About Me

How Yoga Found Me and Swept Me Off to India

Yoga found me, like it does most people, in a state of crisis.  At 19, I suffered a dance injury; I took a leave of absence from Brown University to recover from an assault; I questioned the meaning of my life.

I decided I needed to step out of my box and try some things I had always been curious about, which led me two places—yoga and rock climbing.  After about 15 minutes plastered to a rock, calves trembling, tears, people insisting their were big ledges to grab onto…well, you can see where I am going with this and you know where I ended up.

My first yoga class took hold of me in a totally different way.  I had no idea what happened but I kept going back.  I even asked my teacher after class, “what is yoga?”  As I learned more about yoga, I realized it was far more than movement, and that my life shared even more parallels with the ancient discipline.

I realized that it was a living practice of the nonviolent principles that I had become so enchanted by in studying the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  These first yoga classes combined with discovering the “Autobiography of a Yogi” and “Autobiography of Malcolm X” moved me to go abroad, to be of service and to start the process of self-study and self-inquiry.

First stop- Thailand to volunteer at a refugee camp I took my books and yoga with me. From Thailand it was an obvious (but terrifying) stop over to India. Between a giardia and head lice riddled Vipassana sit and sunset yoga on the Ganges with a teacher who taught in rhymes, my yogic love affair bloomed and deepened. I indulged in singing, moving, learning and serving. I realized yoga was big enough to include and encompass all of me and dedicated my life to studying it.

Journey with My Teachers

Back in the States I hungrily sought out the best teachers. Trish O’Rielly and Brain Dorfman showed me the eight limbs of yoga seamlessly interwoven in each practice through the Viniyoga approach. Rodney Yee showed me how to speak directly and personally to each student no matter the size of the group and how to practice and teach with the ease of window-shopping.  Five years working with Richard Freeman helped me put it all together: refined alignment that flowed perfectly with my understanding of the body through Rolfing, a seamless emphasis on breath and an internal focus, all with a wry sense of humor and a raised eyebrow. I learned from Richard that the most simple is the most advanced and that slow is powerful.

With these new gifts I returned to India with high hopes. But the books I was reading on Advaita Vedanta were incomprehensible. I was lost. The clarity I had found through my teachers was getting cloudy.

Walking alone one day at the Ramana Maharshi ashram, a man sitting under a tree asked me if I would like a bite of the first piece of fruit off the ashram tree. He asked me where I was going. I confidently replied “the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram” to study Vedic chanting.  To which he replied, “Let’s hear what you know.”

I was embarrassed but I began. He corrected me at each word. That night, he sat teaching me answering my questions about Vedanta from a yogic point of view. He had command of all the yoga texts from memory and I felt like he was speaking directly to me, grasping what I already understood and taking me to the next level. When we discovered we shared a love of jazz, I knew I had found a really important teacher in J. Jayraman, the ashram librarian!

Within a week, the person scheduled to perform for a celebration, about 20 minutes of chanting in total had dropped out and I had agreed to fill in.  The rigorous training, day and night begun, I would be woken at any time to be quizzed and tested. I submitted all my actions to the foot of my teacher, to be guided to humility and deeper self-understanding. I stayed there for three months, me and my teacher living together, meditating, chanting and being tested on philosophical truisms like geometric proofs.

Brazil & Beyond

The cast of India’s spell was finally broken when I went to teach on and island paradise in Brazil three years ago.  I found the heart and devotion of India, combined with an irresistible embrace of the body and the feminine.  I promptly fell in love with Brazil, then a Brazilian, and soon after arrived a baby Brazilian, fulfilling one of my heart’s greatest desires- to be a mother.

Motherhood has transformed me and my practice in ways I never would have expected. The process of total transformation, beginning on the physical and traveling through all the other layers of my being, has revealed the yogic teaching of interconnectedness. I have had a long recovery after a lot of tearing in the birth process. The effects that the experience on the physical level has had on my total being, emotional, sexual, and spiritual have been profound.  Only now, two years later am I beginning to piece all of the connections together.   Being a woman is now more important than ever in how I regard myself, my practice and my teaching.

While I am now a teacher, I will always be a student. I am learning that my own happiness, state of mind, and experience is often the best contribution I have to offer my community. I am learning that when I teach yoga, when I help my students find peace in themselves, I am spreading this happiness. It fills me with drive and delight to enable ordinary people to come together, look inside themselves and then go back out into the world and share whatever since of wisdom, happiness, peace or changed perspective that they experienced.  I look forward to practicing with you!

More about my teaching path and training »