Our Story: Part 1

Our discovery of the world of wellness began before ‘wellness’ became a buzzword, before yoga and veganism were cool, and before illness touched our family.

We are Lindsay and Laura—Canadian-born sisters and founders of KYN, a holistic lifestyle company with an online platform, movement studio, guided wellness retreats and holistic experiences in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Having spent more than half our lives on these islands, we are fortunate to call the Turks and Caicos home.

We spent our early childhood here, with summer visits to family in Canada. Island life was remote—dirt roads connected the island villages, and Grace Bay Beach was empty with the exception of Club Med. We grew up on the beach, biking to school each day.  Mom worked from home keeping Dad’s paperwork in check and managing the house.  Dad always had many projects on the go.  He worked very hard and instilled this work ethic in us too by assigning lists of chores each day and on weekends.

On Sundays we went to church, where our uncle often helped with the sermons and our mother led the hymns. We spent our afternoons exploring the islands and beaches on boats with friends, or sipping virgin pina coladas at the Ramada (now Seven Stars) pool.

In 1993 we returned to Canada, and our parents separated shortly after. Dad stayed in Turks and Caicos, with an apartment in Ft. Lauderdale for work, and Mom stayed with us in Ontario. He traveled a lot that year for work. Travel, a broken back, and a wounded heart brought dad to a 90-minute heated yoga class.  He practiced every day for a month and was pain free for the first time in his life.  And so our journey began with him.

Our first introduction to yoga began with our dad in a heated, carpeted spare room. There were no mats, no music, no certified instructor, and definitely no Lululemon. But every day at 4pm, on the weekends he would visit, we practiced the 26 postures of Bikram yoga with Dad.  He led us through each posture, explaining the benefits of the heat and the purpose of asana as a tool to sit comfortably in meditation.

Dad’s visits home after traveling abroad were full of little trinkets and interesting books from around the world. He shared with us books on Eastern philosophy, tradition and history, sparking family discussions about religion, spirituality, business, and the world. We grew to love our yoga sessions and these deep discussions that opened our minds to so many ways of being.

But this was only the beginning.

The pivotal moment of our journey—when we began to understand and experience wellness as a holistic, 360-degree approach to health—was at a small healing center that integrated food as medicine through the raw food diet, wheatgrass, green juice, fasting and enemas, among many other approaches. Our time at this healing center, known as The Hippocrates Health Institute, changed everything.

Dad suggested we go to Hippocrates to experience what he had learned and felt when he was ill and in search of healing. He recommended we stay on for the education and certification as Raw Food Health Educators, so we did.

It sounded like the perfect plan: road trip from Ontario to Florida, live amongst the palms and orange trees, soak up the warm weather, and get healthy in the process.  We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

On our third day there, we left the facility and found a payphone to call Dad.

“This isn’t for us. There's a 65-year-old man demonstrating how to do an enema…and we are supposed to do these daily! Can we leave?”

We pleaded. But Dad encouraged us to stick it out a little longer, to take the parts that resonate and leave the rest. So we obliged.

The following day in our first ‘healing circle’ session, we watched as an 80-year-old woman cracked wide open, releasing trauma and many tears from a childhood experience she had locked up her whole life. This moment shook us to our core and helped us see the importance of staying on the journey at Hippocrates. Dad was right.

“Hippo,” as we endearingly call it, changed our lives. We felt lighter, cleaner, stronger and healthier. But even more impactful than the physical changes was witnessing the healing process for people who were really unwell.

We watched as a woman who came in a wheelchair literally danced out of the room. And after a drug addict suffered through detox and released trauma, we watched as her gray--coloured face took on a pinkish glow as she slowly re-grew her liver.

We were a little out of place and by far the youngest ones there, but this allowed us to fully take in everything around us. Every day, we were in awe.

Our time at Hippocrates was the beginning of an exploration into many holistic lifestyle practices. At the ages of 19 and 22, we learned to use the tools from our training to create space for healing in our own daily lives.

Returning to life outside of Hippo, the practices of raw food cuisine, juicing, sprouting, growing and consuming wheatgrass, fasting, qigong, meditation and yoga, all became a part of our weekly rituals. 

We decided to dive deeper into yoga too and completed our first yoga teacher certification in 2007 together, alongside our dad.  Sweating in a yoga class with dad will always feel like coming home for us.  

Our practice of yoga, meditation, sitting in deep philosophical discussions and discovering the power of food as medicine became the way we connected with our dad.  These experiences also shaped our relationship with each other and became the foundation for us to share movement and food and to facilitate growth and healing for others.