Broad, Then Deep

The Saturday 11.15 community class, which the studio gives to its newer teachers. I taught my first on 28 June 2025. I am at the start of teaching, not the middle of it — which is the reason the rest of this page is about practice.

Year by year: 2015 8 · 2016 35 · 2017 160 · 2018 199 · 2019 249 · 2021 33 · 2022 30 · 2023 210 · 2024 256 · 2025 270 · 2026 161. The 497-day break from December 2019 to May 2021 is the studio closures; I came back the month they reopened and have practiced four or five times a week since.

Most of it was at Yoga Tree, which before it closed was the largest studio group in San Francisco and something close to a crossroads for the profession — 143 instructors on the staff list the December I was going most often. I practiced with 65 of them, 486 classes, across six of its rooms. Alignment-led vinyasa, Iyengar-inflected hatha, yin, restorative, Bikram, Forrest, Jivamukti, bhakti, Ashtanga: not as a survey, just as what was on the schedule when I could get there. I have written up that studio separately.

I am a Baptiste teacher. But I did not arrive at it out of a vacuum, and when I teach I can hear the other rooms.

San Francisco mostly, with the Massachusetts North Shore in the mix — Newburyport, Salisbury, Amesbury, and a Bikram studio in Seacoast — which is where I am from and where I practiced when I was home.

I first walked into Baptiste Power Yoga San Francisco in June 2019 and practiced nearly every day for three weeks. Then the studios closed. When they reopened in May 2021 I went back, and I have not really practiced anywhere else since: 134 classes a year, with 46 of the studio’s teachers.

Both were led by Ekaterina Petrova, who taught me 12 classes at Yoga Tree between December 2018 and November 2019. She is the only teacher I have kept practicing with across the whole eleven years.

Baptiste is 60% of everything I have done, and all of it since 2019. Before that it was vinyasa, 458 classes of it, with 55 classes of Bikram, 39 of alignment-led hatha, 13 of yin and 14 restorative around the edges.

A teacher trained in one method who has spent four years in other people’s rooms knows something a little different from a teacher who has only ever practiced one way. That is the argument this chart makes, and it is most of why I keep the record at all.