Elizabeth Silas

Elizabeth began her daily practice of yoga in 1998 in upstate New York. Her apprenticing and training experiences then opened her eyes to the teaching of yoga as its own practice--as a karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga practice all rolled into one. Since this practice is one in which the learning never ends, she regularly attends workshops and classes to integrate other traditions and perspectives into her teaching. She draws inspiration from her own practice as well as from the study of Sanskrit and the philosophies of Advaita Vedanta, Tantra, and Buddhism. These studies began when she was an undergraduate in linguistics, developed further as she focused on the intersection of western and eastern philosophies for her master's degree, and continue today.

Elizabeth's 200-hour certification is in Ashtanga Yoga and her 300-hour certification is in Jivamukti Yoga. She is most guided by the principles of Jivamukti sequencing, cueing, adjusting, and integrating ancient theory into modern practice. She draws upon points of alignment and action from many schools of hatha yoga, including Anusara, Iyengar, and Meridian Flexibility, and she incorporates core strength movements from Pilates.

Elizabeth teaches students to carefully align the body while flowing through an ever-changing series of postures, linking them together with a steady breath. She designs each class to enable students to stay centered in an awareness of how their own bodies feel, rather than focusing on how someone else's body appears. The shape of one body is so simple and unified when looked at from the outside, yet our internal experiences are complex, layered, and sometimes contradictory. If we can immerse ourselves in our experience of the present moment, then we can see the interrelations of "inside" and "outside," of "self" and "other" -- rather than habitually seeing these as separate and comparing other people's "outsides" to our own "inside." Yoga is the process of feeling our way beyond those surface borders.