For Professor Aron Efimenko, it’s all about comfort: “I literally have a hammock in my office.”
He was an eighties kid who spent lunchtime in the art room, dodging coaches who pestered him to try out for the basketball team because of his stature. Now, he’s an educator, a client of the Kairos Wellness Experience (KWE) who’s made impressive strides on his fitness journey.
Though he became fast friends with Fitness Trail Guides
Carol and Al, and benefits greatly from their individualized process, Aron also has a deep understanding of KWE’s foundational principles — process over product, the dynamics of comfort, and our personal trajectories — all of which lead back to the beginning of his own fitness trail.
Journey with Adriene
In his adolescence, Aron says his perception of the fitness world was largely influenced by the behavior of his peers; the “jocks” would pick on him and his friends for not being athletic or fit.
“As I grew up, I realized I had language for what I was seeing, not just in gym class but now in media and pop culture representations of fitness: toxicity,” he writes to Kairos. “The mindset it seemed to take — often overly negative, judgmental, and self-involved — presented an easy choice: I would run screaming from such an endeavor if it saved me from such a hopeless worldview.”
“My friends, on the other hand, were mostly like me: classic nerds with little interest in fitness in part because we were all easy targets for the jocks, so why would we want to participate in a world that so roundly rejected us?”
As an adult, Aron’s current physical and emotional journey with fitness has strong roots in the aftermath of a major life experience.
“When I first met Carol, I was simply trying to follow through on a path I’d set for myself in the previous five years,” he explains. “I’d lost a partner to cancer, but not before she put the importance of health and fitness in my mind (she was athletic and health conscious in a way I hadn’t encountered in a partner before). She also made me promise to look after myself after she passed.”
“After she passed,” he continues, “I got a therapist and on a whim gave home practice yoga a shot (shout out to Yoga with Adriene). I knew I needed to figure out a good practice for being mindful and present. Yoga was the best thing for my grief and ensuing depression, honestly, and this set a course that would lead me to joining Carol and our friend Greg at the gym, and then, after a much-too-long hiatus over the pandemic, meeting Al.”
Adriene’s gentle presence created a new and comforting space for Aron at a very difficult time in his life, while simultaneously pushing him out of his comfort zone as he tried something new. Now, he sees those same techniques and dynamics at work in his training with Kairos.
“There’s a throughline here that I think connects Adriene with Al and Carol,” he tells KWE. “They create these comforting, calm, supportive, non-judgmental environments that just kind of accept you where you’re at.”
“Because of the passing of my girlfriend, the discovery of therapy and especially yoga, I feel like that set a path for me,” Aron says. “The trajectory of my life changed because of those events, and so I found myself more open to health and fitness.”
The path less traveled
Aron is intellectual, well-spoken and extremely relatable; he is also, as he puts it, “easily bored.” What he liked most about Kairos when he first began training with Carol was her ability to switch things up.
“I’m very much an Enneagram Personality Type 7, which is the enthusiast,” he says. “If you keep giving me new experiences, I will just keep coming back for more of that. Carol’s really good about changing up the routines, so because of that I got hooked very early, and was all in. I never got tired of the same thing day to day.”
Carol is highly perceptive, fun-loving, and a quick thinker who is always eager to try something new. She and Al bring an innovative style to fitness training that Aron couldn’t find elsewhere or on his own.
“I suspect because I was left to my own devices, I’d do the same things over and over again; I wouldn’t push myself,” Aron says of his pre-Kairos solo workouts. “I wouldn’t realize, even, that I wasn’t pushing myself. It felt like I was working in a factory, pushing levers and buttons.”
“By the time I met Carol, I was totally ready for some new mentor to take me to whatever the next level was,” he tells KWE. “She’s obviously very enthusiastic and supportive. All the things I liked about Adriene, I got with a live person who was always changing things up for me.”
Take comfort
The Kairos Wellness Experience is founded on the principle that in order to step out of your comfort zone, you must first be made to feel comfortable. In today’s fitness world, it’s sometimes all too rare that we find an entrance point without feeling belittled, imposed upon, or unwelcome.
“Something that is very endearing and helpful about both of them is their attentiveness to comfort,” Aron says about Carol and Al. “Especially as a 44-year-old who grew up in the eighties and nineties, the ‘no pain no gain’ motto was such a big thing, and such a huge turn-off for somebody like me. I’m all about comfort and ease whenever I can get it, because life is already too hard anyway. [Al and Carol are] very conscious of making sure that you’re comfortable at pretty much every level.”
For him, feeling seen and understood by Carol and Al was just the first step. Kairos won’t just meet you where you are; we want to move forward with you.
“They’re the right kind of people,” Aron continues, “who will meet you where you’re at, but also make you aware of what you’re currently capable of, and be encouraging of that, and build on what you can already do. That’s something that I found with them, among many other things, that I didn’t even know I was looking for or missing.”
“Not to get all Zen about this, but…”
Aron will tell you he’s not a spiritual person, but the unconditional inclusivity he feels from Carol and Al mirrors what one might hope to find in a religious space or a therapist’s office.
“They’re good at organically reading the person and what they need,” he tells Kairos. “That is rare, and it’s something, honestly, I expect from spiritual leaders and therapists. They are both of those things and more.”
“It also helps that I don’t feel like they’re mindlessly positive for the sake of hitting some new goal,” Aron writes of KWE’s attitude. “They provide examples of what’s working, and if it isn’t, why it isn’t. Their practice is informed by a relevant and comfortably shared knowledge, which I wish was true of more things in life.”
As for why Aron would recommend Kairos, he speaks not just to physical fitness, but to the holistic experience.
“It engages you on a foundational level that provides a holistic approach to mind, body, and spiritual wellness,” he writes. “All key aspects of the self are integrated. There’s no toxicity, unrealistic expectations, or impossible promises. It’s just good humans trying to do right by other humans.”
“Every minute you get with them in the gym or in conversation is a gift.”
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