Mission
Shine your Inner Light boldly, brightly
What I love most about teaching a class or working with clients one-on-one is witnessing the inherent beauty in everyone. To look someone in the eyes, to see beyond limited perceptions and externalized traits, is to find relationship with the true essence of a person. This is where deep human connection occurs.
My personal yoga journey began while on assignment field-producing for Maria Shriver in Los Angeles. We were working together on The Sunday Today Show, a morning show at NBC Network news. By chance I found myself in a yoga class, which I later learned was an Ashtanga offering. Ashtanga is one of the purest forms of yoga, founded by Pattabhi Jois. He was a student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, widely regarded as one of the most influential yoga teachers of the 20th century. Because of his lineage and deep scholarly roots, Western practitioners would spend months studying with Jois in India and then return to the States to share his wisdom with their students. I became a passionate practitioner of Ashtanga. Six months into my studies with Jois-trained teachers a promotion to become an associate producer for Dateline NBC required me to move back to New York City, where I was based. I was immeasurably disappointed.
It took a year of trying many studios and teachers before I discovered Jivamukti Yoga. Co-founders Sharon Gannon and David Life, devotees of Jois, infused their offering with the esoteric teachings, the philosophical underpinnings, of the ancient tradition. They lit the flame that would forever change my life.
Thus began a love affair with a practice that gave me the fortitude and courage to heal my relationship to drugs, and food. Coping mechanisms that assuaged the anxiety and depression that flowed unbridled in my nervous system. But it was the death of my younger brother that catalyzed my practice into a higher calling. His death caused me to surrender barriers that kept me from an aliveness I had never been able to fully embody.
The path of awakening was rigorous, not as sparkly as I had imagined. I saw my resistances and my preferences, my habitual ways of responding—and I found the ferocity and compassion required to heal. Jois called this pada pada, Sanskrit for step by step. “Practice yoga and all things are coming,” he would tell students. And so I did. Step by step, day by day, month by month, year by year. I just kept practicing.
A vision of sharing my personal sojourn emerged while I lay on the floor, staring at a cavernous ceiling, after one of my many teacher trainings.
I imagined Inner Light Yoga. It was a tribute to my brother Scott. I wanted to ensure that everyone I touched through this practice connected to the light within, to their basic goodness; no barriers, no misguided thoughts of unworthiness. I knew then, as I know now, that yoga is a transformative practice. If we surrender and open our palms all things are possible. Self love is the ultimate gift. When we embrace the love of self, then we can shine our Inner Light boldly and brightly.
That is my mission.
Someday I hope to share my journey in a book I’ve been working on, called Surviving Enlightenment: An Urban Yogini’s Path of Awakening.