Rodney Yee Biography

For as long as he can remember, Rodney Yee has been fascinated by the mind and body. He was a gymnast, a ballet dancer with the Oakland Ballet Company and the Matsuyama Ballet Company of Tokyo, and a philosophy and physical therapy major at UC Davis and Berkeley. In 1980, he took his first yoga class, following a path of inquiry about the mind and body. He went to yoga in the quest of flexibility and discovered a discipline that would become his life's work and passion. Rodney started full-time yoga studies in 1981 at the San Francisco Iyengar Yoga Institute and The Yoga Room in Berkeley. He founded the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California, with Richard Rosen and Claire Finn in 1987, after becoming a certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher. Rodney still teaches at Piedmont Yoga Classroom on a regular basis, but he is now located in New York and teaches regularly at his wife Colleen's studio, Yoga Shanti, in Sag Harbor, NY, as well as their new site in the Flatiron District. Rodney delivers teacher training, conferences, and retreats domestically and internationally, many of them with Colleen, in addition to teaching public courses in Sag Harbor and Oakland. Rodney has led several in-depth (18-month) teacher training programs and has been teaching Advanced Yoga Teacher Training courses at studios around the country for over 15 years. He and Colleen have conducted yoga retreats in Northern California, upstate New York, Hawaii, Mexico, Bali, Bhutan, and a variety of other locales. Rodney has been on Oprah, Good Morning America, the PBS series The Practical Power of Yoga, and several other television shows. He regularly contributes to Yoga Journal, Self, Shape, and Fitness, as well as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Marie Claire, Elle, O-The Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Marie Claire, Elle, O-The Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Rodney has appeared in over 30 Gaiam video titles and several audio recordings, and has co-authored two books with Nina Zolotow, Yoga: The Poetry of the Body (St. Martins, 2002) and Moving Toward Balance (Rodale, 2004). Rodney and Colleen collaborated with Gaiam to create the Gaiam Yoga Classroom, an online yoga studio featuring videos, audio courses, and position instructions. It was created with the goal of making yoga at home accessible to a wide range of people. Rodney and Colleen are the Yoga Directors of the Urban Zen Foundation's Health and Wellness Initiative, Donna Karan's effort to shift the healthcare paradigm to embrace complementary and alternative medicine. They are the core yoga faculty of the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program, a 500-hour program that is currently training close to 100 integrative therapists in five modalities – yoga therapy, aromatherapy, reiki, contemplative end-of-life care, and a variety of other modalities – as part of this project. The Urban Zen Health and Wellness Initiative, in collaboration with Rodney, Colleen, and Gaiam, has created DVDs and CDs for hospitals that guide patients through in-bed exercises, therapeutic postures, breath monitoring methods, and body-scan meditations. Rodney's teaching is heavily influenced by his personal experience and intuition. His core circle of friends, regular pupils, and family are also excellent sources of information. His communication abilities, sequencing elegance, and ability to break down postures into their fundamental parts are his talents. Rodney uses yoga to put philosophy into practice and to reveal the innate beauty of our emotions. He adores yoga's capacity to purify the mind and body, allowing him to be present at the moment. Rodney and Colleen are happily married and living in Long Island, New York, with their four wonderful children, Evan, Adesha, Rachel, and Johanna.

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