As a schoolteacher, I discovered yoga in the late 90’s as a way to release stress and to cultivate the capacity to hold a space for my students to express their feelings. My yoga journey led me to connecting with yoga practitioners in Cuba who encouraged me to become a teacher. Inspired by their undaunting ability to live in the present moment and find joy even in the midst of difficult circumstances, I vowed I would return with more training and share what I learned.

I packed up my car with a few belongings and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I completed a year-long teacher training and began to teach at a studio. Living in the desert was not always easy for this east-coaster, but the wide-open horizons of the desert became a place for me to explore my own inner landscape without distraction. Self-reflection coupled with my work as a teacher at a Native American high school deepened my connection to spirit in the form of service. I returned to the east coast and later to Cuba with more tools to navigate the waves of life and to support others in doing the same.

I believe yoga activates the body’s own healing abilities and the heart’s deepest wisdom. I know what it is like to struggle with body pain and an uncertainty that things will get better. Having sustained a shoulder injury and three subsequent rotator cuff surgeries, I learned how to modify my practice to adjust to my changing body. I understand the disappointment that can arise when our bodies hurt or shift from what we are used to. I offer variations in my classes to suit different needs and I always approach my practice and teaching with compassion born of the necessity to be with what is. “You have to respect where the body wants to take you– accept the body where it is,” says Eduardo Pimentel, one of my yoga teachers in Cuba.

I am interested in how the yoga practice asks us to disassemble the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. “How do you imagine our world?” I ask my Cuban yoga teacher friend, Eligio Kindelan, and he replies, “New every day with possibility. If we are new every day, the world is also new.” Over and over, we are asked to release our sense of identity and to open to something quite often unknown—our deepest potential for freedom, self-expression, and love. Through the practice of yoga, we have an invitation to return to what is steady in our lives –breath, movement, mindfulness—and we make this our platform. Then, we prepare for take-off!

My credentials~

I have been practicing yoga for over twenty years and teaching for fifteen (RYT 200).  I trained in the Anusara method and in aspects of Para Yoga. I honor teachers Marion Griffin, Suzie Hurley, John Friend, Rod Stryker, Noah Maze, and Naime Jezzeny among others for my introduction and immersion into the beauty and challenge that is my experience of yoga. For the ever-present guidance of my meditation practice, I am indebted to my teacher, Paul Muller-Ortega. Over the years, I have worked with several members of the yoga community in Cuba to continue to build a bridge between people of the United States and Cuba through yoga and meditation.

I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont and I teach creative writing at Stevenson University. I have experienced the revelatory nature of both writing and yoga and wholeheartedly believe everyone has a unique voice that can be expressed on the page. For deep compassion for what the process involves, I hold a space for each student to discover their voice through movement and language.