About
Listening is exercise for the mind.
It is not easy. Learn to listen.
—Barbara
Links
Here are links to a few local Boston area studios and teachers I am fond of as well as the websites of fellow yogis of my generation who I have most admired, taught, and studied with through the years. Stellar elders.
About
Born in Texas and raised in Tennessee, I immigrated to England a week after graduating from college. I began studying yoga in London in 1972 and teaching in 1974. After moving to Boston in 1978, I sought out the tiny yoga community and slowly built a teaching practice, opening my school on Beacon Hill in 1982. In 2016, after 35 years in Boston, my heart’s hometown, and several years of planning, I chose to step back from teaching yoga full-time and return to my southern roots. This time, to Durham, NC, to be near family. I am still here, though I get back north a couple of times a year.
As to yoga - my first exposure to yoga was the Iyengar Method, which I practiced devotedly for 13 years. I learned a lot, and its stellar attention to alignment informs my practice to this day. However, a teacher I met in London awoke another aspect of the practice, a more internal, less linear experience that called to me. Though she threw me out of the nest years ago, telling me to trust my voice and spread my wings (which I did), I will forever thank Angela Farmer, and her husband Victor Van Kooten, for encouraging me to be. I also appreciate my peers Doug Keller, Richard Freeman, Mary Taylor, Sarah Powers, Mary Paffard, and John Schumacher for the wisdom they share. Though quite different than me, their teaching resonates and helps keep me curious!
So, I’m a patchwork quilt. My style is a bit quirky, full of stories, no fealty to any method, informed by the teachers I study with on rare occasion, but mainly, a solo practice and, of course, time, because there is simply no way to rush the process. My classes are, simply put, my sharing my experience of 54 years on the mat in the hope that students will be encouraged to own their practice.
I continue to teach yoga for the connection to community, and for sharing what I have learned. I truly look forward to every class and hope to continue to teach both online and in person for a long time to come.
I continue my own practice, and find myself amazed that after all these years, I'm inspired, even excited, by new and fresh inquiries. Predictably, my practice (and teaching) is centered around an asana practice that observes and adapts to the aging body's needs for agility and strength, and the inevitable challenges that come from having been around the sun a few times.
Still, time waits for no one, and paths to other loves, long postponed, beckon. I love being able to spend hours reading, working in the garden, and doing lots of things that I now have time to enjoy, guilt-free, in these, the Forest Dweller years.
Golden Quotes
Accolades from Students
Your way of explanation makes the actions so accessible. I love how you bring so much of yourself to your teaching. It somehow gives us permission to be ourselves too! —S.T., Boston
Your classes are so vibrant because of your incredible skill as a teacher and your vividly bright narrative stories. I can't wait until the next time. —K.S, Boston
I’m writing because yesterday's class reminded me of how much I look forward to your classes and though I wasn’t excited about the online idea I set aside my judgment and received a powerful experience just as an in-person class. —A.R.
Thank you so much for the absolutely exemplary practices that I was able to participate in with you over the past few days. Your practices are the perfect balance of grace and strength. I always learn so much from you. —K.S.
I'm just writing to let you know that I think of you often since I had been practicing yoga for years before coming to your studio but never on the technical level you teach. I learned so much from you and am forever grateful." —P.L.
Barbara has an extraordinary way of breaking down challenging postures step by step, and using each progression as conscious preparation and warm-up for the next step; therefore, each step or modification becomes an asana within itself. Honestly, it is this “foreplay” that is interesting, not the final pose. —M.M.
I find your sequencing and pace can bring me to places like no other. —K.F.
I truly believe that the same amount of body work could not have given me as much as the 10 hours of your guided yoga did. I felt and still feel opened and reconnected in a very deep, healed way. Thank You!
I tried to put into words what I appreciate about you...it’s some combo of discipline and originality/inspiration/experience...whatever it is, it is unique, gifted, and the pearls are appreciated by the swine. —S.E.
In my thoughts, often during meditation time, I must have written 50 letters a year, each one filled with gratitude at my good fortune to have had you as my first and primary yoga teacher; to continue to benefit from your stellar teaching and example; to have been inspired into and encouraged to grow and blossom with work I can’t imagine loving more. —J.S.
… Your class is always a high point of my week. You are the best (of many wonderful) yoga teachers I have ever had-- wondrous really. Thank you for everything you've given me. —J.B.
You're the best and studying, practicing, listening, to you rings true and always leaves me full and in touch w myself and breathing in my heart. —A.B
Really, I think you are a genius. —M.Mc.
Just wanted to thank you for the fabulous journey taken with your guidance, wisdom, patience and kindness during class I really did feel like I went somewhere and came back refreshed and renewed. —N.C.
Thank you for bringing inspiration and hope back into a practice that was feeling a little bland for me before I started working with you. I'm back at that place where I feel like I still have so much to learn. It's all kind of a mystery and a little bit unfolds every time I come to your class. Backbends don't hurt anymore, I'm learning how to stand properly, I can see and feel the poses much more clearly. The list goes on. —S.B
"What keeps popping up is 'luminary'. You are so gifted..." P.R
"While it is true that yoga plumbs the essence of human existence, it is rare to have a yoga teacher who does exactly that, caring for her students with those precepts." D.F.
"You have changed my life. Thank you. " M.B.