EP25 David Vendetti-The art of Living and Loving Unconditionally
"Yoga allows me to be who I am without struggle. To notice, breathe, remember and enjoy this body, this moment. " David Vendetti
Today’s guest we have on David Vendetti. David is the owner of South Boston Yoga, a VERY large and VERY busy yoga studio in the South Boston area.
It was a beautiful conversation today — it was first time I’ve had the opportunity to really sit and talk with him and I personally learned so much. I learned about his philosophy on life and really just a kind hearted compassionate person that’s spreading love and light out there in this world. It started out by talking about how he was adopted and then at the age of 12 or 13, when he was in the 7th grade he was asked to leave Milton Academy because he was too artistic.
And for anybody who knows Milton Academy, that right there says that David is a very smart man. We talked about all kinds of stuff from meditation to what’s going on within our country and within our states with letting in Syrian refugees. We talked about him just going recently through double hip surgery and the recovery both physical and emotional with that.
We talked about the Yoga studios and his philosophy on helping and empowering people. It was a beautiful opportunity for me to be able to learn and really get to understand a little bit deeper about my life and my path. I hope you enjoy this episode. If it’s your first time on, enjoy. It’s a very casual podcast. We’re not going to get too serious or crazy in it. There is no structured flow, we just take the conversations as they go and this was a beautiful flowing conversation.
Links from the Show
Show Transcript
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:15] KC: Welcome to the Business of Life Podcast, episode number 24. Keith here and as always, just grateful to be able to have you on, to be able to be sharing and to do this every single week. Today’s guest we have on David Vendetti. David is the owner of South Boston Yoga, a very, very, very large yoga studio, a very busy yoga studio in the South Boston area.
It was a beautiful conversation today and David is — it was first time I’ve had the opportunity to really sit and talk with him and learned so much. Learned so much about his philosophy on life and really just a kind hearted compassionate person that’s spreading love and light out there in this world. It started out by talking about how he was adopted and then at the age of 12 or 13, when he was in the 7th grade he was asked to leave Milton Academy because he was too artistic.
And for anybody who knows Milton Academy, that right there says that David is a very smart man. Milton is one of the top academies in the country, and we talked about all kinds of stuff from meditation to what’s going on within our country and within our states with letting in Syrian refugees. We talked about him just going recently through double hip surgery and the recovery both physical and emotional with that.
We talked about the Yoga studios and really just a lot about his philosophy on helping and empowering people. It was a beautiful opportunity for me to be able to learn and really get to understand a little bit deeper about my life and my path. I hope you enjoy this episode, I know that you will. If it’s your first time on, enjoy. It’s a very casual podcast. We’re not going to get too serious or crazy in it. There is no structured flow, we just really take the conversations as they go and this was a beautiful flowing conversation.
So let’s go ahead and get David on.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:50] KC: Okay, so I am excited to introduce today’s guest Mr. David Vendetti, owner of South Boston Yoga. David, welcome to the show.
[0:03:01] DV: Keith, thank you so much.
[0:03:02] KC: So I’ve been eager to connect with you. I know before we press the record button, we were talking about how I’ve heard about you and I’ve been watching sort of from a distance through Jackie and Ralph Gates and Richard Lanza. It’s exciting to have you on, it’s exciting to be connecting with you.
[0:03:25] DV: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.
[0:03:28] KC: So if you’re cool, I’d love to just dive right in. I had one of the questions — I always think about what would our listeners love to hear and what do I want to hear, and I’m curious to dive into how you got to opening South Boston Yoga because I hadn’t really heard of you, I didn’t know who you were and I was very involved in the yoga community at that time and then all of a sudden this massive, beautiful studio opened up that seemed like it was packed from day one, [laughter] so yeah. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the evolution of that.
[0:04:14] DV: Yeah, sure. It was actually very organic and I wish I could say it was fully planned but I work at Back Bay Yoga for a long time with my good friend, Lynn [Biger] and then I had moved. I’d recently got married and I moved to Southy and we were in this large building, a beautiful building, a green building and they were supposed to have a yoga studio there and it fell through.
They came to me and one of the owners of the building, his wife was a student of mine and she said, “You should ask David, he lives in the building,” and so I went to Lynn and I said, “Let’s spin this, let’s do a Back Bay Yoga South,” and she was like, “Oh my God, my hands are so full.” And I understand what she’s saying now because one studio, your hands are so full. And so we opened this tiny space. It was a 1,000 square feet and it’s very beautiful. We were able to fill it up pretty rapidly.
We had beautiful people like Joan to come in and teach and Tom Hogan and Todd was teaching and so it was a really lovely beginning but then it grew so fast that we couldn’t contain the classes and so we moved across the street from a thousand square feet to 10,000 square feet and I think I almost had an aneurism.
[0:05:39] KC: Was it literary like everything was tenfold like the build out is tenfold right?
[0:05:51] DV: Yes.
[0:05:52] KC: Like everything.
[0:05:54] DV: The rent was actually not that different because we moved to an older building like kind of a more rustic beat up like an exposed brick and I actually really like that feel because I’m a casual guy. I’m not here to give you a spa experience, I’m here to give you a very real experience of community in Boston and I love it. I love our space but we’ve taken care of it.
Like you said, you just moved into this new home and all of a sudden, you find it like, “Oh my God, it’s leaking in the corner and what am I going to do with this window?” But we managed to somehow pull through. I think everybody that survived that time is now a richer, stronger, and possibly slightly emotionally deranged person because of it but we did it and we’ve been going strong now in that space for five years now.
[0:06:44] KC: Wow, it’s only been five years up there?
[0:06:46] DV: Well seven total because we had the other space for two.
[0:06:49] KC: Okay, so when you moved into the new space, one of the things for our listeners who have never been to South Boston Yoga — first of all if you’re local, you should go over there and check it out. But one of the things that I noticed when you get up there, I didn’t know it was that big. I didn’t know it was 10,000 square feet but it has that small community feel to it. It doesn’t have a factory feel to it. Was that an intentional thing when you set that up?
[0:07:25] DV: I think that’s really about — Todd, the other owner and myself, we wanted a big space to do this fun thing that we were exploring called yoga and we just invited all of our friends and we were like, “Hey, let’s build this super fun cool place where we can all hang out and figure out what this is.” So that’s the vibe that I think people still get when they walk in. Fortunately, it’s never been about money for me and I almost accidentally fell into having this huge business because all I wanted was just to have a great space.
