When Kathryn Monti Thomas ’07 was 11 years old, she saw a Navy helicopter demonstration. That’s when she knew she wanted to fly.
At Rochester, Thomas took steps to pursue that dream. She was a double major in political science and religion and a four-year member of the swim team. As a Naval ROTC midshipman, she was commissioned as an ensign and set off for flight school in Florida.
After earning her wings as a Naval aviator, she was deployed to the Mediterranean. Five and a half years into her Navy career, though, she fell and broke her ankle. The injury was so severe that she had to have multiple surgeries and lost feeling in her left leg. She could no longer fly.
“The Navy wants deployable pilots,” she says. “That wasn’t me anymore.” After one last surgery, she was medically separated from the Navy.
To help rehabilitate her ankle—and to help navigate the devastation of the loss of her Naval career—Thomas tried yoga. And she began to feel different. “For that hour on my yoga mat, I could finally stop ruminating about who I wasn’t going to be, and I became okay with who I was.”
Hoping to share that reclaimed sense of self with others, Thomas started Yoga 4 Change (y4c.org) in 2014. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, the nonprofit organization strives to bring meaningful change to the lives of veterans, incarcerated people, youth, and those in recovery. Today, Yoga 4 Change has programs in more than 80 facilities throughout 10 Florida counties.
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