Why I Teach and How This Stuff Works

Many studies show that you will sleep better, feel better, be more focused, and so on, if you start a regular movement and breath practice. You can find them with a quick Google Scholar search. We reap huge physical, psychological, and emotional benefits when we breathe and move mindfully every day.

Each time we practice, we bring awareness to areas of body and mind that were previously less awake. Sleepy. In a physical sense, this may mean becoming more aware of where you rotate your upper arms or of how you expand the spaces between your back ribs as you inhale. Mentally and emotionally, this may mean watching yourself become frustrated or forceful or scared or competitive while learning a new movement and considering whether you have similar reactions in other situations.

As you become more aware, you can decide which areas you want to change and which you wish to sustain. Yoga encourages you to study yourself, challenge yourself, and accept yourself. My intention, as a teacher, is to offer an opportunity for some of each of these things to happen.

To do this, I sequence each class to build strength and flexibility gradually as we work toward more challenging postures and movements. I choose words carefully to be both clear and concise in guiding students through their practices, and I supplement these verbal suggestions with visual demonstrations, physical assists (when students opt in), and cues for students to self-assist.

Throughout each class, I adjust what and how I’m teaching to adapt to the needs of the students in that particular room at that particular time, providing ways to modify or intensify. I encourage students to stay with the breath, listening to their breathing to gauge where to go next. When the breathing stays steady through both “easier” and “harder” sections, the class is focused and centered.

With beginning students, I demonstrate more. With students who have been practicing regularly, I rarely demonstrate—I encourage listening, rather than looking. Most important: Listen to your own breath and inner sensations before you listen to my suggestions. This atmosphere enables you to stay centered in an awareness of how your own body feels, rather than focusing on how someone else—me, or anyone else in the room—appears.

I don’t want to get too deeply into it here, but for those of you who care, here’s why I think this matters: The shape of one body is so simple and unified when looked at from the outside, yet our internal experiences are complex, layered, and often contradictory. If we can immerse ourselves in our experience of the present moment—that is, how this feels on the inside, here and now—then we can start to observe the curious interrelations of what seems to be “inside” and what seems to be “outside,” rather than always seeing these as separate. Why compare someone else’s smooth and polished “outside” to our own fragmented and complex “inside”? What’s inside us is always a rough draft in progress (or two drafts, or three, side by side, each with their own tangents). What’s outside (whether it’s how we look or what we say or what we write or what we do) has been pared down. It’s been through some revisions to become, if not a final draft, at least an edited one. That’s not inauthenticity—that’s just making choices (because we can’t do / say / think / show it all).

The more we can observe and reflect upon the multitude of options on our internal landscape, the less our choices run on autopilot. We can have more input into why we choose to do, or say, or think one thing rather than one of the many others. And maybe, just maybe, we can be kinder, reflecting and responding to others instead of reacting in the ways we have in the past (in what yoga and Buddhism call samskaras, the patterns or ruts we cycle through repeatedly).

Analysis and comparison are useful in modern life, but when they are chronic, habitual, and inescapable processes, then we are stuck in a world of separation. The practices of yoga and Pilates can take us beyond those surface borders. They can give us the experience of being mindful as we move, and with enough practice, we can carry that awareness out into the rest of our lives, staying aware of many options as we act, speak, and think elsewhere.

“You already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open . . . it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? . . . [A]t the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.” —David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon”

How and Where I've Taught

I have been practicing and teaching since 1999 in both big-city studios and small-town locations. I currently teach classes, workshops, teacher trainings, continuing education, and private sessions at Chagrin Yoga on the east side of Cleveland and at other studios throughout Ohio.

Before moving to Cleveland, I owned Movement Yoga and Pilates, a studio in Troy, Ohio, that offered a full schedule of drop-in classes and private sessions. I taught at Yogaview and Moksha Yoga while living in Chicago for the summer of 2007, and I have taught classes, workshops, and teacher trainings at It’s Yoga, World Peace Yoga, and YogahOMe in Cincinnati and at LeeLaa Yoga, Day Yoga, Practice Yoga, and Yellow Tree Yoga in the Dayton area. I designed and taught an interdisciplinary undergraduate course called “Yoga: Ancient Theory and Modern Practice” at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I had the honor of creating and leading the Yoga Teacher Trainings at the Miami University Recreational Sports Center from 2001 to 2006, as our yoga program bloomed from 3 classes to over 20 per week. I’ve taught each year, in full or as part of a team, 200-hour Yoga Alliance teacher trainings at Cincinnati State, at my own studio, at Yellow Tree Yoga, at Day Yoga, and at Chagrin Yoga.

I love taking classes with teachers I’ve trained (sometimes long ago!). Each one of you has found a path to reach students, and honed your talents and gifts, in different ways.

