My relationship with yoga was born less from a search for a career and more from a search for meaning.

I was born in the United States and moved to Canada when I was nine, growing up between American and Canadian cultures with Eastern European roots running through my family. From a young age, I often felt a little different from the world around me. Individuality and self-expression didn’t always come easily in the environment I grew up in, so creativity became one f my first languages.

I drew, painted, danced, moved, and found ways to express what I didn’t always know how to put into words. There was an independent spirit in me from the beginning—a need to understand life through my own experience rather than simply accept what I was told.

My teenage years brought a much more difficult chapter. I struggled with anorexia, depression, and self-harm, and found myself confronting questions about identity, belonging, the body, and what it meant to be alive. Beneath those struggles was a deep search for something real—something that could give direction to my life and teach me how to inhabit my body rather than constantly fight against it.

Movement gradually became part of that search.

After exploring different forms of yoga, I eventually found Ashtanga. What began as a physical practice slowly became something much deeper: a relationship with discipline, breath, devotion, self-inquiry, and the willingness to return again and again.

I have now been teaching yoga for more than a decade, but I still consider myself a student first.

My path has taken me through years of practice, study, travel, mentorship, and training in Canada, the United States, and India. My work has grown to include Ashtanga, Hatha, Vinyasa and Modo-based practices, while my background as a Registered Massage Therapist has profoundly shaped the way I understand and work with the body.

For more than a decade, my hands have been one of my greatest teachers.

Massage therapy taught me to listen differently—to understand that bodies communicate constantly, that no two bodies are built the same, and that anatomy is something we experience, not simply something we study in a book. My training in Esalen® massage and years of hands-on therapeutic work continue to influence the way I teach movement, offer adjustments, and meet the person in front of me.

Ashtanga remains at the heart of my personal practice and teaching. I am deeply drawn to its lineage, discipline, philosophy, breath and traditional method, while also believing that tradition should never require us to stop thinking, questioning, learning, or listening to the individual body.

For me, practice is not about forcing ourselves into a shape or achieving a perfect expression of a posture. It is a place for research—a living conversation between tradition and the person practicing it.

This philosophy is at the heart of Ashtanga Yoga Club and the community I continue to build and nurture. I want students to experience the depth of this practice without feeling that they need to arrive as a particular kind of practitioner. Discipline and accessibility can coexist. Tradition and curiosity can coexist. Strength and softness can coexist.

And my education is far from finished.

I am currently—and, I hope, forever—deepening my study of yoga philosophy, anatomy, breath, the subtle and physical body, and Ayurveda. My growing relationship with Ayurvedic study continues to expand the way I understand the body, our individual nature, our relationship with our environment, and the many ways practice can support a life beyond the mat.

I don’t see teaching as standing at the front of a room because I have arrived somewhere others haven’t. I see it as sharing what I have learned while continuing to study alongside the people who choose to practice with me.

I remain curious. I continue to question. I continue to practice.

And after all these years, I am still discovering what this path has to teach me.