[0:08:01] KC: Yeah and it really is. It totally has that feel to it. The other question that I wanted to ask to start off with because I want to get to know you a little bit more before I dive into some other questions but I feel like there’s a — when I look from a distance, like I said, I’ve only seen you today. It really is the first time besides a couple of times we’ve chatted over Facebook that we’ve talked. I feel like you have this mission in life to just spread love and light and compassion into the world. Is that sort of how you see yourself and what you see your job is?
[0:08:49] DV: Yes. I come from a very, it’s a strange background to me. I was adopted as a kid and then I was actually asked to leave the high school that I was at. I went to Milton Academy until I was in seventh grade and they just said to me, “Look, you’re too artistic. You need to leave.” [Laughs] So all of the friends that I had from K to 7th grade I lost.
Then I really feel like when I started again, it was very hard to find long term friends and I actually reflected on this a lot, I started building a community. I was like, “Oh, I’ve lost my community. I felt disconnected so many times in my life. I’m just going to build a place where people thrive and feel accepted and embraced and celebrated and where you can be a human being. You can make a mistake, you can be silly and you can also be really empowered by the work that you’re doing.
[0:09:48] KC: This was in the 7th grade or this was when you were talking more about South Boston Yoga now?
[0:09:56] DV: I think this is like something that I’ve realized within the last year or two.
[0:10:00] KC: Gotcha.
[0:10:01] DV: My goal was to let everyone know no matter where they’re from or what their background is that they’re all miraculous just the fact that we live as human beings and that everyone matters and because we all matter, when we come together we create a vision that is accepted universally and to leave any one piece of it out, you don’t have a holistic vision anymore.
[0:10:27] KC: Alright, so you just opened up a bunch of things that I wanted to dive into. This is perfect. I had mentioned earlier to you if it was alright if we talked a little bit about everything that is going on around the world with the bombings and the, we’ll call it terrorist attacks and I think that for me, watching you recently on Facebook and watching the response that you had towards it — so first of all, I’m going to say that I felt very akin to your thoughts and feelings on things.
With that said, I feel like there’re is a lot of people who are misunderstanding about the acts of a few individuals and sort of stereo typing or casting that stereo type towards anyone from Syria or anyone who’s Muslim and yeah, I just really wanted to get your thoughts on all of that.
[0:11:39] DV: Well, thank you first of all for opening this up because it’s really been heart breaking and I did live in India for five months and I’ve been there five or six times. I’ve travelled a lot and I am teaching classes everywhere and I just find that each person that you meet is, you just look into their eyes and you hear their story and it breaks your heart and at the same time, you’re impressed at how beautiful and powerful they are.
I actually think that the President said it best recently in an interview where he said, “If we were the kinds of people that close our doors to other people, we are no longer America,” and that’s not who we are and that’s not who I want to become. When an act of violence happens in the world, for me to be angry and then violent because of it, actually destroys the integrity of who I am. In a very simple way, I was at a restaurant once and the waiter was very mean. He’s clearly having a bad night which I waited tables so I know.
[0:12:44] KC: I have too.
[0:12:45] DV: And then, at the end my friend was like, “You shouldn’t leave them a tip,” and I was like, “No, no I’m going to leave a 20% tip or whatever,” and they said, “I don’t understand,” and I said, “The tip is not about the waiter. The tip is about me” and maybe that choice that I make will make a difference in this person’s life. It’s about who I am as a human being so our responses to this acts are not about those people who are being violent and angry and striking out.
First of all, we need to listen to them and figure out why they are in this situation and then how we can help educate that area of the world or maybe even open a conversation where it’s not that retaliation but it’s about understanding. That’s the gist of it.
[0:13:32] KC: I guess I want to dive in and especially for everyone listening in for you, I want to preface the next statement with saying, “I agree with you,” what do you say to someone who says shut off the boarders. The big thing I’ve seen floating around right now is don’t let a single —The big thing I’ve seen floating around right now is “Don’t let a single Syrian in, right?” Everyone is upset with President Obama’s stance and even certain states, they are refusing…
[0:14:08] DV: Massachusetts.
[0:14:08] KC: Yeah.
[0:14:09] DV: We are but the thing is we and this goes beyond even just this complication that’s happening but we’ve also have this racial issues coming up as well and when you give somebody a label, you say that they’re not me. So to say that somebody is Syrian is your way of saying they’re not human, they’re not like me but they can’t help where they were born into the world.
I can’t help that I was born here, I had no choice in that. They’re human beings, they have a family, they want to protect their family, they also are maybe scared for their own lives. I understand what it’s like to have those fears and if we can connect on that level, then I think that I would be a better person. I would rather in the end allow somebody into my home that ended up betraying me than blocking down my emotional system and shutting out people and becoming cold and calculating and hateful.
I don’t want to live the rest of my life like that and sure, I’m not going to let anyone trample all over me. I’m going to stay open and vulnerable but also be honest about what I can and can’t do. Maybe this isn’t a good idea for me but this is how I can help and it’s always about helping for me. Don’t just say something is bad. Tell me how you can help the situation instead of making it worst, instead of complaining about it.
[0:15:31] KC: Looking at you is starting to really make sense to me now. I feel like for a lot of people, when we talk about yoga or when we think about yoga, the introduction to yoga is a very physical practice. Initially, it starts with postures and we take it a little bit deeper and we start learning about the breath and more about the body but what you’re talking about now and the feeling that I got when I went into the studio is one about a way of being and that sort of what you’re sharing.
[0:16:16] DV: Correct. In fact, I almost have thought in several points that it doesn’t make sense to even call our studio yoga studio because that’s not my vision for the future of health for people. I think that if you really want to think about health for someone, you need to include something like weight lifting, you need to include cardio, you need to include stretching, you definitely need massage because nothing opens up the tissue like massage.
If I were to do teacher trainings in the future, I almost wish it was the four or five year program and each year, you are certified in a different thing, like a personal training certification, massage therapy certification, a yoga certification and then a nutritional component as well.
[0:17:04] KC: What are your thoughts about Ashtanga yoga comes to mind at first to me and just to give everybody and you can totally correct me if this description is wrong David, to give everyone, I think a lot more people are familiar with Vinyasa or power yoga and those off shoots from Ashtanga. Ashtanga is more of a very strict sequential flow.
[0:17:34] DV: Right.
[0:17:35] KC: What are thoughts about the different body types and different emotional states like different human beings with all the stuff we come to. Do you think that everybody can fit into a certain mold? Do you think that we really have to find what works for us?
[0:17:58] DV: I think you know the answer to this, right? We’re also completely different in our lifestyles and what we do for a living and then what we’re required to do. For example, if you have a job waiting tables and you’re running around in your feet all day long, for you to go to that and then take an Ashtanga class where you’re on your feet and you’re stretching the entire practice, it doesn’t make as much sense.
