Graduation Day from Teacher Training
Why Yoga? While in the middle of chemotherapy in 2002, I stumbled and stretched my way into one of the biggest surprises of my life: I love and need yoga. After some years of studying with local and national teachers, I downward-dogged myself into a second surprise: I wanted to become a yoga teacher. Since that time, I completed 200+ hours of teacher training with Gopi Sandal through the eclectic and soulful Bhaktivana Yoga Center in Baldwin, KS., and I’m registered with the Yoga Alliance. I also studied with wonderful teachers in the area in addition to Gopi: Anne Underwood (focusing on Iyengar yoga), MariaAna Garza, Laura Ramberg and others as well as teachers in the Northeast from the Anasura and Kripalu traditions. Practicing and teaching yoga has been an essential calling in my life, returning me continually to the mat where I learn how important it is to come home to all of who we are and what the world asks of us.
Teaching Yoga: I teach an all-levels class on Mondays from 12-1 p.m. at Westside Yoga, and I plan on adding more classes in the second half of 2013. My class focus on, as much as possible, living more fully in our bodies and learning to pay greater attention to our health and heart. I also teach occasional workshops combining yoga and writing as way to recover bodies and voices, and I often incorporate poetry into my yoga classes and breathing and stretching in my writing workshops.
Writing on Yoga: I am honored to write twice a month for Hugger Mugger’s blog, alternating between poetry of/on yoga and writing about practice, teaching and being. For several years, I wrote a similar column for the now-defunct Magazine of Yoga, which holds an archive of articles and poems here (each poem with a writing prompt too). I also wrote a collection of yoga poems as part of Landed, a book of poems. Link to all my columns here.
