A Glimpse of Dan
Founding Teacher
"Mat time is ME time.”
Languages Spoken: English
Country: USA
I am a 21 year Army retiree. During that time I was an Army Recruiter and Instructor where I taught Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear defense. I have attended numerous leadership courses and deployed to Iraq in 2005 where I was in charge of the base defense of over 10000 Soldiers and civilians. I have been married for 28 years and have two grown kids who are also in the military. One thing about being married for 28 years is that you have to have a sense of humor. I jokingly say that my wife has the strongest eyeballs in the world because every time I say something she just rolls her eyes at me.
I started my yoga journey about 10 years back doing the old P90X DVDs. That morphed into a once a week yoga class while working as an Army civilian. I decided to take my life in a more positive direction by taking a 200hr yoga teacher training certification in 2016 with Empower School of Yoga in Nashville, TN. Since then I have attended Level One: Journey Into Power with Baptiste Yoga and the Baptiste Power Yoga Teacher Course along with 40 Days to Personal Revolution twice. In 2019 I took the 300hr ytt with Baptiste Power Yoga Nashville. I have co-facilitated yoga teacher training courses helping to certify over 100 yoga teachers. Yoga has personally helped me physically and mentally. 21 years in the military is hard on the body. As the phrase goes, “it’s not the years, it’s the mileage”. Uncle Sam can be quite hard on the body.
I used to be addicted to opioids and also had a spinal cord stimulator implanted in my lower back to manage my lower back pain. Since starting a regular yoga practice I haven’t taken any prescribed pain medications in over three years and had the stimulator surgically removed because I just don’t need it.
My main two intentions for my classes are “have fun and challenge”. Just because you are sweating your butt off doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. I say lots of punny-type dad jokes in my classes. I will purposely say something outlandish just to see if my students are listening. I have a strong passion for teaching arm balances/inversions. I find teaching those to be fun and empowering. I love the look a student gets when they go up into an arm balance/inversion for the first time when they didn’t think they could do it.