Somebody that waits tables might need to do something more restorative like Yen. They need to slow it down, maybe they do some yoga therapy because they are emotionally scattered from their experience at the restaurant but I actually love Desikachar practice. When we are talking about the lineage of yoga, Krishnamurti came first in the active form of yoga which he observed by watching the British military do physical drills in India because Aburbi is Asane.
Then also there are these text on Janice gymnastics which showed all these different contortionism. He thought this is a piece that I really want to add to the meditation and the Pranayama and these social obligations and obligations to self that I consider to be a yoga practice.
[0:19:10] KC: Hold on, slow down.
[0:19:11] DV: Yeah.
[0:19:11] KC: You mentioned meditation, Pranayama and then what was the third one, something about cells?
[0:19:19] DV: The Yamas and Niyamas. A Yama is like don’t kill, don’t steal, tell the truth, it is like a moral obligation to society and then you have the Niyamas ,which is a purification practice within yourself where you take good care of yourself and you treat yourself with loving kindness and you observe yourself.
[0:19:40] KC: Just for everyone else listening, I just want to make sure I’m on the same page too. Pranayama is breath right?
[0:19:45] DV: Correct.
[0:19:45] KC: Okay. Alright, continue.
[0:19:48] DV: Krishnamurti inspired, there is actually a couple of people Indra Devi was one of them but also the three that we always talk about our Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and his son, Desikachar who often gets left out of the picture but Desikachar was with him most of his life and saw that he took each individual and gave them a prescription of poses that would work best based on their energy levels and this is body type. Desikachar’s studies called Viniyoga are very much about the need for teachers to look at each student one by one and say these other things that will work for you. Please do these.
[0:20:26] KC: I got you and is that where you guys have gravitated to and evolved too as a studio and I guess I’ll ask that a little bit deeper. How do you do that in a group setting?
[0:20:40] DV: Well I think first and foremost, not to have this kind of rigid mindset when you’re teaching, for example on Sunday morning, we can have a 100 people practicing upstairs in the room. It would be a disservice of me to take the body into an extreme range of motion have that be the focal point for my class. Instead, for those larger group classes, I have total body fitness, not just in terms of flexibility but also in terms of stability in those classes.
Nothing too outside of the norm. I try to fit it into a place where everyone who leads has a positive experience of themselves emotionally. They can do it. They’ve succeeded at some of the postures and also, the result of doing those poses is very beneficial in terms of them breathing deeper, standing taller, walking with a greater injured motion and then feeling solid and feeling strong in their body.
[0:21:34] KC: Gotcha. And as far as the breath, for somebody that’s newer to yoga — I guess if I look back on my practice, the first year or two, I should say I think there is a lot of ego involved and I was more concerned about how I looked in the postures and was I getting deeper in the posture, was I keeping up with the class and now, I can honestly care less about that and the only thing that I really care about is “how is my breathing? What am I focused on?” that’s it. I was wondering if you can share a little bit for a beginner, how you see the importance of the breath.
[0:22:29] DV: It’s a good question. With a lot of these questions, we ask about yoga, again, not everybody can take it the same way. Some people are capable of really linking their mind to their breath in the beginning and taking full deep breaths that will take you to the range of the motion and back out of it. However, a lot of people are not open in the lungs in the rib cage.
At the beginning, they are going to need to take two or three breaths for each posture and to just let them know that that’s okay and to focus instead on the posture first and then the breath will come but some of them, the breath is there but the stability and the posture is not.
[0:23:05] KC: Gotcha.
[0:23:07] DV: But a lot of teachers will also tell you that this idea of Pranayama and focusing on the breath is not something for a beginner but I think it definitely is. I mean breath is at the core of your body. You are doing it every day mostly unconsciously. Starting to bring conscious awareness into the depth of your body is a very beautiful practice.
[0:23:29] KC: Yeah like if I’m thinking back again with myself I think that I was — so yoga played an enormous part and continues to play an enormous part in the unfolding and healing of my life and I don’t think I had enough focus to even or I don’t think I have enough emotional stability to even focus on the breath. It was just so much for me but what I did through doing the poses, I was breathing and was detoxing and it was probably just like you said, for the first two years, I don’t think I could have done it differently.
[0:24:14] DV: Exactly and so I will be doing a disservice to you if I tried to necessarily push you. Instead, I do a better service as a teacher to say, “This is where you are. You are doing amazing”.
[0:24:27] KC: I love it.
[0:24:27] DV: And then you learn that where you are today is amazing and you don’t judge or shame or say “well I wish I was” whatever it is that your goal is.
[0:24:37] KC: I love it. Another big part for me and a big part of my practice really developed into meditation and when I first started meditating 15 years ago, I tried it and actually it made my life worst. I have to be honest, I would sit down and I would leave a meditation practice way worse than when I started.
[0:25:05] DV: What’s that about Keith?
[0:25:11] KC: Yeah, you know what it was? I had a lot of our listeners know this story but I’ll give you the abridged version. From the time I was 12 years old until the time that I was 23, I was a drunk like drunk-drunk, like blackout, like extremely drinking a lot and it was through my 20’s when I started going to yoga, it was a 20 something year old adult with the emotional body of a 12 year old.
Little by little, I needed to — like the physical practice, I needed the very vigorous hot and that’s where I found my first piece. I remember we were talking before we pressed record, we were talking about my first class with Jenny Rossi and I remember this was probably three months after I had stopped drinking and I remember at the end of the class, I was like, “Oh my God”. For the first time in my life I can breathe without having alcohol in my system.
And yes, the hard part for me with the meditation was too much at one time. Too much emotion, too much unhealed stuff coming to the surface.
[0:26:45] DV: Now I see where you’re at, in that case thank God, we have all these different ways that you can re-encounter the heart of where you are. For you, the physical practice was the easiest one for you to start with but there maybe people for whom physical practice is super challenging and they can start with the breath and that might be their path to then come to the physical yoga.
In the case of the meditation, I would say not only were you building your ability to be one pointed and focused during that time but also maybe you were doing a little bit too much. Five minutes of meditation would have been better than 30 minutes.
[0:27:26] KC: Oh David, it was five minutes and it was a mess! But yeah, I totally get what you’re saying. You know what else really worked for me and this is one of the things that I advise a lot people on, because I’m this type A personality, that a lot of people that I encounter have a similar personality and they struggle. They struggle with meditation and one of the things that really worked for me was coloring, literally a coloring book because it gave my mind something to focus on while I was relaxing.
[0:28:06] DV: That’s perfect, so that was your form of meditation.
[0:28:10] KC: Yeah, it really was.
