Welcome! I'm Amy, longtime New Yorker, mom of 2 bodhisattvas who are growing too fast, yogi, meditator, teacher, student, Italian speaker to my lovely, Italian hubby, and, drumroll please.....new studio owner! I spent my first years in New York as a dancer, and theater artist, some of those years overlapping with my growing interest in yoga and Buddhism. Once introduced to yoga I immediately connected yoga's union of movement and meditation as the experience that interested me most in dance - how the physical body could be an instrument to opening, nurturing, and getting to know our minds as well as shedding light onto our connection with each other. It wasn’t until my first class with yoga teacher Cyndi Lee at her OM Yoga Center in downtown NYC, which fused luscious vinyasa flow with Iyengar alignment and Buddhist philosophy, that my life took a different direction. I trained to teach yoga at OM Yoga Center in 2002 with no intention of actually teaching yoga, and have been teaching ever since! In the past few years my attention has focused on teaching mindfulness to children and teens and I have been working with and adapting curriculum to suit different needs. Along with teaching mindfulness to school children in Brooklyn I have facilitated team building days and conferences on bringing mindfulness into the classroom.  I have trained in the Mindful Schools curriculum and am a graduate of The Interdependence Project's yearlong meditation teacher training program in NYC.  I am also proud to work for Madison Youth and Family Services, facilitating a mindfulness program in both elementary schools, a mentoring program at Brown School as well as health programs at the High School.

 Currently I am interested in how meditation and yoga can help us to access our natural state of basic goodness.  This isn't a state we need to obtain or aspire to but rather a natural, unobstructed state that we all ALREADY possess. We live in a society with information overload, which focuses on busy-ness, productivity and consumerism. As a result we often feel anxious, over worked, afraid, confused, unfulfilled or numb. This is where yoga and meditation can help.  Mindfulness practices re-wire our mind to root out unskillful mind-states bringing us back into alignment with who we ALREADY are.

Mindfulness practices can move us from a feeling of just coping, or getting by, to a place where we feel our lives flourishing.  Through practice we can move our mind out of patterns of busyness, overwhelm, dissociation and narcissism to a space where we thrive in attention, compassion, adaptability, emotional stability and resilience. With adults Mindfulness is about rewiring our mind to find routes out of these habitual and destructive patterns. With children we can reinforce healthy mind-states right from the get go and introduce tools to access them before too many destructive patterns develop.