Yoga

I stumbled into yoga in 1998 as a way to balance my life as a dancer in New York City. Having just finished my MFA in choreography and performance, I was juggling the desk job that was intended to pay off my student loans with dance classes, auditions and the general sense of “not-enoughness” that comes from being a working artist in a big city. My mat quickly became my refuge. It was the place where I could relax and enjoy movement without worrying about the performance aspect of it. Yoga became what I had lost in my dancing — a sense of unselfconscious joy, and it was clear to me that more than choreography, this feeling of coming home to oneself was what I wanted to share with others.

It wasn’t long until I wandered into OM yoga center, a Manhattan based studio under the direction of Cyndi Lee where I would eventually begin teaching in 2002. At OM, meditation and yoga sat side by side as part of the culture. The first ten years of my teaching career were humbly steeped in the dharma teachings of the Shambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, which offers meditation as a path that quiets the mind enough to reveal its inherent wisdom. My own teaching style grew to reflect the “ordinary magic” that arises through training the body and mind to ride the waves of change that define our lives both on and off the mat without losing our balance. Or at least when we do, being able to pause, perhaps even smile, and take a deep breath.

Over the years I have been strongly influenced by the precision of Iyengar yoga and the powerful steadiness of vinyasa flow, but home practice has always been an essential part of the equation for me. My teaching comes from a place deeply rooted in my own experience of the practices of yoga and meditation. If I had to give my teaching style a name, I suppose it would be "deep flow" — a mixture of Hatha and Vinyasa, in which precision of alignment blends with the fluidity of the breath to create sequences that dance in a rhythmic, instinctual way. I offer yoga that is well rounded, challenging, but also honest and responsive to what is arising in the moment, as well as within the students. That means no two classes are exactly the same, but my hope is that they feel familiar in the sense that they are restorative — a sort of energetic alchemy that realigns body, mind and breath to their natural, open, luminous state.

In addition to OM yoga center, during my early teaching career, I was part of the founding faculty of Kula Yoga Project, as well as Virayoga (Elena Brower) and continue to study (remotely) with my longtime Iyengar teacher Genny Kapuler. I have been humbled to serve as a teaching assistant to international yoga teacher Shiva Rea, and am grateful for the trial by fire experience of training future yoga teachers with Shiva, at OM yoga center, Michelle Loew at the Yoga Space and as part of Jill Knouse's Elevate teacher training faculty in Portland, OR. Along the road, my heart opened to the devotional beauty of mantra and Sufi poetry — the upshot being an advanced certification through Laughing Lotus Yoga, an amazing library, as well as a lingering love for the devotional “Bhakti” path. But it is the thread of mindfulness/awareness practice that has woven these practices together — a reminder of emptiness that manifests as the powerful potential of spaciousness.

Meditation

A student of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, as well as contemplative psychotherapy, I am inspired by the teachings of the Insight Meditation tradition, and continue to study with my longtime friend and (very first) meditation teacher, Buddhist author Ethan Nichtern. While my path began in 2002 in Shambhala meditation tradition, most recently, I have embarked on an my third year of the Contemplative Psychotherapy Program thorough the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science as part of the Psychosocial Change cohort. I am a founding team member of the Contemplative Studies Program (Miles Neale) - a cohort of practitioners integrating the ancient wisdom and meditation practices of Tibetan Buddhism with contemporary perspectives from neuroscience, trauma research and psychotherapy - as well as part of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science meditation faculty.

At home in Portland, OR, I sit with the Presence Collective (Caverly Morgan), a community dedicated to personal transformation, social justice and collective liberation. In 2018, I completed a certificate in Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhism through the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science under the guidance of Dr. Miles Neale, with whom I traveled to Nepal later that year. A deeply impactful journey, this pilgrimage shifted my perspective on the way the sacred and the secular inform one another (simply, yet beautifully), and can infuse everyday life with a sense of “ordinary magic.” I left Nepal with the promise I had made the Boudhanath Stupa (known as the great wish-fulfilling stupa) to “be the possibility for genuine connection” firmly seeded in my own HeartMind.