Patti Lewis

"Yoga seemed weird to me when I first tried it on a whim. Yet I kept going back to class. There was something inside me that shifted whenever I took class. Something that felt enormous and also small at the same time. I started practicing Ashtanga yoga with a friend and classmate when I was in graduate school, and practicing (and a good therapist) saved me. Saved me from fear, anxiety, despair, doubt, and quitting school. It helped heal my body when I tore my Achilles tendon. It was when I was on my mat the world got quiet. It gave me faith, in myself and in something bigger and more powerful than myself. On my mat nobody was looking at me and judging me to be too big, too loud, too wrong, not right.

"Yoga has seen me through many life changes, good and bad. It is the thing I always come back to. It is always new, yet old and familiar and welcoming. It forces me to be present. It forces me to confront whether I can have compassion for myself as well as others; whether I can be truthful and honest with myself and with others. Yoga has the power to remove my layers and brings me face to face with myself and allows me to face the wider world.

"I have studied over the years with many teachers for various periods of time. I have learned something from all of them. In no particular order: Eddie and Jocelyne Stern, Noah Williams, Kimberly Flynn, Chuck Miller, Maty Ezraty, Jodi Blumstein, Jeanne Heileman, and the teachers of Integral Yoga.

"I have a degree in Anthropology from Barnard College and an MFA from Yale School of Drama."