Align Your Practice
aka What you do on your mat matters
Ways to Study with me
THINGS CHANGE AND WE CAN TOO
The great gift of practicing and teaching for all these years is that I have complete clarity about both the extraordinary range of possibility that exists in yoga, and how profound our capacity for change is.
Our bodies, minds, and spirits evolve over time, and we need practices that recognize and support that we are different day to day, year to year, decade to decade. The practice I had 25 years ago is a distant cousin of the practice I have today. Same with my teaching. But we are all part of the same family. What served me once may not today, but it still had value then and is part of the continuum of my abiding connection to yoga.
And while the specifics have changed, there are throughlines, themes that connect the dots from the very beginning to now.
Patience and persistence
Said another way, a commitment to the big picture of self-knowledge, rather than the false dichotomy of immediate gratification or bust. I had a pose I worked on every day for 8 years before I could finally pull it off. And I absolutely did not believe I would ever be able to do it when I first encountered it. I appreciate all those years of glacial progress even more than I enjoyed finally having some success.
ANd It's all about alignment
I mean this in a very practical, literal way, but also in the figurative or meta sense. I teach with an emphasis on precise physical alignment because it’s better for your musculoskeletal system not to hurl yourself around unconsciously. But I also teach and practice this way because doing so invites your mind to be connected to your body and to the present moment, not off on its own, careening back and forth between past and future, glory and catastrophe. There is a wonderful proverb “The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” When you put your mind to work in service of subtle actions rather than letting it run riot, your mind becomes your ally, not your adversary. Your habitual chatter settles down and you get a taste of who you really are, underneath all that familiar noise. When that happens, however fleetingly, you experience a kind of integrity between all the parts of you, an alignment of mind, body, and spirit in which the sum is greater than the parts. This is the essence of yoga.
How does private instruction work?
The beauty of private instruction is that we can create a program that is just right for you. Perhaps you want to improve your range of motion or strengthen a particular part of your body. Or finally, understand a family of poses or an aspect of alignment or anatomy that has always felt elusive. Or you’ve never practiced and want to get started with the basics so you have a good foundation. Or you want to deepen your practice by learning about the philosophical underpinnings of yoga. Or begin to build a home practice. The list goes on and on. Whatever feels most important to you will be the guiding principle as we work together.
Who works privately with me?
I have private students that I’ve worked with weekly for over a decade, students who sign up for a finite series of sessions to develop or grow a given element of their practice, students who had never practiced when we began working together, and students who are themselves, yoga teachers.
In other words, everyone.
What’s the benefit of private sessions?
I am in my element when I teach and am eternally grateful for all the different ways I get to connect with students. What I particularly enjoy about private instruction is the opportunity it provides for dialogue so that the student and I can identify exactly what they want to work on, and I can design a program and tailor practices that will support this kind of individualized exploration.
How is private instruction different from public classes?
The significant distinction is that I can give you very specific feedback in an ongoing way. This level of personalized engagement often means that you can make progress in your practice at a more rapid rate because we can problem-solve in real time when something feels confusing or out of reach. Individual work means you can ask a question in the moment. It also allows you to share when a particular modification or approach to pose or an action resonates or feels powerful, and then we can amplify that way of working. This back-and-forth is central to creating a practice that feels uniquely yours.
teaching Philosophy
it’s about the pose, but it’s not about the pose.
I care deeply about how the interplay of anatomy, alignment and skillful sequencing provides an entree into poses that are both fully expressed (meaning you are doing the fullest version of the pose that makes sense for you in that moment) and sustainable (meaning you are doing a version of the pose that will not cause a vulnerability or injury, either in the moment or down the road). Postures are like vivid, neon signposts containing a reservoir of information about you: where you are strong, where you are mobile, what you rely on when something is hard, and what you default to — either physically or in the stories you tell about yourself. So yes, doing asana thoughtfully and with presence will give you a richer experience of the poses themselves, but it will also give you a richer experience of yourself.
Livestreaming at Down Under School of Yoga
Weekly classes
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00–12:30 pm
Down Under On Demand
When you can’t get to class in real-time, you can practice with me using the studio’s on-demand platform. Down Under On Demand offers a free trial and adds new videos each week.
300 Hour Teacher training
Begins January 2023
What you will learn:
Communication & Voice, Refined Teaching, Applied Therapeutics, Mechanics of Breath, Philosophy & Tradition, Karma Yoga Practicum, Business of Yoga, Inclusivity & Diversity
Tuition: $4,200
$500 deposit due with application