Guys Talking Yoga

Dr. Loren Fishman is a physiatrist with a private practice in Manhattan and he is also a professor at Columbia University Medical School where he teaches Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine. He discovered yoga in the 1970s while reading a copy of BKS Iyengar’s Light on Yoga in India and was so inspired he traveled to meet the author who ultimately inspired him to learn and use yoga to help he...

In 2012, seventeen-year-old Jan Andrysek was playing ice hockey in Prerov, a small town in the Czech Republic, when he was introduced to yoga by his coaches during his off-season training. Initially skeptical he quickly realized yoga helped with strength, mobility, injury prevention, stress management, breathwork – and just getting a good night’s sleep.  So in 2019, convinced that more h...

Today’s conversation is with twenty-year yoga practitioner Knight Kiplinger, an economic journalist who is Editor Emeritus of the Kiplinger financial media company in Washington, D.C., publishers of business forecasts and personal finance advice – known for the weekly Kiplinger Letter, monthly Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine and daily Kiplinger.com. Kiplinger wa...

Kevin Geniza is a 2020 graduate of the University of Oregon where he was a leader on the golf team that won the PAC-12 conference title and was runner-up in the 2017 national championship. He was drawn to play for the Ducks because their coach, Casey Martin, incorporated yoga into the team’s fitness program where they were instructed to work on their breath and explore who they are as student-athl...

Today’s guest is Robert Stern, an Assistant Professor of History & Legal Studies at Saint Thomas More University. While in his mid-thirties, Robert initially found yoga as a way to get through long winters as a graduate student. Yoga gave him physical benefits and also served as an outlet to deal with the stress of traveling to and from Cincinnati to Chicago while looking after his ailing fath...

A veteran of the Iraq War and with 28 years of uniformed service, Dr. Vincent Arnold has supported and served nearly all the branches of the US military, including the Air Force, Coast Guard, Marine Corp., and the Navy before retiring with the rank of Chaplain in 2007. Upon his retirement from active military service, Dr. Arnold served as the first civilian Clinical Director and Department Head fo...

In 2018 Brian retired from the Army with the rank of sergeant first class after nearly thirty years of service. And while his aunt introduced him to yoga way back in the 1980s, he didn’t get really into the practice until he signed up for a 200-hour teacher training program to give him something to do during the lockdown. What he found was not only exposure to many physical modalities of yoga, but...

As a first sergeant in the US Air National Guard, Dominic Stanley’s job is to provide support in regards to health, morale, welfare, etc. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a yogi who both practices and teaches yoga. Dominic found yoga after returning from deployment in Iraq, and some of the struggles and challenges associated with the return to civilian life. He was already physically active, but his...

David Truesdale, a registered yoga teacher (RYT) and Certified Warriors at Ease teacher, is a founding board member of the Texas-based nonprofit Warrior Spirit Project. He serves others by sharing his passion for yoga and providing free trauma-informed yoga and iRest meditation to veterans and first responders in the great Dallas&nbs...

For Dennis Kerr, his military experience and yoga path have become intertwined over the last twenty years. Dennis enlisted in the Army in 2002 and went to Iraq where his path of yoga began after being inspired by the international bestseller, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and his curiosity led him to Rodney Yee introduction to yoga videos while deployed. Soon after, the discipl...

After over twenty-five years of service, Chris Davis retired as an assistant chief of police at the Fayetteville (NC) Police Department with service duties consisting of patrol, investigations, internal affairs, training, and as the Investigative Bureau Commander where he supervised over 150 employees. Prior to law enforcement, he served over three years serving in Operation Desert Storm and Deser...

Retired Major Mark Voelker (USMC) shares his path with yoga and how the practice has helped him develop the mind-body connection, learn to make better choices off the mat and be a teacher and leader for others in need.  He’s a certified yoga and meditation teacher, Warriors at Ease graduate and Level 1 instructor.  Mark is also a team lead at Semper Fi Odyssey where he works with injured and comba...

