Lane Changer - Marya Williams, when life’s lanes bring you full circle
Two Weston lane changers!
Thirty-five years ago, pre-teen Marya moved with her family to a house on King Street in my community of Weston. After high school and a college hospitality and tourism program, she fled town for the west coast. Her goal then? to achieve the state of happiness that had eluded her in her first 20 years. In her mid-40s now, the goal hasn’t changed much. But let’s look at the lanes that took her around the world and back to her yoga studio across from that King Street house.
Panorama Mountain Village in British Columbia’s interior was her first stop. She spotted an ad in a newspaper. Despite arriving at the last interview on the last day with no appointment, she was hired and moved a couple weeks later. She’d never been to Panorama. Although she was a kid from Weston, far from a mountain, she’d started skiing in elementary school and snowboarding in high school. She loved the life but Panorama was just her first stop. If she just kept traveling, sure she’d get to a place where she belonged. She spent five years around BC, worked on cruise ship, and then two years in Barbados as a marketing director. She came back to Toronto to study to be a registered massage therapist. Landing a spot in the program was a bit of fluke too - she found the course, got accepted and started, all in a week. She was keen to build on her previous experience in acupressure, reflexology, and other bodywork therapies and to qualify for a profession that had potential to put her in something other than survival mode. Like many GenXers, she hadn’t been encouraged by parents or schools to consider what she wanted to do in life. At 30, she was starting to figure it out for herself.
Marya took pride in being good at the massage program. She’s a small-framed woman but, as a former massage client of hers, I can tell you, she’s got the hand-strength of a construction worker. But more than the clinical side of the work, she developed a real passion for learning physiology and the science of the body.
The travel bug however was still very much alive in her so after graduating, Marya took her new qualifications to Australia, massaging people on a pontoon on the Great Barrier Reef while thousands of whales migrated by. After Oz came Barbados where she is a dual citizen and had grown up visiting and working. She gave massages in a Seaside Massage Hut. She later met a Bajan who was on holiday from his life in Canada. Before long, Marya was pregnant. She was months away from her 35th birthday, her self-imposed cut-off age for having children. She moved back to Toronto to be a family with the father and they settled in a house in Weston a block away from my house. She took a position at a local clinic providing massage services. Soon, she was mother to two boys. Her relationship did not last but her home in Weston has become long-term - at least for the foreseeable future.
COVID-19 did a number on so many of us, and for Marya, it rendered her unable to meet the minimum practice hours to keep her massage licence. She began to study accounting but that didn’t feel quite right. She considered nursing, given her passion for understanding the human body, but the profession isn’t compatible with being a solo parent of two pre-teens. Then she found an online yoga training program, a dream she thought was dead after having kids and being unable to attend in-person retreats. The program spoke to her strengths - even incorporating myofascial release, something that had become standard in her treatments after practicing under John Barnes, the internationally recognized physical therapist, lecturer, author, and leading authority on MFR and attending several seminars over the years.
When the program completed, she repurposed her kids’ playroom and started teaching yoga from home and to one online client. Marya knew she needed a bigger space so gave a serious look at the empty storefront across the park from my house. It’s where she rented VHS videos as a kid - indeed Jack and I also rented videos there when we first moved to Weston 14 years ago! After the convenience store/rental place closed three years ago, a coffee shop opened and died a quick death. It’s the only commercial building in a sea of private houses, but Marya latched onto it. She’s part of a tight group of young parents on the street and last November I saw her and many of those friends transforming the space.
Named Blue Zone Wellness, Marya’s studio aims to achieve what the world’s blue zones do - you know, those regions where people live longer, healthier lives, thanks to simple habits like staying active, reducing stress, and connecting with others. Marya’s landed into the work side of her new life-lane in soft-launch mode for now. But she’s loving it, just like those neighbours who’ve forsaken an hour of scrolling to try out her blue-zone approach. Her classes are still at times when I can’t make it, but I’m hoping she’ll find a schedule to meet everyone’s needs, even those like me who venture out of Weston to work during the day.
There’s no soft-launch for her personally though. She’s in the new lane fully, adopting a yoga and meditation practice to rewire her nervous system and beat the chronic fatigue she’s experienced since childhood. She’s more mindful about what goes into her body too - less sugar and carbs, no alcohol, intermittent fasting. She also wishes people would realize, as she has, that spending an hour in your own company on the yoga mat does more for you than time in the mall (hear hear!). For the first time ever, Marya is seeing glimpses of what life might be like out of survival mode. She awakened one day feeling pure joy for the first time in her life. New lanes will do that. I hope she gets over her struggle to feel worthy of happiness so this feeling becomes routine for her.
Travel is not in the cards now - that ended with COVID and the financial responsibilities of sole custody of two kids. Marya’s started to realize though she doesn’t need to seek something outside herself - she is her own home now. And the funny thing? Blue Zone Wellness is just across the street from that house Marya and her family moved into all those years ago.
Check out Blue Zone Wellness here: https://www.blue-zone-wellness.com/ Marya’s been on a long social media hiatus and re-entering it is a big hurdle for her. Let’s give her the Weston-style boost she deserves! Like. Comment. Share.
Missed previous Lane Changer profiles?
Peter Chandler, how it all began for me
Cathy Crowe, her lane is the street
Marissa Bastidas, same lane, new direction
Pam Hudak, living on a multi-lane highway
Jennifer, crossing lanes from Phuket to pup-minder
Emma Simpson, from taxiway to writing terminal
Jessica Waraich, changing lanes on the career on-ramp
Michelle Simmons, straddling two lanes in her mid-40s
Sybil Chandler (1928-2025), proud to find life’s off-ramp
Faiv Noelle, solo on a global highway
Karly Wilson, waiting aside life’s highway for the next lane
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