[0:28:11] DV: My grandmother’s doctor actually asked her to meditate and she called me up and she was like, “Oh Davie, I don’t know” I don’t know how to meditate, what am I supposed to do and I said, “Well listen, you love Barbara Streisand right?” and she’s like, “Yes”.
Then I said, “Well why don’t you put on a Barbara Streisand album and just put on the last song or two and sit on the porch with the windows open, the song playing and just look out at your yard and let those two songs play and then when it’s done, look out on the backyard for another minute or two more and that’s your meditation”.
[0:28:47] KC: When you’re viewing meditation, for our listeners what is the goal?
[0:28:55] DV: The nice part is it’s actually laid out for you. The first goal if we’re following the eight limbs of yoga is Asana which we often translate to a yoga class but that’s not what Asana originally meant. It meant sit down.
[0:29:12] KC: Get your Asana in a seat.
[0:29:14] DV: Right, sit down. The first thing you do is you come to stillness and then you breathe into the stillness, that’s Pranayama and then you begin to withdraw your senses. Anytime you get absorbed in a painting or some music and somebody is calling your name and you don’t hear them, that’s called Pratyahara, that’s sense withdrawal.
You start to draw your energy into the body and concentrate and that’s what you’re doing when you’re coloring and that’s called Dharana, to concentrate and then when you concentrate for a long enough period of time, you actually lose track of time and you exist in a state of meditation and then when the meditative state goes on for long enough and you feel connected to the entire world around you, that’s the state of Sumathi. Fortunately, somebody wrote that all out for us and we can just follow that format if we want.
[0:30:06] KC: I love it. In your practice now
[0:30:05] KC: I love it. In your practice now, what is your routine look like, what is your, if you could put a typical day together with your morning routine and.
[0:30:17] DV: My god. You’re going to love this. I recently had double hip surgery.
[0:30:22] KC: My gosh.
[0:30:24] DV: For a congenital deformity of my hips where the rim of the acetabulum, the hip socket, encroaches upon the head and neck of the femur and the head and the neck of the femur are also too large and then it grinds away the rubber in your hips. I wanted to know if it was something I had done in my life to have this and the doctor said no, I’m not sure I believe him.
He said, even if you were sitting in a chair by the time you reach your mid-40s, this is what will happen with this particular birth defect. I’ve been a little kinder in the way that I treat my body every day, I do a lot of myofascialball rolling. My friend Jill Miller just released this book called The Role Model which is the best book I’ve ever seen.
Basically on anything, it’s just so well put together so people who are interested in self massage, definitely check that out and then I’ll have some kind of like healthy drink that taste gross but I do it because it makes my mind a little clearer.
[0:31:21] KC: Do you mind if I ask what’s in it?
[0:31:23] DV: It’s always like Kale or sea weed or some kind of squidgy thing from the ocean, I don’t know.
[0:31:28] KC: Yup.
[0:31:31] DV: Sometimes I’ll like a shake mix in, I love wheat grass, a little bit of fresh wheat grass and that really help me recover but I do encourage people to think about the body’s physiology which says that we shouldn’t do the same practice every day. It says the body requires 48 hours to A, break down a currently existing pattern that you’d like to change.
B, to start building up along a new lines of force that you’re putting into it. I gently over practice ever other day, I get massaged as much as I can afford.
[0:32:07] KC: Yup.
[0:32:08] DV: Because I really think that it’s the accumulative effect of all of these things that brings us to balance.
[0:32:14] KC: Gotch. That’s a lot. How long ago were those surgeries?
[0:32:25] DV: I’ve been off crutches for two weeks.
[0:32:27] KC: Wow. How long ago were the surgeries?
[0:32:31] DV: The first one was in September and then I was in bed for almost three weeks and the second one was in November I think. No, the second one was October, they were five weeks apart. The medical team was incredibly supportive, my doctor, Dr. Minender Coker was exceptional, I was so lucky to get him, he usually just works with kids.
I have recovered super quickly and I actually released an article and a small series on ways to weight train in bed when you can’t use your legs. Self-massage that you can do and also a ball rolling series for people who have recently had issues with their hips.
[0:33:19] KC: What’s the — can we Google that or how do we find that?
[0:33:24] DV: Some of it is on my Facebook page and the rest of it is actually in European yoga magazine.
[0:33:32] KC: OhI saw the link to that.
[0:33:34] DV: yup, if you go to my Facebook page, there’s an English translation on that and how to take good care of your hips.
[0:33:40] KC: Yeah. Wow, it was interesting because I was, before I jump on, I always like to go back and kind of look, I want to know a little bit more about you and I kept seeing a lot of posts referred to like I’m going to be back, I’m back, like these types of things. And I was like, “I wonder what, I didn’t go back far enough to see what had happened.” Yeah, I’m happy for you, I’m happy that you’re doing well and back and it sounds like you moved through everything with a lot of grace too.
[0:34:16] DV: Well, let’s say yes and no because I want to be really practical for anybody that’s listening which is the emotional journey of having a surgery is really debilitating that I basically lost both of my legs and the legs that you stand on and the way you stand in the world and for me it’s also my livelihood.
Emotionally it was very challenging especially after the second surgery I’ve been in bed almost for two months and to build my energy level back up while still healing really took that nutritional support. Even now I feel very fragile both physically and emotionally as I moved back into the business and into teaching.
This wasn’t a quick recovery, it’s a slow and steady recovery and I’ve tried to take my judgment off of myself the entire time. I will be like, why aren’t you better yet, instead, how do we return to this in two or three months and see how we’ve progressed.
[0:35:14] KC: With the emotional piece of it, did you lean on your life’s practice of I’ll use the word Yoga but everything that you’ve done up to that point to really like all the different tools that you’ve learned?
[0:35:33] DV: Yeah, and people. I think that’s one of my life missions is this idea that people help each other to get through things. My fiancée was some kind of angel from another dimension. He would cook me three meals a day, four meals a day, made shakes, he walked the dog, also having a dog was incredibly comforting, she was always there like in bed curled up next to me.
I would spend most of the day texting people, be like, “How are you?” Be like, “I’m like this,” and I make a funny face and send it back. [Laughter] I haven’t had a time like this since I opened the business where I was able to connect to people as much because I was so busy. It was great to touch base with my friends and my family, write some articles and really just rest in the soil of my life instead of all these things that I’m constantly trying to grow.
[0:36:31] KC: Yeah, it’s almost a forced shift in what you’re doing, right?
[0:36:37] DV: Yes.
[0:36:39] KC: Sometimes those are the — it’s so hard to accept it at first but usually those are where the biggest blessings come in our life.
