Around 1995
I was a nightclub promotor in Washington, DC when I took my first yoga classes, taught by Bart Church and David Ingalls.
I learned right away that, after trying a lot of other things, I’d finally found my path forward in life. And the new awareness I got from that first year of practice showed me that the nightclubbing lifestyle was not good for me.
Photo by Todd Franson for Metro Weekly
1996-1997
Burnt out from nightclub promoting, I headed for the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to learn everything except cooking from Michelin 3-Star Chef Patrick O’Connell.
I worked about six jobs at his legendary Inn at Little Washington in that year, ending up as Patrick’s butler and driver.
He taught me how to make gorgeous flower arrangements, how to host guests, and above all, he taught me that the pursuit of perfection is a noble endeavor.
It was while living there that I taught my first classes, in my living room, to friends that I’d promised a hot meal if they’d endure my first attempts at teaching.
December 1997
Obviously running low on printer ink, I posted these on bulletin boards around Northwest Washington, DC for classes in a space I rented at The Washington Ballet.
The posters got me exactly zero students, but my friends came and now we know that was all that was needed. Mostly people from the DC and Olympia music scenes, which were thriving then, my first dozen or so classes were made up of members of Fugazi, The Makeup, Bikini Kill, and Unrest.
1998-2001
Shortly after moving back to DC, I started teaching Tipper, who was Vice President Al Gore’s wife at the time.
I taught Tipper throughout the 2000 US Presidential campaign, at the Democratic National Convention, during the Supreme Court hearings that settled the results, and for years after.
Working with her showed me that I had a knack for helping people with very public lives learn how to go inside and take care of themselves. And I thank her for that because she taught me by example that it’s by cherishing our ordinariness that we can navigate extraordinary lives with sanity. I still draw from that teaching.
2001
When the Supreme Court chose George Bush to be President instead of Mr. Gore, I hightailed it to Los Angeles and started learning from Maty Ezraty, who remained my teacher for 19 years until her passing.
I can’t sum up the importance of this in a little blurb. Everything I do comes from what I learned from her and from doing the practice and the methodology that she taught me. Everything.
2000-2020
The Red Hot Chili Peppers thought it would be hilarious to hire Tipper Gore’s yoga teacher because she had been instrumental in getting certain music, including theirs, labeled as “explicit”. I’d met them when their tour stopped in DC and they took me with them. I taught them for ten years after that.
The word of mouth thing happens fast in Hollywood, and I went on to teach a whole lot of private yoga to public figures for the rest of the time I was in LA.
You can read more about that here.
2003-2010
Before Maty sold YogaWorks, the company she’d built, she taught me to teach teachers how to teach. After she left, I went on to teach the YogaWorks Teacher Training more than 20 times in the USA, Asia, and Australia, and continued to assist her when she taught workshops and trainings around the world.
Photo by Saam Gabbay
2010-2015
Teaching the YogaWorks training to people in different cultures taught me that a method developed for an American audience didn’t work everywhere, and that made me look a lot more deeply into what I was doing. I began to develop a new methodology that was less about technique and more about outcomes.
Around the same time, I opened a yoga studio called YogaPoser, first on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, then at the iconic Fred Segal store in Santa Monica- where all the classes were taught by people trained in that new methodology, and it got rave reviews!
2015-2022
In 2015, I got seriously burnt out trying to survive in an increasingly brutal yoga industry. I collapsed and went home to my family in Maryland.
From there I developed an e-learning platform for teachers, then sold the teacher training curriculum I’d authored to yoga franchise companies in Europe and the USA.
This led to opportunities with start-ups that valued my e-learning expertise, and that led to me knowing that the corporate framework is not for me.
From 2018 to 2022, I lived in Stockholm, then London, then Normandy, France.
2022
I came home to Maryland from living in France in December 2021 so I could enjoy holidays with family and renew my visa before going back. But I loved being near them so much that I decided to stay.
Now I live on the Patuxent River in the same spot where my little baby feet first touched sand, next door to the house my grandparents lived in back then. This is about one million times better than any place my journey took me, but I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t left.
The deep grounding that I’ve gotten by being here has allowed me to see who I really am again, and that is a teacher.
I’m here to share what I have learned with those who want to know it.
