My Story

From a young age I was interested in spirituality, mysticism and the natural world. My way to connect with those latent curiosities and impulses was most often through movement, whether it was running through the forest, swimming across a lake, climbing a tree or wrestling with friends. I craved physical experiences that gave me a window into a broader and vaster experience of who I was. I did a variety of team and individual sports growing up such as soccer, swimming, sailing and cross country and then when I was 17 I came across Zen Meditation as part of a school project. We were assigned to participate in a religious ritual that was foreign to us, I ventured with a friend to the Providence Zen Center and participated in a meditation practice and mindful eating ceremony. I connected profoundly with the dynamic stillness and bright, luminous quality that emerged from simply paying close attention to the present moment. From that point on I began meditating daily and seeking out resources in books and in teachers that would afford me guideposts along my way. I was fortunate that my Aunt Sharon, an acupuncturist, had been practicing Tibetan Buddhism for many years at that point and became a guide and inspiration to me in how to both integrate a spiritual practice into my life as well as to build a livelihood in which the pursuit of wisdom and health could be at the source.

In 2005 as an undergraduate at Goucher college I discovered Vinyasa Yoga, which was being taught in a student run yoga club. I didn’t realize it at the time but those early experiences of attending class laid seeds for what was to be a lifetime pursuit of yoga as a student and a teacher. I came to major in comparative religions and during my studies, yoga and mediation became through lines that enabled me to connect my personal and spiritual life with my academic studies and to find direct, embodied experiences that helped me to understand the religious theory about which I was learning. This relationship between my life and my studies was deepened significantly when in 2007 I spent a semester studying abroad in India. The Buddhist Studies program in which I participated placed a strong emphasis on learning different styles of meditation from leading teachers from around the world. It was at that time I had the great fortune of learning from Ācariya U Hla Myint, Ekai Korematsu Osho Roshi and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and my appreciation for the power of wisdom practices was truly sparked as was my awe for the scope of human potential. My studies there continue to inform the humility and devotion that I bring into my role as a teacher.

Returning to school and the United States I was all the more inspired to go deeper into my yoga practice and also challenged by the question of how it would fit into my life and eventually career. Then in 2008 I showed up to a meeting of the college yoga club only to find that there were about 15 students but the teacher was not there. After an awkward discussion of what to do I mustered up courage to teach what would be my first of many yoga classes. Though I was unsure of myself, the language of teaching came more naturally to me than I would expect and for the first time I began to develop a sense of myself in the role of yoga teacher.

Shortly after graduating with my bachelors degree in Comparative Religion I attended a 200 hour yoga teacher training at Charm City Yoga. In addition to being the core studio in Baltimore at the time, the studio was also rich with the flavor of Indian spirituality that I had come to appreciate so deeply during my semester abroad there. The studio director and leader of the teacher training, Kim Manfredi, was a frequent traveler to India and as such was able to imbue the studio with the magic and power that I loved. I also was a dedicated student of another core teacher there, Will Walter. To this day Will’s style and mastery influence everything about what it means to me to teach a great yoga class. I began teaching vinyasa classes at Charm City Yoga shortly after that in 2012 and began to grow both in confidence and humility, it seemed that the more comfortable and stronger I became as a practitioner and teacher, the broader and higher the scope of the yogic tradition appeared to me, such that I became sure that it would truly take a lifetime to learn everything I needed to. At that time I also became aware of something even more relevant, that through my caring attention and the skill that I had cultivated I was able to make a real, meaningful and positive impact on the lives of my students.

I only stayed in Baltimore for a short period after that and then relocated to Philadelphia where I was fortunate to teach at several studios, first and foremost of which was Amrita Yoga and Wellness. It was there that I found a home and a community of practitioners and teachers who would be essential supports as I shifted into the next stage of my career and life. I continued to teach vinyasa yoga classes as well as to work with students 1:1. The intimate and challenging work of working with people in a 1:1 capacity was very difficult at first, forcing me to become more precise with my instruction and more sensitive interpersonally. Yet I understood that those challenges were the right ones for me at the time and that teaching private yoga would be a big part of the next phase of my career. It was also at that time that I met my now wife Jessica, someone without whom I would likely be lost but with whom I feel that everything is possible!

As I continued to teach I also continued to learn and through colleagues in Philadelphia such as John Raiss, Noah Julian and Ari Halbert I became aware of Katonah Yoga which at the time operated a studio in midtown Manhattan. The first time I visited in 2014 I was blown away by a small, loud and brilliant force of nature named Nevine Michaan. I felt that I found what I had been searching for, a teacher who could communicate at the level of the body, energy, mythology, philosophy and mysticism simultaneously and with total elegance! In those days Nevine would teach three classes over the course of about six hours and rarely stop teaching over the entire span of time! Between asana, pranayama, reading students’ bodies and expounding on philosophy, the experience was awesome and I was hooked. I started going up to New York as often as I could to learn from her and her core teachers such as Abby Galvin, Dages Keates and others. I immersed myself in the books that Nevine recommended such as “Staying Health with the Seasons,” “A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe,” “The Kybalion” and pretty much everything by Mircea Eliade that I could lay may hands on. My group classes and private students were thriving and I felt that I was a conduit for the power of the Katonah tradition in Philadelphia!

It was at that time that I also was presented with a rare opportunity and one that I could not say no to. While walking back to my apartment in the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia, someone who I had never met called to me from across the street. It turned out to be the husband of one of my students and the head of a real estate development company that was active in my neighborhood. His wife had told him about how much she enjoyed my classes and he offered to work with me to build the first yoga studio in that neighborhood. After some hard thinking I decided to dive in, but not alone, my friend and colleague Noah Julian who shared a deep interest in Katonah yoga with me, became my partner.

We opened and ran The Yoga and Movement Sanctuary for about four years over which time we brought in incredible teachers from as far away as Europe and Israel, hosted three, 250 hour teacher trainings and became a sanctuary for the community in Brewerytown. I had the rare opportunity to design and take care of a physical space that was the manifestation of so much of the theoretical learning and creative envisioning that I had done since I was 17 years old. The experience was deeply special and I look back with great fondness on the many students and teachers who called YMS home. Yet the combination of the pandemic and my having become a father in 2017 led to our needing to close the studio and for me to find more steady work.

In the background since 2018 I had been helping my Aunt Sharon with online courses in East Asian Medicine and had developed a fair degree of competence as an instructional designer. YMS closed at about the time that Sharon and I realized that a natural next step would be to start a business in which we enabled other teachers of East Asian Medicine to teach online and enjoy the type of success that she was having in doing so. And so together we formed The White Pine Circle, an organization of which today I am proud to be the executive director.

In 2021 my family and I made the big decision to relocate from Philadelphia to New Milford, CT. We’ve loved living in this area and become part of the community here.

These days I teach yoga not as my full time job but as an expression of my hearts joy and desire to help others. I continue to study Katonah yoga as well as from ancient texts, my beloved Mircea Eliade and to enjoy the recent proliferation of truly great online resources there are for people like me who want to keep their studies alive. I still go to Katonah Yoga (the studio in Westchester County) when I can. I teach two classes and am still taking on a limited number of private yoga students and relishing in the way that yoga can transform their lives for the better.

- Emile