[0:36:47] DV: Yeah, always that, it’s the only way to make me stop. You have to knock me out to make me stop.
[0:36:55] KC: As far as — like you have this thriving community your on your way towards a full recovery. It seems like the business side of it is sort of, before you and I pressed record again, I was talking about, there is a stabilization that’s going on within my family life right now, that’s our theme for the next couple of years. It sounds like you have that with the studio. You’d eluded to this a little bit earlier, what’s your vision for where you’re going with things next and what you’re really passionate about?
[0:37:38] DV: I do think it’s complicated, I am working on writing my 300 hour teacher training, 500 hour teacher training. I’ve been a 200 hour teacher for the last 10 years or something.
[0:37:50] KC: Can I interject real quick?
[0:37:51] DV: Yeah.
[0:37:52] KC: What’s the difference with those? For a 200, a 300, a 500 as far as from the — I can understand the time et cetera but as far as certifications and if I’m becoming a teacher?
[0:38:10] DV: Right, okay. A 200 hour certification which actually ends up equaling three weeks of work, which isn’t a lot of time, that’s kind of the door opener for you as a yoga teacher. That will get you in the door at gyms and sports clubs and yoga studios and places around the country. They look for that certification, it’s a Yoga Alliance certification and many people require it, not everybody does.
And then a 500 hour certification just means you add another 300 hours to that and that’s usually for teachers that are looking to deepen their study with special cases like you’re working more with cancer patients, you’re working more with depression, kids with special needs or you’re working to develop yourself as a workshop presenter, or a potential teacher trainer or retreat leader.
[0:39:02] KC: Gotcha.
[0:39:03] DV: That would be it.
[0:39:04] KC: The 500 is really focused, it’s almost like grad school.
[0:39:08] DV: Yes.
[0:39:09] KC: Gotcha.
[0:39:10] DV: I think part of my vision is just to keep working on this program because so many of my graduates can work in areas that I wish I could but I don’t have an in there. Like I have a graduate who is working in the hospital system with special needs kids, I think that’s so exceptional and then I have a lot of people that are working with communities just everywhere.
We have teachers in California, we have some who are in France right now which is really touching to see them, I was talking to them last week and my friend whose name is Mika, I just told him how heartbroken I was and he said, “I was talking to my best friend who told me, these people who are doing this don’t know what love is. We will show them what love is.”
And that was their response, it wasn’t like violence or it wasn’t outrage, it was that we will show them what love is, I think that my mission is always to try to show people how to come together, how to connect with everyone and how to build these flourishing communities of support no matter where you are.
[0:40:20] KC: That’s beautiful. It’s funny like, when I’m going through and I have certain questions that I want to ask and then I like to really keep it open though and go with the flow of the podcast, because I feel that that’s the most natural thing and I feel like we get the best content. And there’s a question that, no idea this was going to come up but I feel that it’s pertinent and I want to ask it.
So when we have different populations and we have different people that come at life and come to community with — we all come with different things. Like we come with different — just like we have different bodies, we have a different emotional bodies, et cetera. For people that have been in extreme cases of anxiety, extreme cases of depression, extreme cases that maybe led to alcoholism or other drug abuses and i guess extreme cases of anything. I feel that when people come to that or when people are in that they’re so far in it and so deep in it that it has become who they are, but deeper than that it’s become who they believe, like it’s in their genes and that is what they are, that is what life is.
I know you’ve worked with so many people and I was wondering if you could share some of the stories of people who came to realize that that’s not who they are and the type of life they’re living now.
[0:42:17] DV: My god, what a question! My hope is that that’s everybody’s journey when they go through a teacher training and that it happens not because of anything that I do or Todd does or one of the other teacher trainings does. But it happens because we give them access to enough information where they can do their own self-study and then reflect on the patterning of their own mind and decide whether or not it makes sense for them to keep it.
A lot of times we’ll talk about Byron Katie’s work or Brené Brown’s work on Daring Greatly. Byron Katie will say, “Is there a stress free reason for you to keep this thought” right? So let’s say the thought is, “I’m worthless, nobody loves me.” First of all, she’ll ask, “Is that true that you’re worthless and no one loves you?”
Sometimes it is true and sometimes it isn’t and you’re like, “Well actually, I can name five people who do love me,” and then you start to shift your perspective and then she’ll ask, “Was there stress free reason to keep it?” When we start to see that we’re doing these things to our self, we can we can break the cycle and say, “You know what? I probably shouldn’t cause this kind of harm in my own mind anymore.”
I’ve seen remarkable transformations, however, I just want to say that it’s not something where you once were one way and now you’re another way, you always have it with you. To deny that your life experiences have been what they are and often lead you to further delusion. To keep that seed within you that says, “I’m not past this, I’m not over this. I am encompassing this in the vastness of who I am as a person.”
[0:44:05] KC: Gotcha.
[0:44:06] DV: “It’s not all of me, it’s a part of me and I have other parts of me that are equally and maybe at this point more valuable.”
[0:44:13] KC: Diving into that one step deeper, have you noticed any common traits in once the negative patterns lose their power.
[0:44:26] DV: Yes. I guess I should ask you, what do you mean? Do you mean in the way the person behaves in the world?
[0:44:32] KC: That’s a good question, I think it’s two fold, it’s how they behave in the world and then how they — like a lot of it could be internal too. I’m just thinking back like for me, there was a trust and a faith and a knowing, like that’s when the shift happened for me internally, which externally I didn’t really do anything different but I existed different in the world if that makes any sense?
[0:45:06] DV: Yes. Okay, I could say two things to this; one is I think any good teacher, good program, good therapist, allows a person to be where they are and yet at the same time lets them feel that their voice and that their life and their path is one that is worthy in this world. That they belong and that what they do makes a difference.
Even if they don’t tell the person that, if they can just sit with them and bear witness to them, sometimes the person will feel like,”Oh my voice is important, they’re listening to my story. I make a difference in this world.” And once you learn that you make a difference, you calm the mind, you start to step out of those patterns and the biggest thing I see in teacher training, even before the close of it, is that these students will pick up the tools that they have learned.
Some of them so fast, they’re like 18 or 19, they pick up tools like faster than I can put them down and then they carry them home and they’ll say something to their parent or the person that’s living in their home like, “We’ve been fighting and I learned today that I don’t actually like fighting and that I care about you. Ans so is there a new way to discuss this?” And it’s like a game changer.
One of my students last year said to me, I went home and my boyfriend broke up with me and I said to him, “I’m so happy for you. If you don’t’ feel good in a situation that you’re in, in your life, you should change it and I care about you and if I really care about you, I have to listen to what you’re saying and allow you to make the choices that you’re going to make in this world.” It like shattered me, I couldn’t believe that that was her perspective!
