I am a certified KRI (Kundalini Research Institute) Level One and Level Two Kundalini Yoga instructor. I did my Level One with lead trainer Guru Dass Singh Khalsa in Bali (220-hrs YTT, 2017), and completed the five required Level Two courses between 2017 and 2021, 300-hrs YTT, for a total of 520-hrs YTT in Kundalini Yoga. Level Two courses include Authentic Relationships (with lead trainer Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa, 2017), Conscious Communication (lead trainers Santokh Singh Khalsa and GuruMeher Singh Khalsa, 2017), Mind and Matter (lead trainer Deva Kaur Khalsa, 2018), Vitality and Stress (also with Deva Kaur, 2019), and Life Cycles and Lifestyles (with lead trainer Nirvair Singh, 2021).

I have also studied the efficacy of kundalini yoga for addiction and trauma recovery with Sat Dharam Kaur Khalsa's program Beyond Addiction: The Yogic Path to Recovery, which featured Dr. Gabor Maté. The rich connection between kundalini art and yoga with Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa. And in 2018 completed a nine-month course of study with GuruMeher Singh Khalsa on emotional liberation and kundalini yoga.

Informing my kundalini practice are Buddhist Vipassana meditation, teacher training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) from UMass Medical School Center for Mindfulness, and teacher training in Prana Vinyasa Flow with Shiva Rea (200hr YTT), plus over 25 years of teaching philosophy and art at the college level.

Please join me at the Dolores Public Library for Wednesday evening yoga class 5:30-6:30pm. As part of a rotating crew of yoga teachers I offer kundalini yoga classes every 3-4 weeks.

This experiential course, developed and taught in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota from 2017 to 2020, offers a dynamic mix of art and kundalini yoga. The goals are tapping into one's natural creativity, developing self-awareness, and cultivating a strong sense of embodiment, intuitive intelligence, and connection to self. Each class opens with yoga and meditation, which leads into guided creative exercises with various art materials and modalities, and ends with structured time to share. Calming the mind/body and centering into self-presence at the beginning, participants experience a more expansive sense of mind/body/spirit and it is from this place that we explore the creative process.

This class is for all levels: although welcome, no previous art or yoga experience is necessary. Most important is an open mind and a willingness to experiment with creative and somatic practices.

From 2002 to 2021 I taught a range of studio and non-studio critical theory courses for the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul (UMN). I accepted the full-time tenure-track position in 2002, received tenure as Associate Professor in 2007, and became Full Professor in 2013. In 2008/09 I was on leave from UMN visiting Stanford University, California, as an Arts Practitioner/Writer Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center, and upon my return to UMN served as Director of Graduate Study from 2009 to 2011. I was the Beverly and Richard Fink Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts from 2014 to 2018.

When I first arrived at UMN I taught in the Photography area before moving to Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice (IASP). I taught freshmen seminars through graduate-level classes as well as cross-listing a course with the Philosophy Department. Taking an innovative approach to arts education that blurred traditional distinctions between media and disciplines, I developed and added a number of new courses to the curriculum, focusing on art and language, image and text, conceptual art, process art, social and ethical issues, and site-specific, interventionist, and performative practices. The most recent addition being the experiential and integrative Art and Yoga.

Prior to joining UMN, I taught philosophy at Bucknell University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Inspired by my Art and Yoga curriculum, I am developing a series of stand-alone, mindfulness-based art and writing workshops for non-academic contexts. Each involves meditation and a creative activity, using the grounding effect of mindfulness to encourage natural creative flow. The initial offerings include: Image and Text: Creating a Personalized Set of Wisdom Cards, in which participants write and craft a decorated deck of customized inspiration words (4-hour). Writing from the Heart: A Writing and Mindfulness Workshop, in which participants explore free-writing to guided writing prompts (3-hour). And Exploring Haiku and Haibun: A Writing and Mindfulness Workshop, in which participants play with two Japanese poetic forms (3-hour).

See details in the images here for descriptions of the content and goals for each course. The Spring 2020 workshops scheduled to take place at School of the West in Mancos, Colorado were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Look for future listings here on this website or contact me if you’re interested in the workshops.

I have been teaching at the university and college level as long as I’ve been in graduate school, a mix of art, humanities, liberal arts, philosophy, and most recently yoga. As an educator I love this aspect of the job and collectively have over 25 years experience. Listed here are the primary academic positions and courses in philosophy before I switched to studio art and more interdisciplinary approaches to teaching. Colleges and universities include the metropolitan fine-art-focused School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Bucknell University, a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania; and the private research university Washington University in St. Louis.