The Weeks Well

As a model of 40+ years, Colleen Saidman Yee admits to being hyper-competitive and needing to be at the center of her classes and her universe. She found yoga in the late 1980s and has been teaching it since the 1990s. She owns Yoga Shanti in Sag Harbor, New York, where her husband Rodney Yee works for her as a teacher. We sat down to talk about Colleen's journey, which included lying about he...

This week I review my 2023 conversations to date and reflect on some standout episodes, including: 1) Jason Crandell and plumbing the depths. 2) Jivana Heyman and his encouragement to use yoga to radically embrace all parts of yourself for the sake of activism. 3) Gail Parker's work reminding us that if we practice yoga, it’s our job to be thinking about how many people have the opportunity to do...

Anjali Rao, president of the Accessible Yoga Association, thinks of herself as a supporter and co-creator, someone who is focused on exploring the histories (plural) in yoga and the stories of people who’ve been obscured through religion, caste, capitalism, cisgenderness, and patriarchy. She wants to highlight these stories within the narrow confines of what many people think of as yoga practice,...

Gail Parker is a trailblazer, and the paths she's opening up are those not in the exterior world but of the interior body. Like most who visit with me on this show, she has been practicing yoga for many decades. She started yoga in Detroit the year after the riots there, and the peace she found in the practice was as immediate as it was thorough. Gail's work is groundbreaking because it's specific...

For many in modern yoga, Cyndi Lee’s name needs no introduction. She started practicing yoga in New York with Sharon Gannon and David Life, who founded the Manhattan-based Jivamukti methodology. With both a BFA and MFA in dance, she soon decided to open Om yoga Center in 1998 (with just $800!), because the choreographed movements of the sun salutes she'd learned through Jivamukti made so much sens...

In the conversation on what yoga lineage is and why it matters, I knew that Richard Freeman, Mary Taylor and Barbara Benagh would offer a multidisciplinary, intersectional conversation that carries both deep respect for what has come before us and a passionate, insightful caring about what may be coming—not just for wisdom tradition practitioners but for the world as a whole. These three have cont...

It's difficult to separate the modern popularity of yoga from Rodney Yee. He was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1999 to talk about yoga after creating his landmark videos AM and PM Yoga a few years earlier. Overnight his videos and teachings sold worldwide as millions wanted to learn how to do yoga the way he taught it. As a yoga teacher of 40 years, and as a philosopher and artist with, by...

Jason Crandell has been called a “teacher’s teacher.” He talks about yoga being a mind-body-breath methodology that helps you more skillfully inhabit your body. The three pillars most important to him, “power, precision, and mindfulness” are the things you can find in all of his classes and trainings, and that have helped him form The Jason Crandell Method over the years. I relearned through hosti...

If you had to label Doug Keller's yoga, you might be safe putting him in the Tantra category. He approaches yoga through both a physiological practice-based lens as well as a philosophical, academic one. Here he connects academic, historical yoga and what we can think of as modern "practitioner" yoga. Most important, Doug addresses how lineage and the assertion of authority run problematically in...

One of the most interesting aspects of this conversation with Judith Hanson Lasater and her daughter Lizzie Lasater was when Judith described the group yoga class a kind of disruption in the long lineage of yoga. The economic demands of teaching yoga in the west have necessitated it, she noted. We’ve gone from the intimacy of the original 1:1 contact between teacher and student to a worldwide indu...

I wanted to talk to Amanda Kingsmith, host of the popular podcast Mastering the Business of Yoga (M.B.Om), because she has a structured, fascinating, and very hopeful approach to the yoga industry and community. Her mission is for everyone in the world to be able to experience the benefits of a long, slow, steady breath, and she wakes up every day thinking about how to help yoga professionals be t...

In the first episode of season two, I talk with Jivana Heyman, author of Accessible Yoga and Yoga Revolution. Jivana started his yoga teaching career supporting communities with disabilities, HIV/AIDS, MS, and heart disease patients. He coined the phrase "Accessible Yoga" after creating the Accessible Yoga Training in 2013 and, as co-founder of the Accessible Yoga School, wants yoga teachers at a...

