My Story
I came to meditation and yoga the long way around.
For 20 years, I was a bookseller. I loved connecting people with stories, helping them find language for what they couldn't yet name. I found yoga and mindfulness during those years, but I didn't really need them yet—not in the way you need something when your life falls apart.
Then I walked through a personal tragedy that cracked my life open. I walked away from everything I knew and dove into practice—not because I was seeking anything lofty, but because I needed to feel less crappy and I found love. Yoga and meditation became the ground under my feet when nothing else made sense.
I trained as a yoga teacher, then as a meditation teacher. I fell into lovingkindness practice (metta) and found teachings that were about compassion, not perfection. And then I started teaching at Rikers Island.
For over a decade, I taught yoga and meditation to people who'd been told—explicitly and implicitly—that they didn't deserve care, let alone practices like meditation. I watched people discover that they could be kind to themselves. That they could sit with their breath and their pain and their humanity. It changed everything about how I teach.
Meditation isn't reserved for people who have it all figured out. It's for all of us—the anxious, the heartbroken, the angry, the lost. It's for people who've been left out, judged, or told they're too much or not enough. That's who I teach. That's who I write for.
Now I teach on platforms like Yoga International and Embodied Philosophy, lead workshops and retreats, speak at organizations navigating hard things, and train other teachers. I serve on the board of Liberation Prison Yoga and have worked with places like NYC Health + Hospitals to bring wellness programming to people who don't usually get access to it.
My book, Sit With Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation, comes out in March 2026. It's part memoir, part guide—and all about practicing lovingkindness when life is messy, which is pretty much always.
I teach what I need to learn. That's the practice.
