The Day of the World Yoga Championships Here it is Sunday morning and we are up and out to take class and get ready for the big day. Both BYSJ teacher, Lee Dickensen, and Bay Area teacher, Gina Middleton, are in the top 10 of their division from yesterday’s successful competition (men and women ages 18-49). Today, my division (women…
I have had several “stand-out” memories with Joseph Encinia over the years in my yoga life. One of them plays like a time-lapse: watching Joseph in competition year after year always in the top 10, falling out of either Standing Head-to-Knee or Standing Bow pose. Every time, it was crushing to watch, as you just knew this guy was something…
How fitting to write this today, on my anniversary of 20 years of starting yoga! Yep – August 11th, 1998, just a few short months after my mom passed away. I took a class on the advice of friends to help my grieving, and never looked back. I instantly knew that Bikram yoga would be something that I would continue…
“Yoga Immersion” is what I will call the four days spent on a journey to Madison, Wisconsin to participate in the USA Yoga 2018 National Championships. Once you enter into the Immersion, life’s priorities become: how you are getting to class, when and how are you going to eat in between performances, and whether you brought what you need to…
I write this on Chris Canevaro’s 3 year anniversary of his passing. It seems impossible that it has been this long already. Where did he go? The older I get, the more I ponder the death experience itself as that day looms closer. It’s not a dismal pondering, but one of curiosity and of faith that, like all else, it will be…
It’s my 54th birthday! I enjoy celebrating birthdays and mine is no exception. Through the years, I make a point to do a gathering because my greatest gift is to spend time with those I love who mean a lot to me. Sounds like that might be easy to accomplish, but, as you experience, time with family and friends–quality time together–is sparse…
The older I get, the more I see the world as both a beautiful and yet a fallen place. I think generation after generation after generation, as we’ve heard for thousands of years, we will always have tension roaming as we vacillate from brighter to darker times, then from darkness into light. Conflicts occur between nation-to-nation, community-to-community, family-to- family and being-to-being.…
I’ve heard it preached, I’ve heard it on TED Talks, I’ve heard it from Bikram, and I’ve seen it in my own experience: the world always leans towards chaos, that is it’s nature. I’m not trying to sound dismal. In fact, quite the opposite. Let me explain. Chaos is a Tool I’m fortunate to have been teaching in one spot…
It’s been 15 years since Bikram Yoga San Jose came to be. We signed the first lease September 2002 and opened January 2003 in our 2,400 square foot home. Then, in January 2012, we opened here in our glorious 7,000 square foot home. Many of you know that I started the yoga 6 months after my mom passed away from…
December 14th is my sister Lori’s birthday. She would have been 51. She passed away at age 7 from Reye’s Syndrome, which thankfully today we mostly prevent now that we know children can be fatally allergic to aspirin, knowledge we didn’t yet have back in the mid ‘70s. I remember hearing my mother screaming in the hospital room as my father told…
