My Story
My
first introduction to yoga was when I was 8 years old. My father
enrolled my sister and I in yoga classes on Saturday mornings at
Northern Secondary School in Toronto. It was the early '70's and all
things Eastern were hip. We also took Transcendental Meditation
classes together as a family and I was given my first mantra by a
Guru. I was instructed never to tell my mantra to anyone....so I
promptly told my sister. Much to my disappointment, she had been
given the exact same one! As my father was busy raising three
children on his own, this period of spiritual exploration was short
lived, but memorable for me none the less.
It
was not until my early 20's that I came back to the practice of yoga
after returning from a few years of wayward travels. Arriving back
home in Toronto broken-hearted, poor and sleeping on my sister's
couch, yoga seemed liked a good thing to do to keep busy and prevent
my mind from wandering into the nethers of despair over my situation.
With no money for classes, I began practicing each day out of a book
my step mother had given me. At first I wasn't at all sure if I was
doing it right, but soon I began feeling the sensations of energy
being freed up and moving through my body indicating that indeed I
was doing something. I imagined this must be what 'they' called yoga.
After
a year or so I moved to Wolfe Island where I worked as a boat builder
for the Caravan Stage Company. It was during this time that I began
taking classes again. I spent about a year taking classes a couple
times a week before I decided that I really wanted to pursue this
inward path more deeply. Although I was happy living on the island,
something felt like it was missing from my life but I couldn't quite
place my finger on it.
In
January of 1998 I headed off to The Kripalu Center in Lenox, Ma.
where I took my initial teacher training and lived and worked as a
volunteer for a few months. At first I had no intentions of teaching,
I was merely looking for a way to spend a more intensive amount of
time practicing and figuring out who I was, and what I wanted to do
with my life. At 29 and Saturn returning I felt like I was searching
for something, but still didn't know what that something was. It felt
like there was a piece of me that was missing and that through my
yoga practice I seemed to be able to get closer to who or what that
thing was. Yoga for me has always been about cultivating a deeply
personal relationship with myself and through that process, I began
to uncover what I now have come to know as my feminine nature.
During
my training I realized that I actually liked teaching so after a few
months of working up north in the bush, I headed back to Toronto
where I began teaching part time at SEED, an alternative high school.
I had wanted to travel to India to study Ayurveda, but things didn't
quite work out as I had planned, so I settled for a training program
in the city. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do so a program
that offered a wide range of disciplines seemed best suited for me at
the time. I enrolled in a 2 year Holistic Health practitioner
training program, but soon found that even in the more complex
modalities such as homeopathy, I seemed to always come back to my
knowledge of yoga and astrology to form a symptom picture. As a
result, I found it difficult to maintain my interest. Having attended
an alternative high school myself and being self taught in astrology,
I found following a set curriculum of studies to be very difficult.
After the first year, I decided to abandon the course altogether and
moved to Winnipeg where I had been offered a full time teaching
position at Heartland yoga. Did I mention that I'm a Sagittarius?
My time spent in
Winnipeg was very beneficial and much more in alignment with my style
of learning through experience. I taught an average of 8-12 classes a
week and had plenty of time to practice. Since all I had to do was
teach, if I woke up at 3:30 in the morning I would just get up and
start practicing, sometimes spending as much as six hours a day
studying, meditating and practicing asana. The deeper I went in my
own practice though, the more uncertain I became of my right to
teach. The more I learned, the more I realized how little I actually
knew. That's when I decided to stop teaching and take a sabbatical,
moving back to Kripalu where I lived for another two years studying
and practicing karma yoga, or selfless service.
