Blog

Introducing Me as a Health Coach

I’m excited to launch a new part of my practice as a Certified Functional Medicine Health Coach. This compliments my current work as a yoga teacher and expert in physical rehabilitation and movement. I’m writing today to tell you my story about how I improved my health and invite you to explore this offering with me. For years I lived a healthy lifestyle informed by my yoga practice and both Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine, or so I thought. Then hormonal changes began taking over. I didn’t experience the apparent symptoms until my mid to late forties, but looking back, they started much earlier. By age 50, my body had changed quite dramatically. Joint pain, reduced range of motion in my shoulders, migraine headaches, low energy, mood swings, brain fog, and weight gain were just some of the reasons I began a deep dive to figure out what was going on […]

The Benefits of Using Weights in Yoga Practice

I promised to write more about strengthening and why I have been using hand weights in my yoga practice. So let’s take a deeper look at using weights, building muscle, and overall health. One of the things I like most about using weight in my yoga practice is how they help me integrate. The use of external load – meaning something other than your body weight – helps connect your body parts to your center and offers an opportunity to ground more fully and lengthen out along the core lines of the body for a full stretch. And because of this external force, your body adapts and grows stronger, more stable, and toned. Since so much of yoga is about awareness, let’s talk about proprioception. Proprioception refers to the body’s ability to sense its position and movement in space. Using hand weights in yoga can help to increase proprioception by […]

Building Strength

I’m super excited to bring hand weights to my yoga teaching. I have been on a journey to get stronger for over ten years. Once I realized that I was spending too much time stretching and trying to get into some deep yoga postures, I felt like I was always chasing pain around my body. But strength work changed everything. It became clear that my core was weak, which was part of the cause of some repetitive injuries I had been dealing with trying to manage. You may have been in a class with me where we have added external load using a yoga block, bolster, or blanket. However, unless you have worked with me privately or done a specific strength-building course I’ve offered, you may have experienced only some of the benefits hand weights can offer. First, I began focusing on more strength-building postures using my body weight and […]

Yoga and Lessons on Being Human

Let’s talk about how we take what we learn and practice on the mat into our everyday life. You may have heard me say that what we do on the sticky mat is rehearsal–the real yoga is everything it takes to live in the world. The time you spend on your mat learning to move well, connect to your center, balance, explore your boundaries, and grow them, all while breathing well, is all preparation to apply yoga out in the world. When you are on the make you cultivate presence and awareness. Are you bringing that into your daily life? Consider how you feel after a satisfying yoga practice. Words like present, calm, and centered may come to your mind. Your body feels good, your mind relaxes and becomes more at ease, and your energy feels balanced. It feels so good that it keeps you coming back for more. […]

My Journey to Contentment

When I was younger I dreamed of traveling the world. In college, I studied abroad and did a fair amount of traveling. After graduation, I moved across the country to San Francisco and got a job in the field I had studied at school. My career was going well and I was up for a promotion. On the outside, my life looked great. But on the inside, I was longing for something I could not quite put my finger on. There was an itch I was looking to satisfy. So I left my job and began exploring a new path. In the midst of all of this, I found yoga – though it felt a little more like yoga found me. In any case, it was as if I had come home. Somehow I knew this was my path. At the time, I did not quite understand or know the depths of it. Looking back, I realize […]