If you teach yoga, it's highly likely that you will fart in front of a class, experience a wardrobe malfunction, and get kicked in the head while helping a student come into Handstand hopefully not all on the same day. When you keep the intention of practicing ahimsa, or non-harming, at the forefront of your teaching, you can let go of needing to understand a student's perspective in order to respect it. "I've had lots of small screwups as a teacher," says Rachel Land, a New Zealand-based yoga teacher and co-host of The Yoga Medicine podcast who describes herself as "a playful and flippant kind of teacher."
A life path that took her from Iowa to West Africa to the halls of Congress to the civil rights-era Deep South to UC Santa Cruz informed Gwen Marcum as she built a community centered around the Capitola Book Café. Marcum died in April at age 86.