During my
sabbatical residency I was able to study with many of today's most
respected teachers but there were three things that impacted my
teaching and understanding of yoga more than anything else. The first
was realizing how I had given my authority over to our sabbatical
teacher Yoganand. Through his teachings, I was really able to see
myself, the self that felt it needed acceptance and approval from
some outer authority. The second was meeting and studying with Angela
Farmer, a beautiful and radiant woman and a long time Iyengar
teacher. She inspired me to new heights as a teacher, and encouraged
me to claim my own authority through honoring my intuition in
practice and teaching. I knew then that it was time to begin teaching
again. And the third was my day to day mentorship by lifelong
disciples of the Kripalu lineage, Atmaram and Chandrakant. Although I
never practiced asana with either one of them, these teachings often
happened at the end of each day while sipping Mataji's chai tea. To
this day I credit much of my off the mat and real life deeper
understanding of yoga to the two of them.
By 2002 I decided
that I needed to take what I had learned out into the world and put
it into practice, so I headed back to Toronto, my hometown. I soon
discovered that as great as my sabbatical experience was, no one ever
mentioned how difficult that transition back into the 'real world'
would be. Fortunately, I happened to have a few friends in the city
who had also lived at Kripalu and who were very supportive during
that time. We were all readjusting to living a spiritual life, while
meeting the demands of the material world we now lived in. By the
fall of that year, I decided to move to Key West, Fl. for the winter
to take some time to figure out what to do next with my life. I was
as surprised as anyone when I decided to open my own yoga studio.
Gone were the days
of being footloose and free, from 2003-2007 I owned and operated
Green Tara Yoga, Key West's first full-fledged yoga studio. As I saw
it, there was a bit of yoga going on here and there, definitely more
than there had been when I lived there in the early 90's, but there
was no place devoted specifically to the practice of yoga and its
spiritual roots. Within a year, the tiny 2 mile by 4 mile island of
Key West had five yoga studios! This was great and of all the things
that I have done as a yoga teacher I am most happy about the growth
and expansion of the practice that I helped to foster during those
years.
In 2004, I asked
Sarah Powers to come and teach her style of Yin/Yang yoga at Green
Tara. The earliest date we could arrange to have her travel to Key
West was November 2006, so I spent the next two years exploring the
Yin and Yang styles, integrating each of them into the curriculum at
the studio. We had a tremendous amount of interest in our restorative
yoga classes and in our flow based Yang style classes, we began
introducing a Yin posture at the start of each sequence. With five
studios in town now, all of us needed teachers to keep classes going
so Green Tara Yoga ran a 200hr. Yoga Alliance Teacher Training, led
by Christine Marguerite, also a former Kripalu resident, and myself.
By the time Sarah arrived we had a solid group of teachers and
practitioners excited to explore deepening their practice with her
teachings. Coincidentally, Sarah was a student of Lama Tsultrim
Allione's and she drew on her understanding of Tibetan Buddhism in
her yoga classes. Sarah had met on retreat a woman by the name of
Ellen Booth Church who happened to be a direct student of Lama
Allione's and founder of the Key West sangha that practiced at Green
Tara Yoga. Things seemed to have come full circle.
In June of 2007, I
decided to move back to Canada and eventually settled on Wolfe Island
where I live now. Currently, I teach both Yin and Yang style classes
in Kingston, Ont. This gives me the chance to develop long term
relationships with my students as we explore together the evolution
of our practices. I also offer workshops and retreats as a way of
sharing my experience of yoga with others in a more comprehensive
way. I have always viewed yoga as something that needed to be able to
grow and change with me. Though the outer form of my practice has
taken on different forms over the years, I continue to strive for
mastery, realizing that perfection is not possible. This is what I
seek to share with others.
My other area of interest lies in teaching teachers. One thing that I have found over the years that seems to be improving in teacher trainings, is the need to address what it means to teach: what it means to be a good teacher, not just to know the postures. At present I am developing workshops and retreats, as well as working on a book, designed for teachers to look at the deeper challenges our chosen profession presents. I also work one on one with teachers, mentoring them in issues that arise within the studio setting to help them define where their true gifts lie. It is in this realm that I feel my true gifts are expressed most fully.