About Evolve

EVOLVE - YOGA & MEDITATION CENTER was established by Margaret Konopacki in Wickenburg Arizona in 2004 as a school and location to teach young people the transformational power of YOGA.

Margaret’s own attraction to this ancient practice began 20 years ago when she first started to go to the Sivananda Yoga Ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. At the time, toiling as an overworked publicist in the busy television industry, she sought refuge in this quiet ashram to just “stop the mind chatter and hyperactivity that was in part created by this non-stop deadline and stress driven industry.” I was depressed yet very successful. I was married to a genius TV Producer, had an amazing career and was the mother of a perfect one-year old boy. Yet I was so unhappy, she recalls. I remember how I felt that first week at the yoga ashram. My body woke up and my mind stayed back. It was the first time I think I really got into clear “self-observation” and saw a really stressed-out, hyper and unhappy person. After the first week my mind was much more focused and my unhappiness came to the surface clearly. What kept coming up for me through the practice of “witnessing” or “meditation” was the message. You have to change your lifestyle!

I continued to work in the television industry for another 10 years but things started to change for me with the beginning of my yoga practice. In those days there was little awareness of yoga in the west and my ongoing rants about how wonderful and transformational it was fell to deaf ears in the TV industry.I started my own practice and began to meditate every morning and do asana practice at least 5 times a week. This was in the 80’s and by then Madonna and Sting began to tell the world about their own yoga transformations. The rest is history. Yoga hit the west like a storm at the beginning of the new millennium. How I ended up establishing a yoga center in Arizona to teach youth the power of yoga was a love story with my only son David. He fell into great unhappiness as a creative and sensitive child and by 14 was spinning out of control in the world of drug addiction. I knew at the time that it was also time for me to move into my new passion permanently and moved out of Toronto, Canada and began working for a Canadian Corporation that happened to be based in Arizona. Today I spend 5 months of the year working as a guest teacher at EVOLVE and the rest of the time I am a student of yoga, traveling extensively to Asia and Europe taking ongoing courses in Ayurvedic medicine, yoga teacher training, ayrovedic massage training and whatever I feel I need in order to become the best teacher of yoga for my 80 young students in Arizona. I have heard the expression – when the student is ready the teacher appears. For me it is reversed – when the teacher is ready the student appears. This is my life today. I have the privilege to work with youth in distress. We mirror life and learning -- to each other.

2008 marks the 6 years of service that I have worked for this special group of people who are the future of our planet. It has been an amazing challenge and to be of service has its great rewards.