MBA To Yoga Teacher To Therapist

The move from corporate work to yoga wasn't a clean break. Ateeka describes spending years with “one foot in two worlds”: changing out of her suit to teach yoga, changing back into it afterward, and returning to her corporate job while also raising a child.

One world felt grounding and fulfilling. The other had become dysregulating. Yet she continued moving between them for five or six years, leaving and returning because yoga couldn't provide the stability she wanted.

There was one experience from that period that Ateeka still remembers. A woman she was mentoring at work came with her to one of her yoga classes. After watching Ateeka teach, she told her, “That is your calling.”

For Ateeka, there was power in having another person witness what she was experiencing for herself.

As she tells me the story, I recognize the feeling immediately. There have been moments in my own life when someone has reflected something back to me that I already knew. Hearing another person say it can make the possibility more frightening because now you have to decide whether you're willing to take yourself seriously.

Yoga led Ateeka to teach a credit course at the University of Maryland, where she taught yoga philosophy alongside the physical practice. As the class expanded to students and faculty across departments, she began noticing something her yoga training couldn't fully address: people were bringing their mental health into the room.

That realization eventually led to another major career change. At 50, Ateeka went back to school to become a therapist.

She found herself alongside other students entering second and third careers and describes the experience as one of the highest points of her life. She excelled academically, but she doesn't romanticize what it required. “Rough. Very rough.”

She was simultaneously doing her own emotional work, completing an unpaid internship, attending school, and leaving behind the career she'd already established.

Becoming a therapist also exposed something Ateeka hadn't expected. Because she was older and appeared capable, people often assumed she didn't need much help.

“I think being mature, you present, you've got it together,” she says. “But I think it made it hard at times to ask for help.”

That pattern extended well beyond graduate school. Ateeka had come to the United States on her own and learned early that there wasn't necessarily someone she could call when she needed money, a place to stay, or help figuring something out. Independence became both a skill and a way she moved through the world.

When support wasn't available, she figured it out herself.

Therapy opened another world for Ateeka: relational healing. She began recognizing how much of her own life had been shaped by things she'd never been taught about relationships—how we choose people, what we learn from our earliest relationships, and how partners can reflect parts of ourselves we struggle to see. Those discoveries now influence how she works with clients.

Ateeka describes herself as a relational therapist and a self-discloser. She may tell a couple that she has struggled with something similar in her own marriage. She remembers the names of clients' children and dogs and details they shared years earlier. When she's in Maryland, she may hike with clients or sit beside them outside a traditional therapy office.

“I see all of them,” she says.

That closeness still has boundaries. Ateeka is clear with clients that she isn't their friend and her practice isn't a crisis center. She sees the relationship itself as part of the work—a place where clients can experience being cared for while also seeing healthy limits modeled in real time.

And Ateeka isn't finished reinventing.

At 60, she's considering another expansion, including a property that could become a place for people to disconnect and reconnect with their lives. This time, she's paying attention to how her decisions affect her husband, the financial risks involved, and what she's learned from previous leaps.

When I ask what she would say to the six-year-old version of herself, after everything that has happened in between, her answer is simple: believe in yourself more.

Because even after an MBA, corporate America, yoga, graduate school, therapy, and the work she's building now, Ateeka is still doing what she's done across every chapter: taking the next step before she can know exactly where it will lead.