I am indebted, first of all, to Audrey Pattison - one of BKS Iyengar’s first students in the UK - for having had the foresight and courage to start a children's Iyengar yoga class in a London state primary school in 1976. As a 6 year old without any conceptual understanding, I simply knew I had found something which helped me feel at home. Yoga became part of my life. Over time, the discovery that I could choose where to place my attention - and that this choice influenced how I felt - grew into a curiosity about meditation and the dharma.
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In my early 20s I spent a year working with the Tibetan community in exile in Dharamsala, India, supporting Tibetan architectural heritage where I worked with Tibetan children and lived amongst Lamas and Rinpoches (senior teachers of Tibetan Buddhism), including the Dalai Lama himself. Their presence, lightness, laughter and friendship was a more profound teaching than any words might have been at that time. By the end of the year I felt ready to attend a silent 20-day Vipassana meditation retreat in a Thai monastery in Bodhgaya. I came away with a radically new experience of reality, and a taste of freedom I had never known before.

The seeds of this new reality were then watered by everyday life. I returned to the UK, completed a Masters degree focusing on the transformative potential of teaching yoga and meditation in schools, and completed a two year Iyengar Yoga teacher training. Near the end of this training I had the opportunity to join a teacher’s intensive taught by B.K.S. Iyengar and his daughter Geeta in India. After two months of daily asana and pranayama practice, I felt more steady, stable, open and present in my body and mind than I had ever experienced.

With this newfound steady strength and open clarity, the confusion and uncertainty I had felt about my path dissolved. I married the boy I had been dating through university, and together we moved to San Francisco. Arriving in 1997 as a newly qualified yoga teacher and passionate meditator in a city alive with yoga and meditation was incredibly inspiring. I practised yoga regularly with Judith Lasater (from whom I discovered a love of restorative yoga), Rodney Yee (who inspired me to include poetry alongside precision) and Sarah Powers (who showed me that it was possible to seamlessly integrate yoga with meditation and dharma teaching). I continued attending regular silent meditation retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, founded nearby by Jack Kornfield.

When my first child was born a few years later, only weeks after the tragic loss of my beloved brother-in-law, the sense of what truly mattered became clear. In this cauldron of life and death, I deeply understood that love was the guiding principle behind all my practices. For the first time, I gave myself full permission to do what I loved: alongside mothering my son, I began teaching and practising yoga and meditation full time. I also fell in love with Ashtanga yoga, and we travelled the long way back to London, practising daily for three months with Dena Kingsberg in Australia, followed by three months with Pattabhi Jois in India. Through this second phase of intense yoga practice, alongside the blessings of stability and openness I also discovered the meditative flow of yoga as an act of physical supplication and devotion.

Over the next nine years, we were blessed with two more children. During this long and precious period, I dived deeply into the meeting place between parenting and spiritual practice, which continued to reflect in my teachings. Alongside regular yoga and meditation classes, I began to teach pregnancy yoga, postnatal yoga, mindfulness for pregnancy and baby massage, as well as offering support as a birth doula. As my children grew, my practice and teaching continued to reflect these changes in our lives, and my attention was able to turn towards reparenting myself as well. I was supported to integrate childhood trauma as it surfaced by both Sarah Powers and Martin Aylward, with whom I continue to study. After becoming endorsed as an Insight Yoga teacher with Sarah and Ty Powers and a Mindfulness teacher with Martin Aylward and Mark Coleman, I felt ready to offer yoga retreats to share and integrate the sacred practices which had been holding and guiding me for over twenty years.


Some years later, another thread was woven into this fabric of yoga, meditation and dharma, when I began to study the animistic cosmology of the Andean-Inkan Holy Mountain tradition in Peru with Tupaq Titto Kuntur. The palpable experience of an alive and intelligent universe, both inseparable from me and pulsating with the very same energy of love which had been guiding me for so long, felt transformative. I discovered greater humility and surrender as my heart opened in trust and devotion. Feeling held in a web of belonging so much vaster than my mind could comprehend, allowed me to release some of the limiting beliefs and behaviours which had previously kept me safe but small, and lovingly feel some of the emotions I had previously been hiding from or drowning inside. 



I have come to honour how life's challenges and blessings offer the friction and support necessary for true transformation. I am grateful for the support and guidance of yoga, meditation, dharma teachings and the natural and spirit worlds, and am equally grateful for the joy and challenge of being alive at a time of great transformation. I have deep faith in our human potential to live in love, and sense this potential begins with the simple yet radical choice to embrace this immediate, embodied moment with curiosity and kindness.



The immediate, embodied, experience of this moment, held with love, allows us to respond with love. And this world is so ready for love's infinitely creative, wise, compassionate, powerful, peaceful, free and joyful response.