Here's the thing I love about yoga: I have no idea what it is. Not in any neat, definable way, at least. If someone asks me what kind of yoga I teach I get kind of nervous and stutter before coming out with, "Uh, vinyasa? Kind of?"
I didn't realize it at the time, but I started doing yoga as a way to recoup from an attempted mugging on the other side of the world. Later I took yoga like a drug — hot, sweaty Power Vinyasa at least once, sometimes twice, a day — to process the death of my dad. I did chatarunga after chatarunga to forget, and I gave myself permission to cry in shavasana.
Now I've been practicing yoga for over a decade. I keep changing and the practice keeps changing with me. Yoga bores, infuriates, encourages, and inspires me. I can't separate myself from it anymore; it's ceased to be something I do and is instead a way that I am. Ten years from now I might not be doing "yoga" — on a mat, in a studio, with props — at all, and if I am, I will definitely not be doing it the same way I am now.
My teachers have been anything but stable, and I mean this as the highest compliment. They have changed course, moved away, taken breaks, and kept asking questions. They have taught me the most by being vulnerable and imperfect, a.k.a., human beings.
In my own practice I keep courting change and asking questions too, hoping to get more comfortable with the unknown. Yoga links movement to breath and breath to movement; there's nothing like connecting to the breath to confront your own mortality. It ebbs and flows, a personal, internal rhythm entirely out of our control.
I teach yoga — on a mat, in a studio, with props — because our bodies are infinitely wise. The Internet attributes this quote to Iyengar, and it sounds like something he would have said: "It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.” By creating a space in which we can connect to and learn from our own bodies, our own internal wisdom, I hope to empower others to look within themselves for answers first. As a teacher, I believe that you, as a student of yourself, are a much greater teacher of yourself than I will ever be.
I've completed 500 hours of training with Don and Amba Stapleton at The Nosara Yoga Institute in Costa Rica and assisted their 200-hr YTT in January 2016. Through NYI I'm certified in Self-Awakening Yoga, a practice aimed to deconditon and repattern the body; and Pranassage, an intuitive. self-healing bodywork modality. Through Don's Inner Quest of the Yoga Educator, I'm also trained as a Yoga Guide, which basically means I'm a really good listener.
In addition to time with my Nosara family, I've taken every class ever at New York's Kula Yoga Project, including a 75-hour advanced training with founder and sequencing genius Schyuler Grant.
I've also studied with Rodney Yee, Colleen Saidman, Nikki Costello, Kevin Gardiner, Kevin Courtney, Alison Sinatra, Dana Rizer, Anna Forrest, and Amma devotees at her ashram in Kerala. I spent a profound and singular week in satsang with Mooji in Rishikesh and 10 days in silence studying Mindfulness Meditation at Wat Suan Mokh in southern Thailand.
In D.C. you can find me at Yoga District on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I'm also leading some of their teacher trainings this spring and summer. Here's my teaching schedule.
Privates, group classes, Pranassage, and guide sessions are all available.
