About

I was not a yoga prodigy.

 Just the opposite in fact.  

I started life as an emotional wreck. I was picked on by kids at school, and as a result ended up with a deep distrust of most people, and virtually non-existent sense of self worth. With the exception of a few key individuals, I felt that the world couldn’t care less if I lived or died.

I don’t feel like that any more – not even close.  Now my life has meaning. I love my work, I love my family, I love my community. I feel welcomed by the world.

I teach yoga because it led me from there to here.  
I want to share that path with others.

My father’s sister was a yogi, and traveled to India to study back in the 70’s.  There was something special about her – her vitality, her passion for life, her genuine, playful love for us little kids.  Somehow, I knew it came from her yoga.  So I started taking yoga classes as soon as I could, which happened to be college.  We spent a lot of time on poses.  Something there mattered, but it remained just beyond my grasp.  

Not finding my yoga home, I followed my other passion: Wilderness.  Being a kid that didn’t get along well with others, I felt totally at home and embraced by wild places.  The grace of the sunshine, the clear water in a creek, and the birds gently flitting around in the willows healed my broken soul.  I studied wildlife biology and for ten years after college led backpacking and river rafting trips into the wildest places I could find in North America.

But years in the backcountry of the western US exposed me to the worst underbelly of natural resource exploitation, and its devastating impact on the wild places that I loved. I would find toxic mining waste seeping into rivers that salmon were trying to live in, clear cuts of irreplaceable old growth trees, overgrazed meadows eaten down to the nub, and whole herds of cattle defecating in the creeks.

I saw that it was the people who knew the law who were making the greatest headway on making things better. So I enrolled in law school.

The day after I passed the bar exam in 2006 I moved to Bend.  Finally, in a mid-sized town for a while, I looked for yoga classes.  To my surprise, I almost immediately found a yoga home.  I found Baptiste yoga, which was an athletic vinyasa flow.  I felt that it’s aggressive movement was a good complement to my newly deskbound life.  

But March of 2012 changed that trajectory.  I was driving over the Cascade Range in a snow storm to a conference on Public Interest Environmental Law when a Jeep Cherokee skidded out of control on the ice, crossed the center line, and hit me head on.  The night before I had taught the most advanced āsana class at our studio. Now I couldn’t walk.  Baptiste yoga, and its athletic vinyasa flow, had nothing to offer me any more.

Fortunately, in 2009 I had been to an intriguing workshop on the Yoga Sūtra-s with Chase Bossart – who is now my root teacher.  I was able to see right away that this was the depth I was looking for.  This teacher actually knew the difference between general feel-good inspiration, and the real teachings of yoga.  Still naïve, and with the diligence of a lawyer tracking down obscure case law, I delved into the Yoga Sūtra. I got several different translations and started to try to read it myself.  I compared each translation, and tried to divine the real meaning from these esoteric books.  Sure that I would eventually find the insight I had seen at the workshop I worked this challenging path for several years.

After the accident, and no longer able to do the Baptiste practice, I finally went to additional workshops with Chase. Sure enough, that same spark of insight was there.  Through some miracle I got him to take me on as a personal student, and that began a transformation that I had no idea was even a possibility in this life.

My chief complaint was back pain from the accident.  We worked on that with āsana, but he also insisted that I do prāṇāyāma (breathing exercises) and meditation.  I did – it’s all part of the yoga thing.  He asked me about all sorts of other things in my life … like why I did environmental law, and how well I slept at night (not well at the time).  He gave me a practice that was completely different from anything I would have chosen.

Most of the changes happened slowly, at a level that was deeper than I had any conscious awareness of. But every now and again something would happen that allowed me to feel how far I had come.  

For example, projects I used to procrastinate on started getting done early.  The sense of dread I used to feel at speaking to a crowd faded to something completely manageable.  

Perhaps one of the biggest was the day that I had the genuine feeling that I had had a good childhood.  When I finally left that horrible bullying situation I put up a wall against that whole part of my life and resolved to never think of it again.  Anyone who’s tried this eventually discovers that it doesn’t work.  The deep-seated sense of shame and worthlessness engrained by years of humiliation were too much a part of my fabric.  They came with me even if I ignored my past.  But behind that wall was also sweet love of a family that took the old camper up the coast of California to go fishing, diving for abalone, and sing with friends around the campfire on the beach.  It was a genuine, passionate, perfect love by imperfect people who can only offer their presence – which they did with every fiber of their soul.  With guidance, and especially the meditation practice, I was able to feel the beauty of my childhood for the first time ever … for real.

Shifts like this have changed me at a level beyond any rational understanding.  I could not have willed myself to feel the sense of self-confidence, and belonging that now reside at my core.  Even if I had rationally known that I was not worthless, the part of me that felt rejected by the world wasn’t interested in listening. Its response was “yeah, you may try to think that, but I know the truth.”

From this deep inward transformation unexpected outward possibilities have flowed.  I now work for a law firm, the Western Environmental Law Center, whose mission is to protect the wildlands, wildlife, waters and communities of the western US.  My specialty is negotiation and collaboration.  The hyper-sensitivity to people’s emotional states, and ability to stay cool in the face of mean-spirited barbs – born of keeping myself safe in a bullying environment – is now my secret strength, my super-power.

I am far from perfect. I only started this process in 2012. I fall out of balance all the time, and all the old emotions jump right up.  But I know how to fix it.  I know those feelings are just symptoms, and not the real me.  When I am in balance I can hear my calling – my higher purpose for being here.  And the sense of deep gratitude for having such purpose is a kind of peace I never knew when I was consumed by shame and fear.

In 2016, after three years of one-on-one mentorship, I began formal studies to learn to learn to be a mentor myself.  I work with my teacher’s close guidance.  We talk about students when I get confused or encounter something new.  He worked with his teacher, Mr. TKV Desikachar one-on-one for 20 years.  I have a long way to go, and I am grateful to discover a path that I know in my heart is worth walking.

link: how to get started