Lily has been practicing yoga since 1999 and teaching since 2005. Her teachings are inspired from her studies with Don and Amba Stapleton, David Moreno, Shiva Rhea, Ana Forrest, and Elise Browning Miller. Before Lily was a yoga instructor, she was a dancer. Lily was born with a loving fascination towards the body-mind-spirit and started formal dance training at age six, continuing to study dance at UC Berkeley and performing and touring nationally and internationally for ten years as a professional modern dancer. Her passion for movement is contagious and her background as a dancer is apparent in her creative, soulful and artful approach to sequencing. Lily strives to keep her practice fresh and inspired, and teaches from her belief, instilled from the yoga of self inquiry taught at Nosara Yoga Institute, that body awareness is the foundation and experimentation is the process. In addition to her creative and intuitive regard for the body, as an experienced private therapeutic yoga instructor and as a certified massage therapist Lily also brings a rigorous knowledge about biomechanics in movement and a keen ability to relate to students of all abilities and apply hands-on-healing and sensitive adjustments in her classes. Lily loves a sweaty, fluid, vigorous vinyasa sequence as much as she does a spacious, soft, reflective moment in practice, checking in with the internal flow. Her classes support a space for exploration, expansion, integration, and self inquiry. Having encountered and healed several orthopedic injuries in her dance career, Lily is dedicated to teaching compassionately and believes that your body is the model for your investigation, not some universal ideal. She is a whole-hearted optimist who believes deeply in the healing power of movement. Lily's work is a labor of love and has brought her to teach in yoga studios internationally, to work therapeutically with private clients, to teach at the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet, to offer yoga for professional athletes including the Golden State Warriors and UC Berkeley Diving team, and to offer yoga to homeless women and children at the Women's Daytime Drop In Center in Berkeley through the wOMen's yoga collective, which she co-founded in 2012. Back in the Bay Area after a year dancing and teaching yoga in Berlin, Lily makes her home in Oakland with her husband Aaron.
