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Many years ago my best friend sent me a copy of the book When Things Fall Apart by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. At the time I was unfamiliar with her work, but my life was definitely falling apart and out of my control. So I was interested in what it might offer to...

A great many of my most important teachers are people I’ve never met. That seems like an odd statement, I know, so I’ll have to explain. I’ve been an avid reader since – well, since the moment I learned to read. As a child, my first favorite book was The House at Pooh...

It is said, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Upon reflection of the road I’ve traveled so far, I had no idea at the time how true these words would turn out to be. As someone who grew up with emotional obstacles and low confidence, I learned at a...

We have all been students and have had many teachers. As students, we remember those teachers who have given gifts that we take with us throughout our lives. It’s the little stuff—the details we learn that inspire us to find our passions. My parents were my first...

Growing up in the Netherlands, I was introduced to yoga as a child by my aunt, Frieda Thepass, who lived with us. In 1957 she founded Stichting Yoga Nederland (now known as Yoga & Vedanta ) with a small group of yoga friends. It is still one of the most respected...

When I lived in northern Kentucky in 1999, my roommate and I signed up for a six-week, once-weekly yoga class learning the sun salutations in a gymnasium. We went every week and loved it. But that was the end of yoga for me until I moved to Ft. Myers in 2003. At that...

Ironically, I began massage therapy school without ever having received a massage. However, I was attracted to the idea of touch as a method of healing the body both physically and emotionally. In 1998 I graduated from the massage therapy training program at the...

My first experience with yoga occurred in 2006 shortly after moving to Florida from northern Virginia. Moving out of state was a particularly difficult decision to make, but I bought my first house, packed my belongings, and ventured 1,000 miles away from everything...

A few times over the past couple years I have been asked the question, “When did you start practicing yoga?” I realized that, subconsciously, I have been practicing yoga throughout my life and in various ways since I was five years old. At that age, I would put on...

I was eleven years old when I watched Mark Spitz win his seven gold medals in the 1972 Olympics. A nearly full-size poster of him in the red, white and blue speedo hung on my sister's closet door. My father's stopwatch was always nearby. We were a family of swimmers....

Around the year 1965, a woman named Sue Luby moved to my hometown of Andover, Massachusetts and changed my life. Sue offered yoga classes – we’d never heard of yoga, but for some reason my mother decided we should give it a try. This would have been around the early...

I came to yoga in a way that is not usual for me—little by little, one piece at a time. Usually, I hit things full force, but with yoga it was a much slower process in the beginning. My first experience with yoga was attending classes with a friend of mine in a large...

I have always enjoyed moving around. After teaching elementary school for 10 years, and the birth of our son, I began teaching fitness part time at our YMCA—aerobics, strength training, weights, loud music, etc. If that wasn't enough, I took up running and competed in...

My first yoga class was in 2002. I remember one pose in that class, Viparita Karani, known in English as Legs Up the Wall. It struck me as being very relaxing and not at all what I expected. In 2003 I retired and found myself with time to devote to a more fit...