ABOUT ME

I grew up in the United Kingdom in a family of practicing Christians who went to a modest Church of England church.  After I moved to the US in my 20s, I found myself drawn away from the protestant faith, and after reading "My Life with the Saints", I became a practicing Catholic. The Catholic faith moved me deeply, but there was still something not quite right for me, and so I started looking around at which faith traditions seemed to have an understanding of how to be happy. I was drawn to the Dalai Lama who seemed to be a very calm and happy individual. I learned about Buddhism from his writings first, and dove into the understand of that philosophical tradition reading Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, and others.  In one of the earliest more traditional yoga classes I took, the teacher guided us through song, and chanted invocations as part of Savāsana. This practice called deeply to my soul, and I found tears pouring down my face. This had some real connection in it! In 2022, I was laid off from my tech job at Amazon, and had some time on my hands - finally, I could enroll in Yoga teacher training! I completed my training in 2023 at Soul of Yoga in Encinitas, CA and began teaching.  One day, browsing YouTube, I found a video of the Bhagavad Gita being sung in Sanskrit. Listening to this invocation, I once again found tears pouring down my face. I had no understanding of Sanskrit, and had never read the Gita at that time. What was this?! I had to learn more. I read the Bhagavad Gita, and it moved me deeply. Discovering a tradition that offered many paths to the divine felt right - less angry than the Christianity I grew up with and feels very prevalent. As I deepen my yoga practice I have found my way to non-dual Sivaism which so far, feels like it incorporates the best of the Christian tradition which recognizes a loving divine universe, and Buddhism which recognizes the deeply dependent nature of all things - often coined "oneness". Whilst Buddhism feels too detached from a divine universe - it’s a bit too atheistic for my taste, the dual nature of Judaism with it's jealous and separate god which flowed over in the Christian faith didn't sit well for me. Taking the mystic parts of the New Testament along with things like the gospel of Thomas and a deep-felt sense that the universe does have some inbuilt divine persona, for me, a non-dual belief system seems to fit best with my personal experience. The universe is all one divine and we’re each an incredible, miraculous, and joyful individual arising part of the one. Thich Nhat Hanh likened incarnation to the crest of a wave in the ocean - arising, and then falling back into the whole. It’s a distinguishable wave, but nobody would ever say that wave isn’t intrinsically part of the whole ocean. The wave has no distinguishable separate being from the ocean. For me the ocean itself is divine consciousness, more than just an accidental confluence of matter and energy that lacks any being-ness, even if that being-ness is simply the sum of all of its parts that are themselves aware. That it is the connection of all conscious beings together as one universal experience outside of time, with time a necessary mechanism to allow experience to occur, but that the universal being-ness itself it above time and distance. I think this lines up well with the traditional Indian concept of Atmān, which for me similar to the christian concept of soul (ψυχή). In a similar way, the notion of Shakti (शक्ति) lines up with spirit (πνεῦμα‎‎) - the divine will expressed as part of each of us.