About Alice

2020 Fall Update

After the long, stark Spring in NY City, I was grateful to start working part-time in June, as a Yoga Therapist in Dr. Loren Fishman’s office. My work with Dr. Fishman, who wrote the books on yoga therapeutics, has been deeply rewarding.

What has sometimes surprised me while working alongside Dr. Fishman, whose wisdom and knowledge is vast, is not that yoga works as a healing modality. It’s how frequently yoga is the best therapy and how quickly some therapeutic issues are either healed or radically improved with the right yoga.

As summer gives way to fall, I’m aware the challenges the year 2020 has presented are not over, and for many, these challenges may deepen. Who knows what the fallout from COVID-19 will be or how the election will unfold in a year fraught with protests and social unrest? And who knows how many positive changes we’ll see due to the creative, entrepreneurial human spirit?

What I do know is that this is the ideal moment to start or deepen a yoga and meditation practice. And we can do so from the comfort of our own homes.

In addition to teaching Dr. Fishman’s yoga therapeutics in his office, I continue to teach Private Yoga and Meditation sessions on Zoom and Skype. (Facetime and WhatsApp are good backups when Internet connections fail.) In upcoming months, I look forward to teaching some group classes online. Please feel free to sign up for my newlsetter in the footer, below, to stay apprised of my offerings.

In my role as a consultant, my intention is to help deserving, high integrity organizations, transform and evolve.  For more information about my consulting services, visit alicehoganconsulting.com.

Finally, as we collectively navigate this transformational time, the view I choose to embrace is that everything is an opportunity for our expansion. May we use this time well, individually and collectively, to go deeper in our practices and to follow our bliss.

Who I Teach

A diverse audience; current and past students include:

• • • Columbia University postdoctoral fellows
    • Singers, dancers, musicians, and writers
    • Therapists, dentists, doctors
    • People suffering with therapeutic issues and chronic illnesses
    • Teens living with HIV
    • Yoga teacher trainees (mentoring in philosophy for certification exam)
    • The healthy aging crowd
    • Bankers and corporate professionals
    • Association for Financial Professionals’ annual event: Meditation and Mindfulness in the Age of Volatility: Essentials for Financial Professionals

What I Teach

• • • Yoga—alignment and therapeutics
    • Meditation
    • Presence and awareness practices
    • Self-care and foundations of well-being
    • Wisdom of Yoga and Tantra

For information on group classes and workshops, sign up for my newsletter in the footer below.

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.

The etymological origin of “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, to deal with mental or emotional suffering, 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 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

Yoga As A Healing Modality

Advanced trainings include:

“Yoga for Osteoporosis,” “Yoga for Arhtritis,” 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

Wisdom Traditions

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?

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
        • 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 access more spaciousness
        • 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 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