A practitioner first.A teacher second.

Origin

I grew up with yoga in India. My mother taught it; my father studied philosophy. By the time I was eight, I was practising Ashtanga — not because it was trendy, but because it was just part of how our family worked with the mind and body. I trained through my teens and twenties, travelled, made mistakes, refined. Yoga was never something I did for an hour and then forgot about. It was embedded in how I moved through the world.

The turning point

When I trained at KPJAYI Mysore under Sharath Ji and Saraswati, everything I thought I understood about Ashtanga shifted. Sharath didn't teach theory. He taught observation. He showed me that Ashtanga isn't about flexibility or strength — it's a system for quieting a busy mind through precise, repetitive practice. The depth isn't in the poses. The depth is in the internal transformation that happens when your mind finally stops resisting the practice.

The deeper lineage

Alongside Mysore, I studied under some of the last living masters of the Krishnamacharya tradition — the root of virtually every serious yoga lineage today. That dual-lineage depth is rare, especially for teachers of my generation, and it changed how I see a practice. I could see what was underneath a student's movement: where the breath broke, where the mind escaped, what the body was actually asking for. That wasn't a skill I taught myself. It came from sitting at the feet of people who'd spent sixty years asking the same questions.

The global pivot

I moved to South Africa. I started teaching online before most teachers had even considered it. What I noticed was that women everywhere — whether in Cape Town or Canada or Colorado — had the same problem: they wanted their practice to work for their minds, not just their bodies. But without a framework, without consistency, without someone to show them what's actually happening, it didn't. So I started running 1:1 sessions with students, watching how their minds moved through the practice, figuring out what worked.

The curriculum

The Yoga Mastery Program wasn't built from theory. I ran 30 students through 1:1 sessions and took detailed notes on what shifted their practice, when they progressed, when they plateaued, what made them quit, what brought them back. The YMP is the curriculum that emerged from that data. It's built on real practice, real people, real results — not on what sounds good or what's trendy in yoga right now.