How a Labyrinth Led to a Healing Path: Karla Hollan's Story

A labyrinth drawn on the earth in Costa Rica became the signal flare that brought Karla Hollan to Embody Costa Rica and, eventually, to this conversation. She wasn't looking for it. She simply saw it from the road, felt the pull, and followed—a gesture that carries a kind of metaphorical weight throughout her life's work: the ability to recognize what the soul needs and walk toward it.

Hollan didn't arrive at healing work through a single epiphany. Instead, she was shaped by observation—watching her father mentor struggling teenagers with unflinching positivity, seeing her family navigate illness, and recognizing early that she needed to work in wellness. As the youngest of five, she was, by her own account, a watcher. "I really felt like part of figuring out life was how to figure out how to have harmony from within," she recalls. She didn't have the language for it then, but the impulse was clear: when the people around her were in flow, something shifted. When struggle took hold, she wanted to understand what could be changed.

That observer's mind found its first platform in an unexpected place: a modeling school. Starting at a young age, Hollan taught other aspiring models—some only three years her junior, though she looked much older. It wasn't vanity work. The finishing school taught her something foundational: how to hold presence in front of others, how to work with what you have, how to settle yourself in a space so you could offer your best. She was already, in those early days, holding space. "It was early on that I wanted to help empower mainly females but help empower them and make them feel good like I did when I was building what I was building in my life."

The Woman Who Changed Everything: Meeting Ruth Gil

The real turning point arrived in 1997 when Hollan moved to Florida and met Ruth Gil, an 84-year-old yoga teacher. At that time, yoga was barely a presence in mainstream American life. "If you even got to do yoga, it would be maybe at a chiropractic center, but most the time it wasn't. Um, it wasn't really accepted. I even had family members that were kind of appalled and they thought I was in some kind of crazy cult." Ruth was an anomaly—sharp, wise, physically capable in ways that seemed impossible for her age.

But Ruth wasn't teaching flexibility. She was teaching Hollan's driven, Type-A self to soften into inner peace. "I remember her always telling me, you're going to take this off the mat and you're going to bring it in your life," Hollan says. At the time, she didn't understand. How do you take an asana off the mat? But as she kept returning, the deeper teaching revealed itself: yoga was a technology for transformation, not a collection of poses. Ruth was molding her student into someone who could work from a place of alignment rather than drive.

Hollan noticed changes in her own body too—shifts that went beyond what running had ever offered. Something fundamental was reorganizing. That experience with Ruth became the foundation for everything that followed: an understanding that wellness is about integration, that the body holds wisdom, and that a guide can help you unlock it.

Building a Somatic and Healing Practice

Over time, Hollan developed a layered approach to wellness that draws on multiple modalities. She teaches aerial yoga, somatic work, and incorporates naturopathic perspectives alongside conventional medicine. Her philosophy is pragmatic: "We have naturopathic ways we have medical ways." The question isn't which one is right—it's what does the person in front of you actually need?

Somatic work sits at the center of her practice because the nervous system holds memory. When someone learns to feel their body, to notice its signals, they begin to access their own capacity for healing. "Somatic work is really important," she explains, and it matters especially in a world that demands constant stimulation. Hollan finds that people are often disconnected from their own felt sense—they know things intellectually, but they haven't felt them in their bones.

This is where breath and presence become radical acts. Helping someone slow down, notice their breath, and recognize what their body is actually telling them can be transformative. It's not complicated, but it requires patience and the willingness to move against the momentum of a fast-paced culture.

Meeting Teachers and Deepening the Practice

Along the way, Hollan studied with significant figures in the yoga and movement world, including Rodney Yee. These encounters confirmed something she already sensed: the power of breath and conscious movement to reshape not just the body but the nervous system itself. "There's something about this place that [works] mechanical physical way but with breath," she reflects, speaking to how yoga integrates the mechanical and the subtle.

Her teaching carries that integration forward. Whether she's leading a group through relaxation in savasana or working with individual students on their practice, she brings the somatic lens—the understanding that healing happens when we can truly feel and sense into what's happening inside ourselves.

A Multidimensional Approach to Empowerment

What emerges from Hollan's full body of work is a consistent impulse: to help others—particularly women—feel good in themselves. Whether she's teaching yoga, leading a retreat, or offering healing work, the thread is the same. She's passing forward what Ruth Gil offered her: the lived knowledge that inner peace changes everything about how you move through the world.

Her time at Embody Costa Rica reflects this. The retreat center, built by DTO and Himalaya in 2020, became a natural home for Hollan's work. When she spotted the labyrinth on the property, something in her recognized the intention behind it. The labyrinth—a path that spirals inward and outward—is itself a symbol of the work she does: the journey toward the center, toward stillness, and the return to the world transformed.

Today, Hollan holds space in multiple dimensions: as a yoga teacher, as a somatic practitioner, as someone who understands that wellness is both deeply personal and fundamentally relational. She teaches her students to take what they learn on the mat into their lives—to work from that place of inner peace Ruth Gil revealed, to trust their nervous systems, to feel their way toward wholeness.

Where to go from here

For those drawn to Hollan's work, the path forward might look like seeking out yoga that emphasizes somatic awareness and nervous system regulation rather than merely physical achievement. Consider exploring teachers or studios that integrate breath work with movement, that slow things down enough for you to actually feel what's happening in your body. If you're interested in aerial yoga specifically, look for instructors trained in both the technical and the therapeutic dimensions of the practice. And if you're seeking retreat experiences that blend wellness with community, spaces like Embody Costa Rica offer immersive environments designed precisely for the kind of transformation Hollan facilitates.