training & practice
Samantha has been practicing Iyengar yoga since 1991. She is a certified graduate of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco's Teacher Training Program, and has been teaching for eight years. Samantha has apprenticed with three master-level Iyengar teachers: Patricia Sullivan, Anne Saliou, and Kathy Alef.
Samantha also brings to her teaching her study and practice of Eastern healing traditions and many therapeutic modalities to alleviate physical and mental suffering, including Zen and Tibetan Buddhist meditation and Ayurveda.
Samantha also brings to her teaching her study and practice of Eastern healing traditions and many therapeutic modalities to alleviate physical and mental suffering, including Zen and Tibetan Buddhist meditation and Ayurveda.
therapeutic yoga
Samantha first came to yoga to heal her lower back pain. Years later, yoga helped her to heal a repetitive stress injury to her neck and arms. Through healing her own injuries, Samantha has gained both the personal experience and the training to help others with their injuries and chronic pain, including repetitive stress injuries.
Samantha's training in therapeutic yoga includes assisting master-level teacher Anne Saliou in the therapeutic yoga classes for back and neck care at the Yoga Loft since 2005. Samantha also regularly substitute-teaches the Upper Back and Neck Care classes for two to three months out of each year, while Anne is in India studying with her teachers, the Iyengar family.
For therapeutic yoga, Samantha is also guided by the teaching of Judith Hanson Lasater (a yoga teacher and physical therapist), and her study of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Qi Gung, as well as the Feldenkrais Method.
buddhist practice
Feeling that something important was missing after practicing yoga for five years, Samantha moved to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a Zen Buddhist monastery in the California mountains, where she spent the next few years in intensive training in Zen meditation.
After leaving the monastery, she spent a year in Asia studying Tibetan Buddhism and yoga in India, Nepal and Thailand.
Samantha's experiences with these teachings taught her numerous central truths about the mind and the nature of the universe, such as the importance of learning to quiet the mind, and the possibility of learning to connect with the life force that nourishes and moves through all things.
green yoga
Upon returning to San Francisco after five years at Tassajara and in Asia, Samantha worked with the Green Yoga Association in its first three years as director of communications and newsletter editor. The mission of the Green Yoga Association is to raise awareness that practicing nonviolence to all things is an essential part of yoga.
Samantha helped to define Green Yoga's philosophy and develop its programs for the yoga community, and also taught at the Green Yoga Conference in 2007. Deeply influenced by her study of Green Yoga, Samantha's yoga teaching is grounded in the awareness of our inter-dependence with the Earth and the cosmos.
dance
Samantha's training includes 15 years of dance training in ballet, modern and Butoh, a modern Japanese dance form. She toured nationally and internationally with the West Coast's most prominent Butoh company, Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Theatre.
Her teachers, Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, were students of the originator of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata. Samantha's training in Butoh taught her the joy of imaginative play.
Samantha has also harbored a passion for the Argentine tango for the last 12 years.
Samantha currently lives next door to the San Francisco Zen Center with her husband, Robert Thomas, a Zen priest.
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"The entire universe is the
true human body."
~Dogen
