bigger dream.”
Carrie Johnson
Lancaster | Founder, Girls on the Run of Lancaster
Carrie Johnson’s older daughter was upset when a classmate called her names. During the mother-daughter talk that followed, the then-fourth-grader asked why she and her sister couldn’t join her mom’s Saturday-morning runs with friends. “You always come home in a good mood,” she told her mom, "while we wait for our weekend to start.”
“I would’ve been deaf to not hear what she was saying,” Johnson recalls. “She was seeing the peace I get from exercise, the social peace and the confidence and how great I felt afterwards.”
At the time, Johnson loved her corporate job as a development director so much that she was “feeling out of balance.” With husband Kerry, the family began doing more outdoor activities together. Soon, the girls entered a half-mile run for kids. Each won a ribbon, and each experienced the glow of setting a goal and achieving it.
That is how Johnson learned about Girls on the Run.
“That day, I went and Googled ‘girls and self-esteem and running,’ and guess what came back?” Johnson said.
The nonprofit Girls on the Run, founded in 1996, mixes character lessons with 5K training for girls in grades three through eight. When Johnson learned about it, Lancaster County had no chapter. She used her business contacts to secure Lancaster General Health’s sponsorship and underwent a stringent application process.
The chapter (www.gotrlancaster.org) launched in September 2009 with two teams totaling 25 girls. Since then, Girls on the Run Lancaster has served 4,650 girls. Girls on the Run grew quickly because “everyone wants to be part of something positive,” Johnson says. Devoted volunteers coach teams twice a week for 10 weeks, run as running buddies, or help operate the culminating, celebratory 5K.
While they train, girls follow a fun curriculum that teaches about self-esteem, healthy living, fighting back against society’s focus on external beauty and rejecting peer pressure. Sessions give girls the tools to speak out against negativity, sharing “the words and language to use from a very young age to feel powerful,” Johnson says. They learn confidence, “the most important trait” to succeed in a changing world.
“With confidence, you take risks, find your voice, radiate power,” Johnson says. “You make mistakes and learn from them.”
With an “awesome board” contributing talents and ideas, Girls on the Run continues progressing, Johnson says. Girls on the Run has given Johnson’s own daughters, now 15 and 17, and all other participants “the time and space to really spread their wings and be truly who they are and authentic, and then carry that forward through their relationships.”
Johnson herself has learned “not to worry so much if my hair isn’t perfect, because that’s not what’s important.”
“It has reinforced some of the values I was raised with and made them more part of my everyday life. Let’s invest in our young people. My whole mission in life is to leave a legacy and to leave good things behind. That’s what Girls on the Run allows us to do.”
Leigh Hurst
Middletown | Founder, Feel Your Boobies
By the time she left big-city life and returned to her hometown, Leigh Hurst had felt the lump in her breast. Her doctors had said it was nothing to worry about.
Back home in Middletown, a doctor finally took the lump seriously, and she was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. Hurst was 33 years old, with no family history of breast cancer. The coincidence of moving back home before the diagnosis, not in crisis but by her own choice, “was almost like fate,” she says now. “I was very rooted in the community and had a lot of support.”
Life took a few more turns. Hurst married. She had babies at age 40 and 42. She divorced. And she saw an idea for a T-shirt printed with “Feel Your Boobies” burgeon into the Feel Your Boobies Foundation, a nonprofit national movement celebrating its tenth year anniversary alerting young women to the message she had ignored for too long (www.feelyourboobies.com).
Hurst got the idea for Feel Your Boobies soon after her 2004 diagnosis. Relying on her corporate experience in e-learning and change management, she took “a funny thing I was saying” and had it printed on 100 T-shirts. She sold the shirts through a one-page website. Her parents, Anne and Jim Hurst, helped pack and mail the orders. Within eight weeks, she needed to order more. By the end of the year, sales generated $10,000 that was donated to breast cancer causes.
After chemotherapy and radiation, Hurst fell into depression, despairing over the continued corporate work that blocked her from achieving simplicity. She took time off from work and began to realize that Feel Your Boobies filled a niche, sending unconventional breast-health messages to young women not interested in lectures.
“We were getting people’s attention in a different way,” she says. “We weren’t promoting breast health in a clinical, serious way.”
Through trial and error, including an online car magnet offering that crashed a Yahoo! server, Hurst created a campaign that now has 395,000 Facebook followers. As its slogan says, Feel Your Boobies offers “A friendly reminder when you least expect it.” The message wraps around a car called the “Boobies Bus,” and it’s on car magnets free to anyone who wants to take one from the sides of the vehicle. It comes from a flash mob in New York. It’s on banners flying over beaches packed with summertime shore-goers.
If the message makes a young woman laugh and text friends about it, then it has “intersected with her life, but in a fun way,” Hurst says. “It’s not supposed to feel like a task. It’s not supposed to come from your mom. It’s supposed to come from a friend.”
Hurst spends her days caring for her sons, Eli, 3, and Leo, 2, and relishing the creative give-and-take of Feel Your Boobies that has rejuvenated her entrepreneurial spirit. Now in its tenth year, the campaign “isn’t just about breast cancer,” she says. It’s about “following the path that has come into your life.”
“It’s about how one voice can make a difference. It can just mean following your voice, taking something bad and making it good.”