[0:47:01] KC: How old was she?
[0:47:03] DV: She was in her 40’s.
[0:47:04] KC: Okay. Beautiful.
[0:47:06] DV: I see this all the time at teacher training that it’s not even something that I do, it’s like they read this book or they watched this video and it was like a little missing piece that all of a sudden their life, they could step out of the stressful reaction to a situation and observe the situation and then decide what would be the best course of action.
[0:47:27] KC: As you’re talking, one of the things that popped onto my mind is the power of a community that uplifts you and where there’s safety and support that really gives you the freedom to go out there and fly and it sounds like out of all the work you’re doing, that’s the backbone of the whole entire thing.
[0:48:02] DV: Yeah, it’s my favorite part. If you can get somebody to believe that they are the most beautiful, amazing, talented, powerful, stunning human being and if they carry that thought with them moving forward into their life, it’s so amazing.
[0:48:19] KC: What do you think from the, and I don’t want to spend too much time on this but I always like to look at both sides of the coin because I think that we want to, like for me, I always like to study what to do and what not to do at the same time and just be aware of what not to do and not put anymore attention on that.
With all the people that you’ve worked with, all the healing that you’ve seen, I’m assuming there’s been times where you’ve seen people that are stuck and they keep repeating the same things over and over. Is there anything that you’ve noticed that gets in people’s way that if we were just aware of this one piece that’s going to help us or aware of this one thing to avoid that type of thing?
[0:49:15] DV: Well, I mean, there’s also a realization, there’s always a pattern just like there’s a winter, spring, summer and fall. There’s always a pattern within us and we may, during a certain season or during a certain time have more space around our emotions and our thoughts and then when we move back into it like let’s say the holidays. When you’re going to see friends and family and it might be more stressful, that’s the time you can fall back into it. And just the realization of that’s a human response that you’re not always going to feel exactly the same in your stability, that’s normal.
And then I carry with me this one yoga sutra and the yoga sutra’s are basically these writings on how to clear your mind of trouble. This one says, “Heyam duhkham anagatam.” It means, “Those troubles that are yet to come are to be avoided.” I’ve actually said this to people’s faces sometimes. Like they’re like, “Hey, let’s go out and get some drinks,” and I say, “Those troubles yet to come are to be avoided.” It’s a very good mantra to hold on to because often we see it, we know, “Look, if I’m going to put myself in a situation, there’s going to be a temptation, there’s going to be a possibility and you could just reverse it.”
[0:50:35] KC: Yeah, what are your thoughts on balance with — when that got brought up, the question that I was thinking about was do you think, well let me preface it this way, have you ever read any of the Dan Milman stuff, the peaceful warrior?
[0:50:53] DV: Yeah, of course.
[0:50:56] KC: They also did the movie that Nick Nolte did the movie and there was one part when they — I don’t remember if they did it together or it was just Nick Nolte but he drank a bunch of whiskey and was smoking cigars or something and the student got really confused and upset and Nick Nolte’s response, the wise sage, I forget. Do you remember what his name was? He called him Socrates, right?
[0:51:27] DV: Yeah, yeah.
[0:51:29] KC: His response to it was that basically once you get to the point that you have self-control over things, you can make a decision but you have to understand the ramifications of that decision. So basically saying, “I’ll drink here and there and I know that I’m going to pay for it the next day,” and I guess what are your thoughts on that type of philosophy?
[0:51:54] DV: I mean I’m going to call bull shit on that a little bit like, you still know what you’re doing and if you know what you’re doing, you should have the discipline to make it stop. However, it’s different, I feel like when it’s an emotional state that’s rising, like grief, it’s only natural to feel grief when there’s loss and to have acceptance around that is great.
But then make a smart choice. Instead of going to the whiskey, say, “You know what? I’m just not going to go to the whiskey, I’m going to go and I’m going to have a wheat grass shot with my friend, it’s going to taste gross just like Jägermeister but it’s going to set me up for success.”
[0:52:35] KC: Yup.
[0:52:36] DV: Especially when somebody’s like a teacher. You have an obligation as a teacher to really uphold that standard of clarity and you don’t have to be perfect. In fact, I want to say that failing equals success in my mind, on a personal level. Right? Maybe an interaction with others, we have to be careful but on a personal level, every time I fail, I’m learning how to stand up again or I’m learning better.
Nobody learns how to ride a bike the first time, there’s no kid that’s gotten on a bike without training wheels and just ridden it. You have to fail hundreds of times until you become a master of that one thing. When my students say, “Oh I failed my audition,” I’m like, “Great. Go to a hundred more auditions. Go to a thousand auditions and by that thousandth one, you will never lose an audition again.”
[0:53:31] KC: So true.
[0:53:33] DV: Actually, what ties into that for me is this whole idea in the meditation community, especially when people are talking about realization or enlightenment. They’ve often said, “You need to strip away everything that you’ve learned,” right? We’ve heard this. There’s a new translation of some of these text that I’m in full support of which is not that we strip away our negative patterns. Not that we need to see through the delusion of the mind. It’s actually the accumulation of our life experiences that when they reach a certain point, enrich us to the point of awareness.
[0:54:09] KC: I’m not sure I followed it 100%.
[0:54:12] DV: Sure. Some people will say that you need to remove the negative patterns of the mind. Addiction or whatever it is. That’s not who you are and that you’re not the ego and that you’re not your history and you’re not any of those things that have happened but the truth is, the acceptance of all of those things that had been you up until this moment and the acknowledgment of the vastness of your experience until this point, at a certain point it reaches, we could call it a tipping point where you begin to become clear about things. It’s not the negation, it’s actually the accumulation, it’s not that the things that you did were wrong or that were negative patterns, it’s that they were times of learning, they were failure that’s leading now to this moment of success.
[0:55:00] KC: Gotcha.
[0:55:01] DV: You needed every single one of them. As hard as some of them were, horrible and some of them uncontrollable, like a car accident or something will be uncontrollable or illness might be uncontrollable. As hard as all of those things were, still the accumulation of that led you to this moment where maybe you become a more mature, compassionate, understanding person.
[0:55:23] KC: Was there a time recently when you were going through the surgeries that the happened? It must have been an extremely challenging just like you said, emotional, physical, emotional everything and then did you get to the point that you let go of the resistance to it?
[0:55:47] DV: Yeah, I actually think, I had resolve that this was going to be the way. I was actually very excited to have the experience of not being able to use my legs. Because now I feel like I’m able to understand what people who are in chronic pain or that have fibromyalgia chronic fatigue, how that their emotional state is really out of their control because the level of pain or intensity in their body is so high that it wears their threshold thin.
