MARGOT STRAUHULL

she/her

LCSW, PERINATAL MENTAL HEALTH PROVIDER, PRENATAL YOGA TEACHER AND CHILDBIRTH EDUCATOR

Margot was born and raised on Sauvie Island, just outside of Portland, and grew up straddling a balance of rural living with urban accessibility. Her first real introduction to yoga was while attending college, in a class called "stretch & strength", and after years of studying movement through the lens of ballet, she found the opportunity to move without judgment or comparison both curious and liberating. 

After attending Whitman College, a 4 year liberal arts college, with the support of her parents, she graduated with a degree in psychology. As a citizen of the USA, with the unique advantage to cross borders, she was able to live and teach English abroad in Costa Rica and then the Czech Republic in her early 20s. While in Costa Rica, she found her way into a yoga teacher training at the Nosara Yoga Institute. After completing the training, she realized that sometimes "the more you know, the more you don't know", and this was the beginning of a profound appreciation for the depth of yoga and how one can forever be a student of this multi-faceted practice.

Margot started teaching yoga in 2006, as a means to try to find balance from the demands of pursuing a career in social work. After completing a Masters in Social Work at Portland State University in 2011, with a focus on perinatal mental health, she became a mother herself, which further cemented her deep appreciation, curiosity and and respect for the transformative time around pregnancy, birth and postpartum. This experience, spurred on her desire to learn more, and while pregnant with her second baby she completed the Prenatal/Postpartum Yoga Teacher Training with Shana Celnicker-Chong and then went on to do a year long apprenticeship with The Yoga Way to Birth, a childbirth education class, under Tina Lilly and Emory Oeding. 

Margot's social work experience extends from working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, to refugee resettlement, to being a child and family therapist and for the last 7 years providing integrated behavioral health services in public health primary care clinics. From a young age, Margot has felt a deep call to work toward trying to create a more just and equitable world and is grateful to found a profession that aligns with these values.

Currently, she works part time as a clinical social worker in a maternal fetal medicine clinic, part-time in a her private practice Root & Bloom Counseling focused on perinatal mental health, teaches prenatal yoga and The Yoga Way to Birth regularly at Yoga Pearl, MamaSpace, Ready Set GROW and other studios throughout Portland, Oregon. She is a certified perinatal mental health provider (PMH-C) through Postpartum Support International. She is a wife to one husband and mother to three, and in her free time enjoys being outside, living room dance parties and experiencing how yoga shows up in all aspects of her life.