A Point of View

I spent a lot of the first years of my career trying to teach everyone everything. I filled my yoga sequences with everything I could dream up and tried to appease everyone in the room in every class.

The greatest thing that happened to my group teaching and one on one coaching was developing a point of view. I studied numerous movement practices and schools of thought about joint mobility and breath and postural restoration. And while that study opened my eyes to new knowledge and possibilities outside the box of yoga, it also narrowed down what I was willing to teach and who I was willing to coach. I wanted to get specific. I wanted to get technical and anatomical. I wanted to reach people with chronic pain. I wanted to work with people on new planes of neurology and respiration and nervous system regulation.

So my classes don’t look quite the same anymore, if you haven’t moved with me recently. We won’t be doing any backbends. There will probably be more breathwork and resistance training involved. We won’t be doing 82 different poses - we’ll pick a few references to find and feel and try to replicate those references across simple but challenging movements.

I’ve eliminated the filler, the stuff I put into what I taught because I thought I should or because other people wanted it. I’ve pared down what I teach to just the few most important skills I believe most people are lacking in order to feel good in their bodies. And my teaching and my brain are much better for it.

One of my favorite athletic coaches Dan John says, “Over and over in my coaching career - and life, as I think about it - simply picking a few things from life’s buffet and sticking to it seems like a common sense success formula.”

I’ve definitely lost people along the way, people who ask, “where’s the yoga in all this? I want a yoga yoga class.” And it’s the best possible thing to hear. Go anywhere in LA, or online, and you can get a bendy, athletic, fast paced vinyasa class. I taught one for 5 years. When people are turned off by what I do now, it means I’m doing something different. I’m offering a point of view on human anatomy, movement, asymmetry, breath. You might not agree with that point of view, and it might change with what I learn and as a I grow. But I promise that a class taught from a unique outlook provides infinitely more value than a class with everything thrown in but the kitchen sink.