Here I review the first season of Practicing Well, discussing my favorite episodes and guests. I also talk about the plans for the podcast in 2023, which will begin with two really different conversations, the first with the Accessible Yoga School's Jivana Heyman and the second with M.B.Om's Amanda Kingsmith. After the first season, which combined folks in what I call the three main "generations"...

John Kepner, Emeritus Executive Director of the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT), grew IAYT into the global standard for yoga therapy training and credentialing. He did it by accomplishing the things he says a professional membership needs to do—establish community via yearly member meetings, ground the profession in research, and publish a peer-reviewed journal as well as a pro...

In this episode, I sit down with Joan White and Patricia Walden, two of the most senior practicing women yoga practitioners in the world. This episode continues a discussion the three of us began in 2021 about Iyengar Yoga, one of the most influential modern lineages in the world. You'll hear what it was like to study with—and be utterly devoted to—just one teacher, BKS Iyengar, and what the Iyeng...

In this episode, I sit down with Stephen Cope, author of the The Dharma in Difficult Times , and Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Stephen says that the genius of yoga in America right now lies in its ability to bring both psychology and neuroscience to yoga practice, and he believes that Sat Bir is at the forefront of this work. This conversatio...

Show notes: In this episode, I sit down for an intimate conversation with the legendary Angela Farmer, known as the creator of the first yoga mat, who has been practicing yoga for 50 years and teaching for nearly as many. During that time, she has learned how to take her yoga journey inward and to listen to the needs of her body to cultivate a practice that she says has no name. Angela and her par...

What is yoga therapy and how does it address the whole person, whether that person is working with disease or wellness? In this episode, I sit down with four teachers certified by the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) to learn about the transformational relationships, whole-person care, and wellness paradigm that characterize the yoga therapy profession. In order of speaking, the...

How well can an industry be when its teachers don't make much more per class than just one student pays for that class? In this episode, I sit down with AJ Schneider, founder of Beyond the Green Coaching, to discuss how money flows in the yoga industry and community—and how it doesn't. As a yoga student, former full-time yoga teacher, and former studio manager of the YogaWorks in Washington, D.C.,...

What is yoga in its postural form? Millions of people in the United States practice yoga every day, and their practice takes the literal form of yoga asanas, or yoga poses. These poses are also being innovated every day in the unregulated market of yoga teaching which has set a suggested standard of just 200 hours of training. Most yoga trainings take less than a month to complete. In this episode...

“Virtually every yoga practice is capable of generating a relaxation effect." This is just one of the points Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, makes in our latest episode. Sat Bir and I explore the fact that yoga is a multifaceted mind-body modality offering basic strategies for coping with stress and emotion. Wee talk about how it is altogether...

In this episode, I sit down with Chris Parkison, founder of the DC Yoga podcast. Chris and I met through the DC Yoga podcast and since then haven't stopped talking about the yoga industry and community, our time as yoga teachers and yoga teacher trainers, and how to deepen the practice of yogic techniques of transformation. In this episode we get deep in talking about the Vedic concept of the kosh...

In this episode, I share my thoughts on 20 years of yoga teaching and 30+ years practice with three of my students who share their own intersectional yoga journeys of differing backgrounds, bodies, and ages. They discuss their individual paths to yoga and what teachers and types of classes work for them. 1. Eric is close to 70 and practices Iyengar Yoga for resistance training. He loves being his...

In this event, I sit down with three leaders in modern yoga, Gary Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute®, Monique Schubert of Kripalu Yoga, and John Schumacher of Iyengar Yoga. In this first episode of Practicing Well , we talk about what yoga lineage is and why it matters. This episode covers: 1. The knowledge base, practical relevance, and teacher-to-student transmission endemic to yoga li...

Welcome🕊! Practicing Well , a new podcast, is about how practicing being well = wellness. This podcast is about the modern practice of being your best self in your mind, breath, body, and brain. It helps you ground amid our bazillion distractions in modern life. You will hear conversations between people with a lifetime of practicing wellness and mindfulness, people who have a lot to say about the...