A bit more:

I began daily ashtanga practice in June of 2009 under the radiant, disciplined tutelage of Catherine Shaddix at The Mindful Body in San Francisco. Incidentally, about a decade earlier, when I was a teenager and I wanted to start learning yoga, my dad got out the yellow pages and looked under “Y.” The closest studio to our house happened to be The Mindful Body, and so twice a week I went for vinyasa and hatha classes taught by long time students of Richard Freeman, amazed by all the various people standing on their heads and moving their bodies with so much control and so little pretension. Down the road some, in a yoga studio in North Carolina, I saw someone doing a move referred to as “tic docs” and felt a tug of recognition. I asked the person what she was doing and she told me, “Mysore ashtanga.” There was no teacher where I lived, so I followed along to a DVD of Sharathji doing the primary series in my living room in Providence. When I returned to San Francisco in 2009 and looked up The Mindful Body, they were running a truly excellent Mysore program. I spent the next 11 years in the clarifying silent electricity of the Mysore room, first with Catherine Shaddix, and then with Noah Williams at Ashtanga Yoga Nilayam in Los Angeles. In 2018 I made my first study trip to Mysore to learn directly from Sharath Jois, and in 2022 I received his blessing to teach. Traveling to Mysore also put me in the orbit of the tremendous Angela Jamison, whose rigor in stewarding ashtanga is unparalled. To borrow her language, practice has put a lot of energy into my system, and teaching is a form of service that naturally follows that influx of energy.