The daughter of a dancer, I’ve always loved movement. In 2002, that love of movement laced with a desire to find a form of exercise that would appeal to my more sedentary husband was the reason I began practicing yoga. We dusted off a VHS I had purchased a year earlier and committed to practicing every day for a month. It didn’t take long for me to notice that, unlike other forms of movement I had played with, (dance, swimming, running, weight lifting, team sports) yoga made me feel more calm, clear and steady. I noticed that situations that used to leave me feeling anxious, impatient or depressed no longer had the same effect. In just a few weeks of dedicated practice, yoga was already beginning to reveal it’s transformative magic. I continued to practice on my own for a few years before deciding to enroll in a teacher training. At the time, I still didn’t understand that yoga is an all encompassing art and science for realizing our fullest potential as human beings. That training opened my eyes to this truth and since then I have been dedicated to helping my students learn that asanas (or postures) are just one small piece of all that yoga has to offer. For nearly a decade I studied with many amazing teachers and dabbled with various styles of yoga, always seeking out practices that are simple, practical and effective in helping humans experience a state of being that is calm, grounded, fully present and profoundly alive. While all of them were beneficial in one way or another, I always sensed that I was missing something. In 2007 I discovered a small ashram in the woods of western Maine but it took me another five years to realize that the yogis living at this ashram had that something that I was looking for ... a clear intention and a practice developed to help one fully embody that intention. The philosophy embodied by these yogis is that all human beings are seeking happiness and fulfillment.    Everything we do has this ultimate desire at it’s core. We seek meaningful work, more money, the perfect mate or a healthier lifestyle because we think that once we have found these things we will finally experience happiness and fulfillment. While all of thesegoals are perfectly reasonable, what most of us discover is that the happiness is fleeting, dissatisfaction sets in again and a new desire arises along with the hope that the attainment of that desire will finally lead to the fulfillment we all crave. Vashi yoga is based on the view that the fulfillment we all seek is actually woven into the fabric of life itself. That fabric consists of three indisputable elements that are essential to this life as we know and experience it. Consciousness or presence (without it we would be in a vegetative state), energy (the primary source of that energy being our breath which literally defines our life with the first inhalation of birth and the last exhalation of death) and matter (or our bodies, which are the only vessels for consciousness and energy that we can experience directly in this moment). When we put our attention on our breath we enhance both the breath as well as our ability to be more fully present. When we move our bodies in certain ways we create within ourselves a more open vessel for consciousness and energy to flow through. When we find a practice that helps us to systematically enhance these building blocks of life we find that the fulfillment we all seek is always available to us. Wherever we are, whoever we’re with, whatever situation is arising, we always have the ability to shift our attention to the essence of who we are, to identify with that essence and discover within  the power to consciously choose actions that are consistently life enhancing. The beauty of this is that the life enhancing decisions you make ripple outwards and positively affect all whose lives you touch. My deepest desire is to live according to these principles and continue to find ways to make them easily understood and embodied by those whose lives connect (however briefly) with mine ....