welcome to the yoga nest
Hello, friend! I’m Kass - I grew up in Rochester, NY and have put my roots down here. It’s a great little city, in spite of the mountains of snow we get every winter.
I've been practicing yoga on and off since the early 2000s. I went to the School of the Arts for middle and high school where they offered yoga, dance, and pilates as alternatives to traditional gym class. As a moody nerd who loved all things bookish, these classes were an absolute life-saver.
I returned to yoga many times over the next twenty years, in many different settings and with many amazing teachers. In the spring of 2021, I reconnected with yoga in a way I had never experienced before - I was on my mat every day, sometimes for multiple classes!
As my practice grew and evolved into something vital, I found myself talking about yoga with everyone around me. This was something that I loved deeply, and sharing it with others felt right, and important. My teacher Erin encouraged me to follow that feeling and in the fall of 2021, I enrolled in the Yoga Teacher Training program at Midtown Athletic Club.
I completed the 200-hour training with my teachers Aimée Senise Conners and Erin Garvin in January 2022 and jumped right into teaching just a few weeks later. My goal is to help my students expand their personal experience through movement, mindfulness, and community connection. You can find me sharing yoga at Compass Cycle + Flow in Rochester and at YOGA 170 in Fairport.
Off the mat, I spend a lot of my time working with Rochester Mutual Aid Network. RMAN is a cooperative network that works to get aid/resources from within our own community to our neighbors who need it. The organization is entirely volunteer-run and operates democratically and transparently. To paraphrase a piece of our Principles statement - there can be no real Freedom without a society where food, housing, and healthcare are guaranteed equitably to all, where people are not oppressed by state violence, where the climate crisis is addressed immediately, and where the workplace is operated democratically and transparently.
Working with RMAN has been incredibly transformational for me - it is extremely satisfying to collaborate with my fellow Network members to make our vision for the future a reality. I’ve learned so much about decision-making, cooperation and compassion while working with RMAN and have experienced deep personal growth because of it. No other work has ever been so meaningful, and I think the key part of it for me is that it’s totally free from coercion. Everyone at RMAN is there because they believe in the same things and want to see a better world than what we’ve got right now. Building a community with the other members of RMAN has been one of the most impactful experiences of my life.
Beyond these two huge and important pieces of my life? I have a husband, a German Shepherd, a cat, and a brand new lab/boxer puppy - Brian, Illy, Sully and Linus. I spend all of my free time with my little family, trying to quietly squeeze as much joy out of life as I can. I can’t promise my posts here will all be joyful, but they will surely all be honest. I’m very glad to be sharing this space with you, friend - welcome.
💖 kass