Whether you come to me for Ayurvedic Health Counseling, Somatic Education, or Yoga/Yoga Therapy, know that I will make recommendations and craft practices that suit your unique needs. Whatever you want to accomplish, I can help you get there.

My Story

I came to the practices of Ayurveda, Yoga, and Somatic Movement later in life. In my early 20s, I took a few yoga classes in a tiny apartment on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, and, despite my utter lack of flexibility, I liked how I felt when the sessions were over--enough to buy the teacher’s home practice cassette tape and a few books on yoga. The books soon sat on a remote shelf in my living room. The cassette tape fared slightly better--I used it maybe  a half dozen times before it wound up in a shoe box in my closet.

Fast forward twenty years to my early 40s: now married with two toddlers, a husband who worked long hours, and a dead-end job in medical marketing, I found myself overweight and chronically sick with bronchitis and sinus infections. I felt stuck. I was deeply self-critical, and that point of view colored my relationships with family and friends, making me judgmental and intolerant of other people’s imperfections. I wanted to live a more compassionate life. But how? How to get unstuck?

Starting to Practice

A yoga studio opened near my home in Brooklyn in 2000. As I started attending classes, the lessons of the physical postures--how to find flexibility within stability and stability within flexibility--began, slowly, to seep into my life off the mat. I quit the job I didn’t like, formed my own company, began singing in a choir, and volunteered my time to institutions that mattered to me. Two surgeries rid me of the sinus infections. One day I was able to touch my toes. I was getting unstuck.

The door into practice would swing widest, however, when my mother suffered a stroke in 2011 and I was in a serious car accident several months later. These brushes with mortality brought life’s short sweet span into high relief for me. What was most important? Surely not material things. Surely not holding myself and others to impossible standards of perfection. Love and kindness were all that mattered. I stopped running as hard and as fast as I could to achieve. Yoga speeded my recovery following the car accident and helped me shepherd my mother through hers. When a beloved teacher suggested I should join a 200-hour teacher training, I was at first incredulous but then thought, “Why not?” I was already attributing many of the changes I’d made to yoga, with only the vaguest idea of why the practice was so effective. It was time to learn more.  

Diving In

Thus began an intense period of study and practice that continues to this day and will shape the rest of my life. I soon came to understand that yoga is nothing less than a system for transformation on all levels--physical, energetic, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. The ancient seers who gave us Ayurveda and Yoga knew more than a thing or two about why we get stuck and the root causes of unhappiness--it arises from the incessant tumult of our thoughts and the ideas to which we hold fast, particularly false views of ourselves. Our minds can trap and imprison us, creating physical discomfort and vice versa–our bodies can lose function and restrict our minds. Body and mind (and heart!) are not separate, they are one.  

Transformation

Choose from any of these disciplines: Ayurveda, Somatic Education, Yoga. They all provide the tools necessary to make lasting change in your life and to help you move beyond suffering. Change begins when we notice thoughts and behaviors that don’t serve us. The first step, then, is to hone our attention and really look at how we conduct ourselves. How do we spend our days? What are we taking in through our senses? What habits have we developed in our physical movements? In our thinking? Do they serve us well? Each of these disciplines invites us to cultivate our awareness and to bring spaciousness and the sacred into everyday life. Quiet the mind, learn to see clearly, discover how to move with ease--these are the gifts of whole hearted, diligent practice. All that’s required is to start your journey now, from wherever you are. All this I humbly offer to you, if you are willing to begin.

My Credentials:

600-Hour Ayurveda Health Counselor Training (New Moon Ayurveda Academy, Joyful Belly School of Ayurveda); C-AHC through NAMA (National Ayurvedic Medical Association)

Certified Yoga Therapist (C-IAYT), International Association of Yoga Therapists, Certified Viniyoga Therapist

1000-Hour Certified Viniyoga Therapist, American Viniyoga Institute®

500-Hour Certified Viniyoga Teacher, American Viniyoga Institute®  ERYT-500 (Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher), Yoga Alliance

Certified Hanna Somatic Educator®, Novato Institute

Certified SMC® (Somatic Movement Center) Clinical Somatics Exercise Instructor, Levels 1-3

Niroga Institute Dynamic Mindfulness for Stress Resilience Training

Additional Education:

AB, Princeton University, 1979 with honors, Comparative Literature

LRAM (Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music) 1980

MFA, Columbia University, 1995, School of the Arts, Writing Division

“Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”

--Wu Men