Leslie started her quest for knowledge of the Self as a pre-teen writing daily journal entries, inspired poetry and escaping her dislike of the school system by going to ballet class, every day. When her first love gave her The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, Leslie started a love affair with the writers of the Beat Generation and embedded in that affair was a door to Eastern thought, spirituality, yoga and meditation of which she was instantly drawn. When Leslie was 20 she landed in the technicolor San Francisco of the early 90’s to pursue her ballet career at the Lines Ballet. One of her early jaunts was to the SF Library Yoga section where she found and checked out a Bikram Yoga Book. She learned the sequence from the pages of a book which she did daily as her pre ballet class warm up between juicing too much sweet juice and making macrobiotic breakfast of miso soup and soaked brown rice. After digging deeper she realized an important part of learning yoga is having a teacher. She started searching for the yoga practice of her heart. Leslie spent the next decade exploring different types of yoga, somatic practices and meditation from Iyengar to Vipassana Retreats to Feldenkrais for ballet.

In 2002, Leslie met her yoga teacher Kaya Mindlin. Kaya taught Leslie four basic SRY poses to release each segment of the spine in the living room before she left for an extended trip to India. While Kaya traveled, Leslie started doing these poses daily in her bedroom. After a life time of dance, the sensation of releasing tension while resolving old chronic dance injuries, while staying still…was a long awaited balm. Leslie has taught this style of yoga since 2008 when she completed her 200 hour yoga teacher training with the Master Yoga Foundation of Swami Nirmalananda. She has since completed thousands of hours of continuing education with her teacher Kaya Mindlin with whom she still studies and has been a dedicated student for the last nineteen years. She has training in Private and Semi Private Hands on Yoga Therapy, Pregnancy Yoga, Ayurveda, Mantra, Sanskrit and Vedic Philosophy.

Leslie began life as a dancer. She studied and performed professionally for more than two decades in classical ballet and contemporary dance. At fifteen, she left her home in Arkansas to go train and eventually perform with the Boston Ballet. In her early twenties, she made the leap from dancing in classical ballet companies to becoming a founding member of the San Francisco based experimental, contemporary dance company Kunst-stoff, with whom she created, performed and traveled nationally and internationally for 12 years. Leslie’s love of dance is varied and includes a far reaching range of dance forms and somatic trainings. She trained and performed with the Japanese Butoh company, Salt Farm. She was a dedicated student of the late Augusta Moore who taught Feldenkrais through ballet. She developed a love of diasporic dance studying many forms of African dance as well as studying and performing with the beloved Afoutayi Haitian Dance Company. Plus, as soon as she came of age living in San Francisco, her love of dance quickly rooted into the urban dance community and culture in which she stayed active for more than twenty years. Presently, she is an active member of the International Axis Syllabus Community, studying anatomy and applied physics to the human body in dynamic movement. Leslie is also a master trainer of the Gyrotonic Expansion System which she has taught privately as well as trained teachers since 1993.

Leslie’s love affair with and exploration of conscious movement informs her knowledge base and teaching style of the Spinal Release Yoga practice.

Leslie also trained as a Clinical Western Herbalist at the Berkeley Herbal Center under the direction of Pam Fischer, Kelsey Barret, the late Tony Seifert and others. She also completed courses in nutrition, holistic health, macrobiotic cooking and Shiatsu massage at San Francisco State University and the Kushi Institute respectively. Growing a baby while studying herbalism, she developed a special love for applying this field of knowledge with mothers and children. Leslie lives in California with her husband and two young daughters who are the lights of her life. Leslie dedicates all of her teaching to her teachers, and states “With a heart of gratitude, know, you and your teachings are alive in me!”