“I remember seeing people who were just kinda crawling away from the madness and then people yelling ‘this isn’t a test, it’s the real thing, he had a gun’. I remember feeling everything.”

***

Seven years ago, a specialist in the United States Army named Dayna Ferguson was stationed at Fort Hood, preparing for her coming deployment to Iraq, when terror ensued.

A crazed gunman — a soldier himself — had walked into the base’s processing center and opened fire. Dayna was one of the innocent Americans hit with the many bullets.

For the young service member, three of them — to be exact — went into her body. One in her arm, which made its way to her chest, collapsing her lung, another to her leg by way of her abdomen.

“They said if I hadn’t been born the way I was born, like with the stomach condition, the bullet that went into my leg, bounced up into my abdomen, would have been a fatal bullet wound,” she recently told KTRK in Houston.

A rare birth defect, something that had caused her so much strife and pain during her childhood, had actually saved her life, and prevented the gunfire from killing her.

The condition, known as Omphalocele, caused some of her internal organs to remain outside her body at birth.

“I never had an appendix and they just king of put things back in — like how they would fit,” she said, once again to KTRK.

Tragically, 13 people lost their lives in the senseless attack, but through this miracle, Ferguson survived. Today, after numerous surgeries, she’s finally getting an opportunity to enjoy her life, share her story, and yes, some yoga.

It’s a practice she’s since become deeply devoted to, and now even teaches.

“I have people come up who say this was so helpful that you shared this before yoga,” she told the reporter. “Everyone is fighting their own battle that you don’t see by looking at them.”

To see Dayna show off her favorite yoga pose, the “King Pigeon”, and tell her incredible story — in her own words, click here.