Meet Billy

Welcome, friends. One of my most extraordinary beliefs in life is the power of vulnerability. I ask my students to show up as their most authentic selves and allow feelings to flow freely. I strive to do the same for them. That’s why I wanted to write more about myself and my life’s journey. 

 

I grew up in Denver, CO, USA. After years of athletics and competing in high school and college, I happened upon yoga back in my mid-twenties. I have always been attracted to the spiritual and philosophical art of yoga. When I began, I didn’t know anything about the physical side of yoga, except that it involved stretching. I had a feeling that it may be the closest thing we have to “the fountain of youth.” I enjoyed the continuous and dynamic challenge that yoga offered. I liked being encouraged to let go of my ego and the competitiveness and pressure accompanying it. I started practicing yoga periodically over the years - simultaneously embracing and cursing the accompanying struggles and sufferings on the mat.  

 

Becoming a teacher was more of an “accident” than a dream come true. After years working in mental health, starting holistic nutrition for animals business, sitting in a cubicle settling auto insurance claims, working in financial services, creating a real estate career, and even getting up at 2 am every morning delivering newspapers around downtown Denver, I went to a yoga teacher training upon the urging of a dear friend. I think that I was just looking for some sort of light to shine on my life. I thought, “this will be a catalyst to take me to wherever it is I need to be to live a life of more meaning and feeling and passion.” I wasn’t broken - necessarily - but maybe we all are a little broken. I was more lost than broken. I was ultimately afraid that I would end up living a disconnected life, one that didn’t excite or challenge me. I was a single dad with a beautiful little three-year-old boy, and I didn’t want to miss out on time spent with him by working a 9-5 job that I didn’t care about. I wanted him to see me happy and pursuing my dreams passionately without fear - whatever those dreams looked like.

 

While I was attempting to start my yoga teaching career, I was also beginning a career in real estate. Because, even in my idealistic mind, there was a voice that said, “You can’t make a career out of teaching yoga!” I remember waking up every morning at 2 am and going to the Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News Warehouse to stack papers, fill my car to the roof with them, and then deliver throughout the city. It was dead of winter when the streets were dark and quiet. After my route, I would rush off to a studio out in the suburbs and teach a 6 am class. I was lucky if one or two people attended. Eventually, I gave up my paper route and the falling asleep at stoplights that came with it. I struggled to balance my careers in real estate and yoga, but I was finding my way. I kept showing up, and students started showing up too. I was (and still am) grateful that I found one of my passions in life through teaching yoga - something that never felt like work. A place for real work with humans to take place. The Soul work. Real connection. Tears. Sorrow. Celebration. Joy. (Not always in that order - but real forays into our shared human condition, consciousness, and experience.) 

 

Yoga has become a catalyst for growth, change, shifts, conversations, moving inward, moving outward, and moving onward in the years since I have evolved as a yoga teacher and practitioner through my experiences in my own life and the relationships with my students. The journey has included many steps forward and some steps back, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. More importantly, this path has become less linear and more circular, and spiraling in nature. But maybe that’s what life is. And I think that’s what our yoga does. It encourages us - urges us - to ask questions from a deeper place, from a different paradigm, encouraging new perspectives and other patterns in our life. In that sense, What is growing older? Are our bodies aging and dying? Maybe. Yes, I guess there’s some of that happening a little every day. But there’s so much more happening when we keep our hearts open and attain a view of our place in the world in a broader and more connected sense.  We find an intimacy with ourselves and with others in this vast Universe that - in all our wonderment - we couldn’t see as fully when we were ourselves at a younger age. So, in that sense, time is almost circular in that it brings us to a new arrival in a place of understanding where we live our lives more truthfully, joyously, and ultimately - like a child - but, with the ancient awakening that comes with time and experience and with the more profound examination of things like mortality, gratitude, compassion, illusion, loss, love, truth, and happiness. We are constantly being “born again” or “rebirthed” into this world . . . Letting go of what doesn’t work and the illusions that separate us from each other, God, the Universe, Love, Ourselves . . . Going deeper into what connects us and allows us to bravely feel our shared humanity and our one spirit. That circular nature of our lives that always brings us back to this new and ancient home . . . the home of our authentic selves - vulnerable, alive, and in the moment of our experience. 

 

To me, this is what the yoga path is all about - it is deep and wide, high and low, it is all things, and nothing at all - but it is the journey of traveling further into our own hearts where we can truly see ourselves and each other. It is the acknowledgment that - as we dwell inside this infinite Universe, the Universe also lives within our infinite selves. Much like every yoga class ends with “Namaste,” “Namaste” is also where every conversation begins...