About Alice

Alice teaches meditation and Yoga to a diverse audience in New York City and also via phone and Skype. Her gentle approach puts newcomers and those who are suffering at ease.

Alice’s own exploration of meditation and Yoga is deep and ongoing.  She has completed over 1200 hours of formal study in meditation, therapeutics, and the wisdom of Yoga. She has also spent countless hours in an ongoing, independent study of diverse mystical traditions and meditation practices.

Alice embraces the physical practice of yoga as “a refinement of the body/mind and of awareness” and teaches therapeutics for wide-ranging issues including osteoporosis, back pain, and cancer.

Before becoming an instructor of meditation and Yoga (in 2008), Alice had careers in global banking and as a consultant to the banks and other firms. With years of experience in competitive corporate cultures, Alice is uniquely qualified to bring these practices into the workplace.

Alice is a lover of the arts, New York City, and the seacoast of her native New Hampshire. She embraces the uplifting view that everything is an opportunity for our expansion.

My Intention

My intention is to help people experience deep-level healing and wholeness through Yoga and its core practice, meditation. It is ultimately to help people discover and become intimate with the deepest, truest part of themselves.

I recently learned that the etymological origin of “to heal” is “to make whole.” When we become familiar with and rest in our truest, most authentic Self, we’re resting in the part of ourselves that is whole.

The Yoga traditions refer to this deep, true self as the atman, or the Self; Buddhists refer to it as one’s essence-nature; many modern-day Teachers refer to it as one’s essential self. In secular parlance, it’s primal awareness.

There are many ways to become familiar with our core of Self including via a secular exploration of the nature of awareness.

Everyone’s Yoga journey is unique. Often it’s the desire to heal a therapeutic issue or to find ease and balance in our lives that brings us to the mat. In our journey, we might heal physical issues, come into more optimal physical alignment, release stored grief, learn how to calm ourselves, and discover the vitality, ease, and joy of the present moment.

As a Teacher, regardless of where we are in our journey, I’m always interested in these questions:

Influences

Wisdom

It’s been twelve years since I started my deep dive in the formal study of Yoga philosophy. I am still on fire for the wisdom of Yoga, especially for the “View,” texts, and practices of the pinnacle of the Yoga traditions, Kashmir Shaivism.

My teaching is also informed by:

• • • Classical Yoga’s foundational wisdom
    • Vedanta and the direct path to pure awareness
    • the mystical core of Christianity and other paths of the heart: the Hindu Bhakti tradition and Sufism
    • Taoism’s wisdom on effortless action from a still center of being
    • Buddhism’s wisdom and practices for mitigating suffering
    • what Lex Hixon referred to as “the open space” beyond all the great traditions
    • secular meditation and mindfulness practices which increase our intimacy with our own awareness
    • the growing body of rigorous scientific research that shows how meditation changes the brain
    • this question…
  What would love do?

Teachers

My primary Teacher—of meditation, nonduality, and the philosophy of Yoga and Tantra (Kashmir Shaivism and Shaktism) since 2008—is Sally Kempton. I love—and share—Sally’s playful, pragmatic, experimental approach to meditation. I also appreciate her impulse to steer clear of dogmatism. The advice she recently shared is: Take this paradigm and any paradigm with a grain of salt.

I have also studied philosophy and mediation deeply with these world-class Teachers:

Bill Mahony, Vedanta, Bhakti Yoga, Kashmir Shaivism
Paul Muller-Ortega, Kashmir Shaivism (Workshops and The Siva Sutras)
Chris Wallis, Shaivism
Chris Tompkins, Shaivism
Mark Dyczkowski, Kashmir Shaivism
Carlos Pomeda, Overiew and History of Yoga, Vedanta, The Bhagavad Gita and The Bhakti Sutras, Patanjali’s Classical Yoga, Kashmir Shaivism and Kundalini Yoga
Rudrani Farbman Brown, Origins of Yoga, Vedanta, Classical Yoga and Kashmir Shaivism

As part of an independent study on mindfulness, I immersed in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, with Florence Meleo-Meyers and Saki Santorelli, and Power of Awareness, with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach.

I also include among my most important influences: Rupert Spira, Teacher of nonduality; Eckhart Tolle, Teacher of presence; Llewellyn Vaughn Lee, Sufi Teacher; and Lex Hixon, Teacher of diverse traditions and the “open space” beyond all religions and traditions.

Yoga As A Healing Modality

Advanced trainings include:

“Yoga for Osteoporosis” and “Yoga for Back Pain” with Dr. Loren Fishman
Yoga4Cancer with Tari Prinster
“Yoga As Medicine” with Dr. Timothy McCall
Anatomy and Therapeutics, Ellen Saltonstall
“Working with Difficult Emotions and States” with Sally Kempton
“The Essence of Buddhist Psychology” with Jack Kornfield
“Tantric Psychology” with Chris Wallis

Original Anusara Yoga Teacher Training

My original yoga training and certification (2007 – 2008) was in alignment-oriented Anusara from World Yoga Center with Rudrani Farbman Brown and Jackie Prete. Read about how I became a meditator as part of this in-depth yoga training.

What I Love

In my original teacher training I was voted “most likely to be found on a beach in Mexico with a stack of Tantric texts.”

I’m drawn to beauty, delight in creativity and cherish authenticity.

I started practicing yoga when I was navigating a universal human experience – the loss of a loved one. In my first classes, I experienced yoga’s power to shift our mental and emotional state and to create deep feelings of well-being in body and mind.

Through the physical practice, I’ve healed my own therapeutic issues and through a deep, ongoing practice of meditation, I’ve re-connected with an underlying, ever-present current of contentment.

One day when walking on Amsterdam Avenue, aware and appreciative of the diversity of New York City, I had this thought: “What a wonderful life it will have been—to have shared the practices of meditation and yoga with so many different people.”

I love…

• • • The diversity and vibrant pulse of New York City
    • The night flight to London
    • The Yoga of art
    • Music, poetry, theatre
    • Shakespeare
    • Sam Gold’s production of King Lear with Glenda Jackson
    • The way Broadway sparkles at twilight
    • The rocky coast of New Hampshire and Maine
    • Small New England towns
    • Beauty—in nature and in architecture
    • Curling up on the couch with a book and a cup of tea
    • Meditating and journaling to capture a flow of insights
    • This deep feeling of well-being in my body/mind
    • Sharing the practices that help us quiet the mind
    • Helping people not suffer and connect with their center—their contentment and intuition
    • The brightness in students’ eyes after class
    • The radical, positive shift in someone’s state after they’ve gotten out of thinking and touched into a deeper dimension of themselves
    • Teaching group classes in thunderstorms or when the snow is falling
    • Using Powerpoint and my Tibetan Bowl to teach in the workplace
    • Capturing moments of beauty with my iPhone camera
    • In summer, the golden, early morning sunlight that floods my parquet floors and white bookshelves
    • The four seasons
    • The planes of Yoga which are a wonder