Our practice has its roots in the Ashtanga Vinyasa system, a part of the free flow vinyasa lineage developed by Jonny Kest in Detroit, Michigan. Everything about this practice is experiential. The moments of free flow invite the practitioner to come as they are, embracing uncertainty, excitement, and everything in between. A wonderful yet edgy metaphor for the human experience…!

Our mission at Studio Ronin Yoga is to serve as a vessel for fostering connection and building community, whether it’s in person, or virtually.

What you’ll find on your mat with Ronin, is a practice that empowers and challenges its students to look within and trust. There truly is no better guru than the courage and wisdom we unlock within ourselves; your teacher serves as guide through practice as no more than the narrator for your experience. Our teaching is sensation based, as opposed to “alignment” based; every human’s body is a little different, even on an anatomical level. Everyone will move a little differently, everyone’s yoga will look a little different, and we think that’s something to be celebrated.

For virtual classes, expect your teacher to be seated and attentive watching the screen, teaching to precisely whomever is in front of them, rather than demoing on a mat. For many of our class styles, students are given the opportunity to practice in volleys of free flow, as Ronin Warriors taking the practice into their own hands.

For In Studio classes, your teacher will move throughout the room while teaching, attentively holding space, and/or offering hands on assists for those who enjoy hands on!

I grew up and studied in North Carolina, often traveling up and down the East Coast. My heart has always belonged to the creative realm, whether in formal study, working for galleries, museums, artist studios, or interior design. In my mid twenties I decided to trade in the southern beach lifestyle for the promise of expansion, and without ever visiting I packed up and moved to Boston. (Don’t worry, I watched the Departed to prepare.) I immediately got a crash course lesson in winter, dropped the twang, and was quickly pushed through some major personal upleveling. I worked in the art field for a while longer in Boston under the wing of my amazing and completely bonkers mentor, bumping into all kinds of wonderful people along the way. Somewhere in there I fell backward into yoga, it saved my life (read below), and I met some incredible folks who happen to love hats, and then after almost 10 years with Boston as home, my love & I set sail on international sabbatical Couchsurfing for 6 months. Traveling was mind-bending, intense, enlightening, uncomfortable, humbling, and exactly what we needed. Like yoga, travel was the most profound way to learn all kinds of things about myself, and what it really means to share this incredible human experience with different kinds of people both near and far. Now as many aspects of our lives have changed forever in the wake of (continuation of..) the pandemic, life is asking us all to be a little more creative in how we meet our needs, and how we can help lift one another up. The age of virtual yoga began in earnest, and we’re all asked to Begin Again.

my yoga story

My yoga journey began like many others, ignited out of sheer necessity: 

Brand new to Boston in 2011 I began working in a local artist’s studio in the trajectory of my academic career in Art History. Just 3 months after moving to Boston from North Carolina, I became strangely very ill. I struggled for months trying to figure out what was making me progressively more and more unwell. (Read: a completely wretched human being.) My once ravenous and impenetrable metabolism had effectively halted, stopping me from keeping almost any food or nutrients in my system. After months of food failures I wound up trying to sustain a very limited version of a vegan diet (rather unsuccessfully) to appease my body’s digestive failure and eminent shut down. Countless failed doctors and blamed organs later, my mentor in the art studio finally had quite enough of my constant state of frustration and exhaustion, and dragged me to my first yoga class!

A long time practitioner herself, my mentor had opened the door to my slow but transformative path back to health. Despite endless tests and disbelief from doctors, I eventually riddled out the cause for being so sick on my own…all by learning how to listen to my body during yoga.  (By the way, it was a rare and severe allergic reaction to a copper IUD that kept me from digesting food for quite a while and withered me to little more than an angry skeleton. For more on that miserable medical malady, click here. Never again, beets.)

Just six months after my first yoga class I began yoga teacher training hopeful that I could share even a fraction of what the practice helped me through. My practice serves me as a sort of tough love when my head or my heart fall back into old patterns of doubt, fear, or anger. Looking back, (with slice of pizza in hand once again) I’m quite grateful for my turbulent introduction to yoga - without it I may never have found such a powerful path through transformation. 

Its from that entire experience that guides me to teach from my gut (pun most certainly intended), with a fierce trust in intuition and courage. I learned the hard way that the process of growth may not be comfortable or predictable, but it’s what we choose to do with what’s laid before us that really matters.  In the same vein, later on I stumbled into the new-to-the-north-east Life Time community, and fell in love with the Kest style of yoga that challenged me in ways I’d never dreamt yoga could access. Physical stress or challenge was one thing, but the emotional and personal growth was, and is, something I feel tremendously passionate about. I learned an entire new skillset to challenge and empower practitioner’s (and my own) emotional intelligence and personal development, with lessons that are immediately practical for how we think, speak, behave, and thrive outside the studio.

my experience

Dubbed an “agent of transformation” from one of my earlier yoga mentors, my specialty lies in growing teachers, and students, and their individual gifts along their paths of transformation. During Covid-19, I took a risk stepping away from the corporate atmosphere and created an online yoga studio. Studio Ronin Yoga - I liked to refer to it as a virtual yoga community - teaching classes, workshops, and offering dharma talks online to help all of us stay close to our practice during the darkest time of the pandemic. As the world has begun to reopen, I opened a small experimental brick and mortar for Ronin within our then-home and apartment complex, and continued to offer virtual classes to keep our boundless sangha intact. As the world, family needs, and the larger scope of the yoga industry continued to evolve post (ish) pandemic, I stepped back into the corporate teaching space with Life Time, focusing on teaching mentoring and the yoga retreat business!

The last few years before Ronin, I biannually lead Life Power Yoga’s 200 Hour Teacher Training for the Boston region, and supported the development of yoga teachers and their skills nationwide amongst the LifePower Yoga Master Trainer team for Life Time Athletic. Locally, I Grand Opened, and oversaw three clubs and their yoga programs in the Boston market.

Prior to working full time for LT, I taught in multiple yoga studios around the Boston Area featuring regular weekly classes, workshops, and retreats.

Additionally, I belong to the Chromatic Yoga collective created by internationally renown teacher Matt Giordano, and lead Chromatic Workshops and Yoga Retreats locally and internationally. To learn more about Chromatic Yoga, click here.

Official specs: E-RYT 500, YACEP; trained in Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Meditation, Yin, and Restorative Yoga, and various meditation practices.