Unsere Lehrer
Jen
Jen enjoyed the most blessed childhood she can imagine, growing up with her parents and guinea pigs near Washington, D.C. She climbed trees and read literature when she wasn’t playing the violin, riding horses, diving, or teaching swing dancing. In college, she experienced suffering and sickness for the first time. She began to study the mind, hoping to cure herself and others of these less pleasant aspects of life (B.A., cum laude, Neuroscience, Columbia University, 1998; M.A., Psychology, Princeton University, 2003; fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and Max-Planck Institute).
One fateful day, Nick dragged his stiff and skeptical friend Jen away from her Ph.D. project on stress & the brain and brought her to an Ashtanga yoga lesson. It was love at first dog. The next week, a Jivamukti teacher named Emily subbed the class and sang lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu, which Jen found absurdly idealistic at first... But as the mantra sank in, she began to feel that doing research and at best developing a pill so that some people might feel a bit less miserable in a specific way for a short time (at the cost of much animal torture) was thinking small relative to her true wish, “May all beings everywhere be happy and free!”
Jen feels extremely grateful to her teachers, who have helped her to see that this goal is fully and unconditionally realizable. She would particularly like to thank Patrick (her first mentor), Petros (500-hr apprenticeship), Sharon & David (300-hr teacher training & Advanced Jivamukti Certification), Richard Freeman (350 hours of Ashtanga teacher intensives), Rolf & Marci Naujokat (16-week Mysore practice), and S. N. Goenka & associates (3x 10-day vipassana meditation). She would also like to extend an enormous thank-you to the Munich satsang for supporting her since she devoted herself full-time to yoga in 2005.
