Yoga

In 1992, my eyes lit upon a beautifully illustrated Sun Salutation in a hippie ski magazine.  With no clue what it was, but a strong intuitive “yes”, I was hooked.  Practicing daily, it positively affected my snowboarding, skateboarding & daily life.  Knowing nothing more than this Sun Sal, I sometimes freestyled further into movement & breath intuitively.  Looking back, I see now that I had found my way into some traditional asana just by turning the mind off & doing what felt great.  My favorite at the time I now know to be called Natarajasana / Dancer’s Pose, & I also see that at times I was basically doing Qi Gong, which I'm also studying.  Freedom of movement, listening to the body, & doing what feels good gave me a great start down this road.  These precepts also turned out to be some of the fundamental principles of the lineage-holding teacher I received my 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training from.  Pretty cool how life works like that.

While some systems are extremely strict on things like body alignment & position, my teacher learned at a time & place (India in the early 1970's) where alignment was actually never spoken of.  Instead, they spoke of what feels good, buoyancy, & lightness of heart.  Of course it's helpful to understand alignment, but only as a guide to making the pose feel beautiful, like a piece of art, like an offering, a prayer.   We can approach asana with beginner's mind, feeling into the body & spirit in this moment now to see what feels & expresses our nature best.  You know you're 'doing it right' if the pose is a little (or very) different every day.  This is being present, being the animal body, being the expression of spirit, of the now - rather than being an expression of thinking, over-analysis & rigidity.

Recently, my life & practice had a profound new layer of heart & devotion breathed into it on a yoga retreat in Baja.  More breath, more bhakti, more kirtan, more sharing of knowledge, more sweetness.  I'm on hiatus from much teaching as I allow this newness, as well as my growing Qi Gong practice, to settle & take root.  I can barely wait to start teaching again!  When I do, I hope you’ll find my classes both light-hearted & reverent; yoga is in part about unifying 'opposite' forces as two sides of the same coin.

If you have any questions, requests for sessions, collaboration dreams or anything else at all, drop me a line!  I love connecting on yoga & bringing dreams to life.

One of my former yoga practice offerings - more coming soon!