I’m very grateful to have gone through this. With that said, there were days where I had been in bed for a week or two and my partner would come home and I just say, “Will you please just hold me, I’m going to cry for a while.”
[0:56:39] KC: Yeah.
[0:56:40] DV: To let that come and to not deny that and to know that’s part of the process of this.
[0:56:47] KC: What you’re sharing is an amazing, it’s sort of something that I’m in the process of going through. I follow a Native American spiritual path and there’s a few different ceremonies but one of the ceremonies we do each year, we go out as a family to South Dakota and we go to the reservation on Rose Bud and it’s a place where the spirituality is very much alive but it’s also, it’s the most impoverished place in the United States. It’s 90% unemployment in the area, just to give you a little bit of a view of what it’s like out there.
One of the ceremonies that we do or that I do, I participate and my family goes and support is called Sun Dance. It’s a four day fast, no food and no water and one of the things that I have started shifting was to be fully present through it. I would find myself detaching when it got hard and now I’m able to start, and I’m definitely still working on this, to cry through it, to breathe through it, to be present through the entire thing and have that whole gamut of emotional experience.
Sort of like you, like it’s a very similar thing where you could have like drugged up and really gone through what you’re going through and detached from it, detached from your emotions, detached from all those things. Like you said, to have your fiancée, what’s his name by the way?
[0:58:46] DV: His name is Brandon Ward, he’s amazing.
[0:58:50] KC: To have Brandon hold you and actually move through that versus suppressing it is, that’ next level stuff.
[0:59:03] DV: It’s best level stuff.
[0:59:04] KC: Yeah.
[0:59:06] DV: Scary to do with someone but I think also if we’re going to add part of my personality or vision or what have you, it’s to form intimate connection with the people around you. I even like to, I carry my dog on the train and I love to start conversations with people on the way in to work and I was so touched the other day. I think his name is Cory, he started talking about the delay and the train system and why don’t they ring the buzzer a minute before you get on the train and we actually had this conversation about waiting tables and the public transportation system and everybody else was on their phones and I was so excited to get to know a new person and to make connection and it just felt awesome. I wish for the world to have more and more of that all the time.
[0:59:59] KC: Geez, you just brought up another one that I’m like really, it’s a struggle of my own. I have such a — one of the biggest addictions that I’m working with right now is during down time picking up my cellphone. Oh my gosh, and I think that so many people are unconscious of it but just like you said, all that is missed from that whole experience that you had is missed from picking up that cellphone, right?
[1:00:33] DV: Right. I’m going to swing it one more way to see if I can blow your mind. Let’s just say that all that time that you’re picking up your cellphone, you’re focusing on it and you’re looking through it rapidly like doing your Facebook feed ad infinitum. Let’s just say that all of that is leading you to a place that when you put down your phone and you go to is it North Dakota?
[1:01:00] KC: South Dakota, yeah.
[1:01:02] DV: You go to south Dakota and you enter that time, it’s a much more profound experience because of the difference between the two. I find now when I intentionally put my phone down, I actually did this yesterday, I was on the way home, I was exhausted, the dog in the car and we drive home along the beach and there’s actually a little pull off where you can stop there and go to the beach and take some time.
It was almost sun down, it was cold, I had already walked her, I was like, “You know what? We’re going to the beach.” I got out and we stayed for like 20 minutes, she was so happy, I took pictures of her, we watched the sun go down, I got close to the water and sat on some rocks and I know that I would not have been able to soak in that experience as deeply as I did if I hadn’t have so much kind of chaos and struggle this week.
[1:01:55] KC: Gotcha.
[1:01:56] DV: I say, get on your phone and go crazy until you can’t do it anymore and then see what happens.
[1:02:03] KC: I’ve never thought about it that way. One of the things that I like to batch it, so if I give myself a half hour of just mind numbing social media and give myself like my fix for the day then it’s easier to when I just want to, especially as a father. If I’m with one of my kids or with all of my kids or with my wife and the temptation to look down at that phone is taking away from the current moment of life.
[1:02:43] DV: Is it though?
[1:02:44] KC: Yeah, for me I believe it is. If I’m sitting there and my daughter’s asking me something and I’m not present to answer her because I’m scrolling through something that isn’t uplifting me.
[1:02:58] DV: Right.
[1:02:59] KC: It’s actually draining me.
[1:03:01] DV: The tendency that I try to get away from is, A, not to berate yourself. If you’re going to watch TV or you need to watch a project runway marathon don’t berate yourself, it’s part of the experience of being human and you may never watch another project runway marathon again. But do it when you feel it and then see because you’re learning in that moment and don’t think about time that you’ve lost because that’s gone.
The big thing that Brené Brown talks about is this shaming of self that’s just so bad for us emotionally. You can’t shame yourself, me and my partner actually spend a lot of time doing media together, we’ll both get on the couch in the sun and we’ll both have a laptop or a phone and we’ll do Instagram at the same time and we’ve got our legs crossed together and the dog’s in the middle and it’s actually a very beautiful connection moment. I’m okay with that, that’s the way society is right now.
[1:03:57] KC: Yeah.
[1:03:57] DV: I don’t want to negate what’s actually happening in society either.
[1:04:02] KC: I like that way of looking at it. So I guess one more question with that, and I’m really curious just again for myself. How do you distinguish between something that — could the whiskey be looked at the same way though? Like going out and having the whiskey because it’s what society is doing, do you know what I mean?
[1:04:28] DV: Correct. Good, I love that you said this. Remember at that time I said that one of them is personal and one of them is interpersonal?
[1:04:36] KC: Yeah.
[1:04:37] DV: To use that as a personal experience, I myself have never really been able to drink because A, I know that when I start drinking it’s because I need it to numb something and I will drink until I’m no more. And B, because even if I just have like one or two things, I wake up the next day, I can’t think straight, I have a headache, sometimes even have a headache before I finish the drink.
But every now and again, I still have a drink because it teaches me, this is a terrible thing. It hurts your head, I’ll have like a sip of champagne and it will go right into my eye like a spike and I’m like, “Okay, okay, thank you. I get the message.” That’s okay but then let’s say that you were drinking in the context to talking to your daughter.
[1:05:21] KC: Yeah.
[1:05:22] DV: That’s when I feel like that’s a different line. One thing is to know yourself and to be practicing what life is within yourself and the other is to realize the way in which you affect the people around you.
[1:05:32] KC: Gotcha.
