I moved to Colorado from my native South Carolina fresh out of college in the early 1970s. I intended to follow a career as a computer analyst for the rest of my life. Soon my life’s pathway led me to yoga, which I have followed ever since.

My first encounter with yoga was almost by accident. One of my first friends in Colorado talked me into taking a yoga class to deal with the stress of my new computer job. My first yoga teacher was the late Mardi Eardman, a wonderful person who influenced many, many souls in Denver. Through Mardi, my love affair with yoga began.

Since I had a background in dance when I lived in South Carolina and since my body was inherently very flexible, practicing the asanas seemed quite effortless. In addition, I experienced it calming my mind.

My second teacher, Herta Park, was also a very influential person. Herta introduced me to the metaphysical world and inspired me to take yoga beyond the physical realm into the spiritual. It was also Herta who saw in me a budding teacher and, acting as a true mentor, gave me a gentle push in that direction. I will always be grateful to Herta for her foresight and soft methods of persuasion.

Soon afterward my coworkers asked me to teach yoga during the noontime break. I jumped at the opportunity, but I quickly saw what a challenge it was. Perhaps because I inhabit a hyper-mobile body, I found it difficult, at first, to relate to stiff beginners and to teach them safely. To help rectify this deficiency, I enrolled in an Iyengar teacher training program in Denver, Colorado, with Felicity Green in order to learn proper alignment and to overcome the hypermobility.

I found the Iyengar style appealing because it built strength and physical awareness. However, by now, I had been practicing yoga for more than ten years, and my joints began to experience instability from my loose ligaments. I began to experience injuries, due to, I believe, lack of sufficient strength to balance my excessive flexibility and a lack of awareness about how to maintain skeletal alignment in the poses. Soon after, my medical doctor diagnosed my condition as degenerative arthritis of the lumbar spine.

My injuries changed my yoga and my life. Most of all, they gave me a great respect for respecting limits and learning to pay attention to my edge while maintaining yoga poses. They also led me in a path of discovery.

For the next 10 years I explored the therapeutic effects of yoga with a number of different teachers, and with considerable passion. My aim was to learn as much as I could in hopes of understanding my body well enough to stay free of pain. One teacher told me prophetically, "Your pain is what’s going to lead you to becoming a really good yoga teacher." However, my search didn’t end with yoga. In 1989 I enrolled in a massage certification program at the Massage Therapy Institute of Colorado for personal healing and to become a better yoga teacher by thoroughly learning about human anatomy.

My life’s work has led me in new directions, and I have been able to include many of these modalities into Body Mind Awareness Yoga. For example, I found that working with the emotions stored in the muscle tissue was a key to my personal healing process. This personal work, in turn, led me to training involving both psychotherapy and a certification in Body Centered Therapy. I believe this training showed me the strong connection between mind and body in yoga as well as in all other aspects of life.

During a particularly intense period of psychotherapy, I encountered rebirthing and became intrigued and respectful of the power of the breath. Since then, I have dedicated a significant amount of my practice and teaching to pranayama. This practice greatly influenced me to include focusing and working with the breath as one of the principle factors of my teaching style.

Still plagued with an unstable pelvis, I became interested the Pilates system of movement because of its focus on core stabilization. I began incorporating the Pilates principles of focusing on the lower abdominal muscles into my yoga teaching. Later I realized the yogis knew these principles all along but called them by a different name ¾ Uddiyana Bandha.

The Feldenkrais system of movement is another modality that I have included in the Body Mind Awareness system of yoga. By exploring movement to deepen awareness, which is the foundation of the Feldenkrais system, I found ways to move in and out of asanas with ease. I believe change begins within awareness and therefore encourage my students to uncover the awareness that already exists within each of them.

Without a doubt the most important influence on my teaching as well as my life is my spiritual practice. It helps me bring all of these elements together with a clear purpose. Quieting the mind, tapping into your own, unique divinity, and letting your yoga unfold as a moving meditation ¾ this is the essence of Body Mind Awareness Yoga.

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Body Mind Awareness Yoga Center
Evergreen, Colorado
303-674-6047
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