Bonnie Golden
Bonnie has been a counselor, teacher and writer throughout her entire career. In her mid-forties she began to practice and study yoga in earnest, after teaching parts of the yoga tradition to her adult stress management classes since the late 1970s. She credits a multitude of wonderful friends and teachers for supporting her in the yoga journey, including the amazing women on this blog, and her Tucson teachers Chris Coniaris and Natasha Korshak. She is proud to have recently become a licensed Yoga Tune-up® teacher with Jill Miller, received her 200 RYT from Tias Little's Prajna Yoga, and completed Relax and Renew Training® with Judith Lasater and Roger Cole . She's a wife, a mom of two sons, a "budding" gardener and a rudimentary knitter. She teaches yoga at a community college, to her friends and husband, and is currently guiding elders in chair yoga at a nursing home.
Read all posts by BonnieVisit Bonnie at Yoga Tune-Up
Andrea could make her yoga bio-sketch sound dreadfully important –trained in India, practiced for over 20 years, studied with major teachers…. While all true, it’s also profoundly misleading and irrelevant. She studied with no one famous in India, mostly practiced for all those years in her own living room, and the major teacher experiences were usually at workshops. What is more true is that Andrea is trying to reclaim a yogic life, balancing that with other kinds of “becoming” –becoming a scholar, becoming a single person again, becoming a middle-aged person, becoming an athlete, becoming a writer…. If the choices here are “tear out her hair” or “practice yoga and possibly find some equanimity, “ the choice is clear.
Read all posts by Andrea
Visit Andrea's blog, A Small Group of Thoughtful, Committed Citizens
Sophia Verzosa
Sophia is a forty-something mom, wife, yogini and graduate student living in southern Alberta. When she began yoga fourteen years ago to help ameliorate the effects of tight muscles, aching joints and a sore back, she did not anticipate the lifelong and all-absorbing journey it would become. After training with Lana Salant Ackerman of Yogawareness, she began teaching in 2002. Seeing the beneficial effects of yoga on her students as they experience life transitions, she became increasingly curious about the physiological basis of those benefits. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree, focusing on the effects of yoga practice on women in menopause. When not in school, she is happiest outside with her family, enjoying the wide Albertan sky.
Read all posts by Sophia
Sharon Frost
Sharon, an artist, is in her mid-sixties. Her involvement with yoga is long-standing but was slow to develop: from episodic experimentation with books (and later videos) in the early 80s, to daily practice, to finally venturing into a class situation in 2001. Most of her class experience has been in Anusara, Iyengar and other alignment-centered yoga. Since her retirement from her curatorial day job, she has completed teacher training (with Jonathan Fitzgordon), done a little teaching and continues to work on her practice at home and in class.
In addition to art and yoga Sharon is working on eventual (possible?) fluency in Spanish. She and her husband travel to Spain and Argentina whenever they can.
Read all posts by Sharon
Visit her sketchblog: sharonfrost.typepad.com/day_books
Jill Smith
Jill is a forty-something wife, editor, yogini, and graduate student living in the Washington, DC area. Her mom introduced her to Kripalu yoga over 12 years ago, shortly after she graduated law school. She has studied Iyengar and Anusara yoga and taught hatha yoga before the rest of her life became too overwhelming. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in library science and when not running or doing yoga would generally rather be knitting or reading.
Read all posts by Jill
Visit Jill's blog, Writing or Typing
Elisa Fante
Elisa took up yoga in the early '90s in an attempt to ease the stress of practicing law in New York City while raising young children. Eventually, she ditched the law, kept the children, and moved to the suburbs, where she spends her time managing a houseful of teenagers and pets, hiking with her husband, running, cooking vegetarian food, and trying to find a yoga class she likes in Long Island.
Read all posts by Elisa
Kimberly Van Orman
Kimberly is a graduate student in upstate New York working on her dissertation on the philosophy of mind. She started playing with yoga videos in the late 80s/early 90s with Lilias and Patricia Walden. Save for a few years in the 2000s when she studied Ashtanga, Kripalu and Iyengar Yoga somewhat seriously, she has mostly remained a dilettante. Her current physical yoga practice is completely piecemeal, consisting mostly of "house yoga," "bed yoga" and some mindful stretching and self-massage after triathlon training. She does still strive for mindfulness in her workouts and her daily life and is grateful for her yoga experiences, friends and practice, even if they aren't part of her current focus.
Read all posts by Kimberly
Chris Miyachi
Chris has been doing all kinds of yoga for twenty five years. In the summer of 2006 she completed a 500 hour Forrest Teacher Training Foundation course with the support of her family. In May of 2007 she completed the Forrest Yoga Advanced Teacher Training (75 hours). She has assisted Ana Forrest at weekend workshops, teacher training intensives and the Yoga Journal Conferences in Boston since 2007. She has also completed an apprenticeship at Back Bay Yoga in Boston with Lynne Begier where she teachs and continues to practice and assist.
She also has a strong interest in Iyengar Yoga and studies weekly in the Boston area with Iyengar teachers Patricia Walden, Peentz Dubble, and Karen Wenc. She has also attended workshops with Shiva Rea, Erich Schiffman, Barbara Benagh, Julie Gumasted, Heather Tiddens, Desiree Rumbaugh, Richard Freeman, and Tias Little. She is a certified Forrest Yoga teacher and an RYT (Registered Yoga Teacher) at the 500 hour level.
Read all posts by Chris
Visit Chris' website, Tomariken
Lianne Raymond
Lianne practices yoga, life coaching and educating teenagers on Vancouver Island. She was sent to her first yoga class in 1996 by her chiropractor who thought it might help with chronic neck tension. It ended becoming a core influence in her life showing up as the focus of her MEd thesis, taking up all her extra cash in yoga training, informing her teaching and her relationships and eventually leading her to become a life coach (she considers Patanjali's Yoga Sutras to be the original self-help book.)
Read all posts by Lianne
Visit Lianne's website
