Built by Someone
Who Needed It to Exist.
Yogasram was not built from a gap in the market.
It was built from a gap in a life well-lived.
I have practiced yoga for over twenty years.
I have never stopped being a Christian.
I grew up in Tennessee in a military family. My father served in the Navy. I served in the United States Marine Corps. Two of my sons followed me in. Service was never something we talked about as a value — it was simply what we did. You showed up. You did the work. You took responsibility for the people around you. That was the beginning of my education in discipline.
Yoga was the continuation of it.
I did not come to yoga through a wellness brand or a studio class. I came to it the way most serious practitioners come to it — through necessity, through a body that needed attention, and through a growing recognition that discipline practiced only outward has a ceiling. Yoga did not compete with my faith. It completed what I was already doing. The body that a Marine trains and the spirit that a Christian tends — yoga was the discipline that could hold both at once. For over twenty years, it still does.
"I did not need yoga to replace anything I believed. I needed it to help me practice everything I already was."
I went on to earn a Master's degree in International Development. I spent over a decade in South America, running a business in Ecuador, working in education and community development alongside people who had very little and built remarkable things from it. I also spent more than ten years as a Christian missionary there — working in healthcare, in schools, in the kind of quiet, daily service that does not make headlines but changes what is possible for real families in real communities.
In every country I worked in, I met yoga practitioners who had no institutional home. Teachers who had spent years in the practice with nothing to show for it that the world would recognize. The knowledge was real. The credential was invisible.
That is the problem Yogasram is built to solve.
Every chapter of her life
pointed here.
United States Marine Corps
Maryanne served in the Marines at a time when very few women did. She comes from a military family — her father a Navy veteran, her sons also Marines. Discipline, accountability, and the willingness to serve under pressure are not concepts she studied. They are the shape of her life.
Technology — From the Ground Up
Maryanne's career began as a COBOL programmer with the Marine Corps — writing code on punch cards before personal computers existed. Her relationship with technology is not that of a recent convert. She has built on technical infrastructure since before it was a career category. She understands what it means to build systems that work at scale.
Over a Decade in South America
She built and ran a business in Ecuador for more than 12 years — in an unfamiliar culture, in a second language, without the safety nets available at home. She has led people, managed complexity, and earned trust in rooms where she was the only person who looked like her. She knows what it means to build from nothing in an unfamiliar place.
Christian Missionary, Ecuador
For over a decade she served as a Christian missionary in Ecuador, working in education, healthcare, and social development alongside local communities. She also practiced yoga throughout those years. Her faith and her practice were never in conflict. That experience is the foundation of Yogasram's position on yoga and religion.
Master's in International Development
Hope International University. The discipline of understanding how institutions work, how communities develop, and how resources need to be structured to produce durable outcomes — this is the academic foundation underneath Yogasram's institutional design.
Rooted in Community — Right Now
While building an international institution, Maryanne is still in her community near the Piedmont area of North Carolina — picking up litter, volunteering at community kitchens, showing up for the people around her. The global vision and the local accountability are not separate commitments. They are the same one.
Twenty-Plus Years of Yoga Practice
She did not build a yoga institution to enter a market. She built it because she has practiced for over two decades — alongside her faith, through service in multiple countries, through the full complexity of a life that has not been easy — and she knows what it does. Yogasram exists because she needed it to exist, and when she looked for it, it wasn't there.
The question she is asked most often:
"How can you be Christian and practice yoga?"
Maryanne has answered this question for twenty years. The answer has never changed. She practices yoga. She follows Jesus. She strives to live by the teachings of the Bible and to see every situation through the lens of her faith. Yoga does not challenge that. It trains the body and steadies the spirit — it is a discipline, not a doctrine.
She spent over a decade doing missionary work in Ecuador alongside local Christian communities. She practiced yoga through all of it. The practice was, if anything, more consistent with her values during that time than before it — because service, discipline, and attention to the inner life are not Hindu concepts. They are human ones.
Yogasram's position on yoga and faith is not a marketing decision. It is Maryanne's life. She is a Christian woman who has practiced yoga for over twenty years, served communities across two continents, and built an institution that says plainly: your faith is welcome here, it was never the obstacle you thought it was, and the practice is yours to claim in any tradition you carry.
"Yoga predates every religion that has since made a claim on it. It will outlast every controversy about it. My faith did not need yoga's permission. And yoga did not need mine."
She faced a turning point that
reordered everything.
There are moments in a life that are not transitions — they are reckonings. A moment when the priorities that seemed fixed reveal themselves as preferences, and the things that actually matter become unmistakably clear. Maryanne had one of those moments. After confronting a serious health crisis, she chose to restart — in technology, in business, in service — with the full weight of that experience behind every decision since.
One of those decisions was Yogasram. Not because it was a promising market opportunity — though it is — but because the school she needed had not been built. A rigorous, globally accessible, practitioner-first institution that would credential real teachers without requiring them to abandon their faith, their tradition, or their identity. An institution built on the actual science of what yoga does to the human body, not on philosophy degrees for people who have never held a pose.
She started with everything she had built: a technical foundation from the Marine Corps, an international development education, twelve years of cross-cultural business experience, a decade of missionary work, and twenty years of practice on the mat. She brought in a business partner with the operational and digital infrastructure to build at scale. And she began.
"The institution I needed did not exist. So I built it. That is, in the end, what Marines do."
Yogasram is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit built under Maxsys International Inc. It is not a wellness brand. It is not a certification mill. It is an institution — one that is building its accreditation roadmap transparently, pursuing university affiliations in sports science and medicine, and opening its doors to every practitioner who has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that there is no serious home for them in the world of yoga education.
There is now.
You found this school
because you were looking for it.
Whether you practice, teach, or want to build something alongside us — Yogasram is open. The Hub is the fastest way in. The school is building its doors for everyone who deserves one.