[1:05:34] DV: In that moment, in the way of The Peaceful Warrior, I feel like if he had done that kind of experimenting on his own like he journeyed to another country and he was at, when in Rome and he was having some drinks there in that country and everybody is celebrating, that’s his personal experience. But in this context, he was representing a teacher for someone else and so he had a moment to say to his student, not “I can do whatever I want” but “I’m actually hurting here. I’m numbing and it isn’t the best choice but I am a human being and maybe you can help me now?” That for me would have been a better response.
[1:06:13] KC: Yeah, gotcha. I’ve got two sort of canned questions that I’m always asking everybody. I know that you mentioned a ton of different books and we’ll have links to those in the show notes. Is there anyone that you haven’t mentioned, any podcast or books or websites or anything that really has your attention right now that you recommend checking out?
[1:06:44] DV: I mean, I already mentioned Brené Brown and I absolutely love her work, she just released another book, I don’t know the title but the one that I read was Darin Greatly. It just talks about how, she does a quote from Theodore Roosevelt that says, “It’s not the critic who counts but it’s the one who is in the arena fighting.”
We have this obligation not to criticize the people around us that are trying to make a living and to live and to thrive and to support their family or whatever it is, but instead to really establish our own self in this world and to build who we are and what we love and that’s the noble work, not to criticize your judge but to just really hone in on our own life.
I would say that one and then I also like this book called Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. It’s about, she’s a brain neurologist and she has a stroke in one hemisphere of her brain and she finds that A, she starts studying it because she knows what it is before she called the hospital.
Then B, that it put her in one hemisphere of her brain, which I think it’s the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the one that connects us to all that is and makes us feel like the universe is miraculous and that we belong as opposed to the left one which is like, learns languages and does math and is very cynical and critical and it forms the “I thought.” Like, “I’m separate.”
[1:08:19] KC: Yeah.
[1:08:20] DV: Even after she recovered, she had her surgery, she maintained the ability to consciously shift between the hemispheres of her brain. Which opens up the argument that maybe enlightenment or liberation or these things that these mystics and sages I’ve been talking about isn’t as mystic as we think. That it actually just means to have the skill to reside more in one hemisphere of the brain than the other.
[1:08:52] KC: That was Stroke of Insight?
[1:08:53] DV: Yeah, it’s called Stroke of Insight. We asked this question in our teacher training on the test, “What is enlightenment?” And the correct response is, “It’s a stroke.” Because I do believe that some of these people who have experienced enlightenment have built up the pressure and anxiety and tension in their life to such a critical point like you often hear Eckhart Tolle will talk about his horrible night of despair and night terrors and it’s very possible that at that moment, he had a small stroke on the left side of his brain that shunted him over to the right side. All of a sudden it doesn’t become about Grace of the Guru or the descending of the divine, it just becomes anatomical, physiological reality and I like that, it means anybody can get it.
[1:09:38] KC: Yeah, we got to our breaking point, right?
[1:09:41] DV: Yup.
[1:09:42] KC: Yeah, cool. Right now in your life, what makes you the happiest?
[1:09:49] DV: Teaching. Teaching makes me the happiest. We did a candle light vigil on Monday night where people could bring candles and flowers to the studio, it was so gorgeous. And then last weekend I had this man John Hughes, an incredible musician. I’ve never met him, my friend Shawndrick Canter had recommend it.
His music was so beautiful he plays this, it’s called the Cora, it’s half string and half percussion and we had 135 people in the studio, I had just gotten back to teaching and to have that kind of support and love and beautiful music all in one place was just awesome.
[1:10:32] KC: It is, it sounds beautiful and awesome. For everybody listening, if they are local or even if they’re not local and they want to journey on up, we’ll include links to the studio but do you have any upcoming retreats, teacher trainings anything that you’d like to share?
[1:10:57] DV: Oh my god, there’s so many exciting things! Our teacher training is coming up in February, we do a three week intensive and then we also do a six month weekends program. It’s going to be better than ever, this whole experience that I’ve been through has given me so much more information and fuel and excitement about what’s coming.
I also was re-invited to the Prague Spirit Festival, I’ll be doing a yoga festival in Europe in March and then I’m doing a country side retreat after that. I’ll probably do it Nantucket Yoga Festival this summer. That’s one of the favorites, do the wonder less festival every year and yeah, you can check out the website that the studio website for anything else that’s coming but I do, do a lot of ball rolling workshops locally and anatomy courses.
[1:11:47] KC: Awesome. Pretty much we’ll put links to your Facebook page and the website and that should cover it all, right?
[1:11:55] DV: Yeah, thank you so much.
[1:11:57] KC: Awesome. Well I really, a good friend of mine who had after I finished talking with Jackie she had said definitely to reach out to you and she’s somebody who has, she pointed me in the right direction and I really want to just thank you for taking the time and sharing with our community and sharing with me.
I always say that one of the coolest parts of my job is being able to have access to someone like yourself for an hour or two to really ask the questions that are helping me on my journey. So I appreciate it, I appreciate all that you’re doing in the world, I appreciate that all you’re doing for the Boston community and just want to say thank you.
[1:12:50] DV: Thank you so much. I just want to add that, I mean, you know Jackie, Jackie has changed my life. She is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met. I feel honored, privileged to know her. That work that she’s done in the community, she used to be a social worker just uplifting other people. Oh! And both of us are teaching at Yoga Reaches Out this year in May.
[1:13:12] KC: Awesome.
[1:13:14] DV: Stadium, there’s like a thousand people, it’s a fund raiser for children’s hospital, it’s run by Sarah Garner. It’s the best day of the year.
[1:13:23] KC: I’ve actually never been to that and I have to get there this year.
[1:13:27] DV: Oh my god, the love that comes through that room is just overwhelming, the doctors when you meet with them privately to talk about the event, they’re in tears, they’re so enthusiastic and grateful to have this kind of support. So far Yoga Reaches Out has raised over $400,000 for children’s hospital. It’s a really great event and if people can make it, we’ll be forming a South Boston yoga team, you can join our team and practice with us there.
[1:13:57] KC: Awesome, I just spoke with Sarah two or three weeks ago, we recorded an episode and I’m going to be publishing that, it’s kind of confusing for the listener but for you and I, I’m publishing that next week.
[1:14:11] DV: Cool, great.
[1:14:13] KC: Awesome, well thank you so much David and yeah, I appreciate everything and for everybody listening, all the links, everything that was mentioned will be available in the show notes.
[1:14:25] DV: Perfect Keith, thank you so much.
[FINAL MESSAGE]
[1:14:28] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Business of Life Podcast. Apply what you learn today and you’ll be one step closer to creating the life you love to live.
[END]