My practice and studies have emphasized finding the actions necessary to let go of habits of holding the body and allow a quiet awareness and stillness within those actions. This awareness has continued to develop over the years as I have become able to breathe more evenly and move from clearer intentions and inquiries.

I strive to balance these elements—awareness, action, stillness, breath, intention, inquiry—when I teach.

I wish to offer many, many thanks to all my teachers, both near and far. Everything that is conveyed in my own classes is the wisdom of the teachers who have come before me intersecting with the insight of the students who are here now. It is with the blessing of my teachers that I continue to be this point of intersection.

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation.”—attributed to Albert Einstein in Howard Eves’ Mathematical Circles Adieu

How and Where I've Learned

I began a daily practice of yoga in 1999 in upstate New York, working with Elizabeth Troy and her teacher, Bob Cooley, learning hatha yoga and the self-assisting and partner-assisting techniques of Resistance Flexibility, and then training to teach. At the time, I worked in publishing in Manhattan, so I also took classes at the Jivamukti Yoga School with Estelle Yogeswari Eichenberger, Natalie Ullman, Kelly Morris, Ruth Lauer-Manenti, and the school’s founders, Sharon Gannon and David Life.

When I moved to Ohio, I trained to teach in the invigorating, eight-month, 200-hour Ashtanga Vinyasa program of It’s Yoga Cincinnati, with Indu Bala Bhardwaj, Mike Burgasser, and Larry Schultz. Here the breath became the guiding principle of my practice and I learned the power of repetition with subtle change.

In 2003, I trained with Sharon Gannon and David Life in their intensive 300-hour program for Jivamukti certification at the Omega Institute. Their commitment to the traditions of yoga—and to teaching as art and as inspiration—feeds every one of my classes, workshops, and private sessions.

These training experiences were amazing. They opened my eyes to the teaching of yoga as its own practice, as a karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga practice all rolled into one.

The learning, happily, never ends, so I travel to attend workshops and classes to integrate other traditions and perspectives into my personal practice and teaching. I have participated in workshops, teacher trainings, and classes with Cyndi Lee, David Nichtern, Erich Schiffman, Kathryn Budig, Rodney Yee, Aadhil Palkhivala, Gary Kraftsow, Dharma Mittra, David Swenson, Beryl Bender Birch, Doug Swenson, Larry Schultz, Martha Marcom, Marcia Miller, Seane Corn, Johnny Kest, Bryan Kest, Baron Baptiste, Ana Forrest, Tias Little, Thomas Myers, Paul Grilley, Sarah Powers, Todd Norian, Betsey Downing, Ami Jayaprada Hirschstein, Frank Jude Boccio, Julie Kirkpatrick, Doug Keller, and others.

My yoga therapy training is focused on Doug Keller’s interweaving of yoga, physical therapy, and somatic methods. I began seeking out therapeutic approaches to work with private clients who had recurring injuries, conditions not fully healed by surgery and physical therapy, and athletic goals that required peak performance and awareness. I became certified as a Yoga Therapist through IAYT in 2017. I have continued studying therapeutic modalities with books, articles, and online trainings from Jill Miller, Katy Bowman, Jules Mitchell, Shelly Prosko, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, David Emerson, and so many others. Ellie Herman, Lynne Robinson, Kathryn Kassai, Kim Perelli, and Samantha Wood have been influential in integrating Pilates rehab and prehab methods into my therapeutics.

I draw on principles of alignment and action from many traditions—including therapeutics—when teaching vinyasa-based classes. Training to teach mat Pilates has helped me incorporate core strength movements at crucial moments in yoga sequences to fire up the center. Teaching and training others to teach barre blends the joy of dance movements and multi-level Pilates together with yoga's meditative approach. Taoist Yin Yoga and Restorative Yoga informs my approach to opening and closing vinyasa classes, as well as teaching gentle sessions.

I study the philosophies of Advaita Vedanta, Tantra, and Buddhism, threading them throughout classes and workshops. I have written about the influence of these ancient philosophies on western poststructural theory and film theory in the thesis I wrote for my Master of Arts degree at Miami University.

The texts of yoga have been of interest to me since before I took my first asana classes. I took a course in Sanskrit at Boston College in the early 90s that compacted a year of transliterating and translating Devanagari into one semester of intense structuralist analysis with Dr. Michael Connolly. His precision and depth of knowledge was a revelation. I renewed my interest when learning the Yoga Sutras with Indu Bala Bhardwaj during Ashtanga training, and found a new love for the Sanskrit language as “asana for the mouth” with Manorama d’Alvia during the Jivamukti training.

The traditions of movement, breath, and awareness are gifts. Each facet of them allows us to explore self and other, and experience the ways those constructs blur.