I was an early-2000’s East Coast transplant when I attended my first yoga class in sunny California. It was intimidating. I felt like I was surrounded by experts, and when the teacher asked us to move in a way that felt foreign in my body, I became frustrated and wanted class to end. But I will never forget the deep sense of peace that overcame me as I walked back to my apartment. It was as if the world, and my place in it, was just right. I wondered, how could something as simple as moving my body while breathing create such a sensation? This is the question that has kept me coming back to my mat ever since.

Over the next few years, yoga became a bigger and bigger part of my life, as I sought respite from a stressful career in the digital advertising world. I completed my 200-hour teacher training through YogaWorks, a studio that taught a blend of Ashtanga, Iyengar, and Viniyoga, and finally figured out a way to leave my corporate career and teach yoga full time. I enjoyed teaching at studios throughout the Bay Area, as I completed my 300-hour teacher training, also through YogaWorks. 

Having spent a decade working in the corporate sector, I saw a need to make the benefits of yoga easier to access for desk workers. My husband and I started a company called Reboot Yoga, that brought the benefits of yoga into office spaces around the Bay Area. Reboot Yoga teachers were a breath of fresh air and wellness as they wheeled into office spaces suitcases full of mats, blocks and straps, to teach much needed yoga classes in kitchen areas, conference rooms, rooftops, and lawns.

After a move from the Bay Area to the Central Coast of California, I began offering up a weekly community class on Sunday mornings to our neighbors, and began teaching public classes at Harmony House, a yoga studio in Pismo Beach where I still teach today. I folded up Reboot Yoga, and instead of bringing yoga into Bay Area tech companies, I brought yoga into my kids' elementary school. I discovered the creativity that came along with introducing children to yoga. 

Over the years, my style of teaching yoga has deepened. While I love teaching yoga to anyone and everyone, I’ve found that my “sweet spot” is teaching a gentler yoga class to folks who are newer to yoga or may be struggling to move their bodies easily. To borrow from my time in the corporate world, this is a “win-win”: I get to teach from my heart and feel my love for yoga at every class, and my students feel cared for and reap the many benefits of yoga at a time in their lives when they the practice of yoga is much needed. Our mostly sedentary lifestyle here in the West can sometimes make moving difficult, especially as we age. I’ve seen this first hand watching my parents and my in-laws struggle to stay healthy and mobile despite physical setbacks.

I want to work to teach a gentle yoga class that will help people to build strong and flexible muscles, mobile joints, controlled breath, a calmer mind, and the confidence to move through life with more ease.