Christina Hickey, the Executive Director at Warriors at Ease (WAE), a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2011 whose pioneering co-founders were involved in some of the first clinical studies funded by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs involving the use of yoga and meditation as an adjunct therapy for combat-related health conditions.  In response to the succ...

Former litigator and corporate banker Larry Drexler entered his first yoga class curious but apprehensive. He soon realized the impact and perspective that yoga provided within his work and relationships, specifically the place of power and autonomy residing between his breath and thoughts. “When you're a litigator, when you're a lawyer, you're trained to be an attack dog. You're trained to be agg...

Growing on the ponds of Canada, Riley Cote dreamed of playing in the NHL and eventually made it. However, after five years in the intense role as an enforcer for the Philadelphia Flyers, he realized he wasn’t living his true path. Shortly before retirement, he found yoga as a means to physical, mental and spiritual health and well-being. In this conversation, Riley shares his story of shiftin...

Neil Taylor is many things - a musician, a meditation teacher, a yoga teacher, and a bodyworker. In this conversation, Neil shares how travel and lifestyle as a professional musician forced him to address health and wellbeing and led him to a meditation retreat that sparked his spiritual path. For Neil, yoga is about connecting with what is most important—our awareness. As he explains, “We all hav...

In his early twenties, Ryan Burnes carried a mindset of invincibility and bravado instead of the authentic version of himself that simmered beneath. He initially found yoga through the recommendation of a chiropractor to deal with back pain from years of pick-up hoops, but later, as he discovered the mind-body connection, the practice “found him” and offered the insight he was seeking into how he...

In 2015 Phil Sussman was a captain in the US Army who fractured his spine in two places during a training exercise. After struggling through the physical, mental, and existential pain of his trauma, and in his words “hitting rock bottom,” his wife suggested he give yoga a shot. Soon after that first class, Phil’s nascent practice began to not only pull him out of his pain and suffering, but also g...

Johnny Gillespie is the founder and owner of Empowered Wellness Studio and the creator of The Balanced Athlete®, a functional fitness program that teaches people how to mindfully move their bodies in a safe and more integrated manner. In addition to being a registered 500-Hour teacher with Yoga Alliance, he is credentialed and certified in strength and conditioning (CSCS), personal training with t...

Former emergency room physician, Dr. Ken Starr got introduced to Bikram yoga in 1996 while doing a rotation as a fourth-year med school student at Stanford. In this conversation, Ken, a board-certified addiction medicine specialist, shares how the adaptability of yoga can be a resource and solution for working through the emotional and physical stress that manifests in the body. www.kenstarrmd.com

The pandemic highlighted the accessibility of online yoga as the practice became one of the few options for those remaking their basements into fitness rooms during the lockdown. In this conversation, James Simboli, a coach and teacher at an all-boys boarding school in upstate Connecticut, shares how the pandemic forced him to consider yoga and how his appreciation resulted in the formation of a s...

Sit or lie back and let Chelsea Duke, owner of Glow Yoga of Eugene, take you through a short guided meditation that helps anyone reconnect after their practice, or any time when they need a moment to check out – and check in.

Chelsea Duke, the owner of Glow Yoga of Eugene, has been leading a range of yoga instruction and training with the athletic department of the University of Oregon since 2013. In our conversation, Chelsea shares how she’s incorporated a style of yoga focused on joint mobility, injury prevention and restorative practices to help men’s teams dominate their game and lives, on and off the track, field,...

Michael Susi is the director of global wellness at LinkedIn where he created and scaled its health and wellness program to meet the needs of sixteen thousand employees. In this conversation, we talk about his path from coaching and training to leading wellness at the world’s largest professional network and how he reimagined the curriculum by designing initiatives around the pillars of thoughts, b...

Ten tips to jumpstart your practice and get yourself on the path to becoming a stronger, wiser, and more balanced self before you know it.