Robert began exploring yoga in 1993. His first yoga teacher was Erich Schiffmann, who sent him on his yoga journey with one simple but crucial piece of advice: if you want to teach yoga, learn about it from your own yoga practice. Then you'll really understand what you are teaching and your teaching will be authentic.

At the same time, Robert has also explored several styles of yoga, including Kripalu, Ashtanga, and Iyengar, drawing upon interesting aspects of each tradition. He has a 200-hour Kripalu Yoga teacher training certificate.

Knowing that he works well with personal study after having worked on a Ph.D. dissertation for 5 years, and that self-education is the path of real understanding, he found it easy and enjoyable to not attach himself to any of these traditions and instead become his own teacher.

Turning his own body into something of laboratory, he has used his yoga practice to gradually heal the many injuries and muscle traumas that 10 years as a distance runner had left in his body and also to develop a deep appreciation for a vast range of postures and such crucial aspects of yoga practice as sequencing and working with particular parts of the body.

Robert's practice of yoga is also influenced greatly by the work of Moshe Feldenkais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. It is by becoming of aware of how you are using your body as you are moving that each movement can be gradually refined and made easier. Robert's approach to teaching yoga is infused with this principle.

You will find this principle in his classes for the hips, lower back, and upper back and shoulders, in his 'Integrated Yoga' classes (All Levels), and in the 'Open Class for Yoga Therapy' that he teaches every morning during the week. Students find that Robert's somatic approach of helping them become body aware through attention to simple movements, transforms their experience of yoga into meditation, and gives their yoga postures an inner depth and space that just 'doing postures' never takes them too.

Robert has run half-marathons and one marathon but gave up running in 1998 to focus on his yoga practice. He has also traveled widely in Europe and India. He first went to India at the age of 21 and backpacked around the country for 3 months, meeting many wonderful people from both India and across the world.

Robert also holds an MA in International Politics from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Dalhousie University in Canada. Prior to all of that, he also worked in the international bond market in London as a trader for 4 years.

He came to Halifax in 1993 to study at Dalhousie University, and after graduating found that he loved the city and the people so much that he wanted to make it his home. He feels warmly supported by everyone he meets and is grateful for the opportunity of living in Eastern Canada.

Robert's yoga practice is part of his holistic approach to life, which includes a diet that is free of wheat, dairy, eggs, refined sugar, and caffeine, and rich in grains, beans, green veggies, and water. It also includes a love of the early-morning, walking outside in the fresh air, work that he is deeply passionate about, and the company of friends that are committed to living life from a place of abundance.

He is a quiet advocate of The Swiss Guide To Optimal Health by Dr. Thomas Rau. You can find out more at www.drrau.com. He also loves the brownies from Gluten Free Goodies at the Halifax Farmers Market. See www.glutenfreegoodies.ca

His yoga classes reflect his relaxed personal style and his interest in all aspects of yoga, from the physical practice, to anatomy, to the ability of yoga to heal the body and bring peace to the mind, to the wider philosophical questions about life and ourselves that yoga prompts us to consider.

His yoga teaching is also influenced to a considerable degree by the teachings of J. Krishnamurti. Robert facilitates a Krishnamurti study group twice a month in Halifax, and teaches a reading and discussion course 3 times a year called Meeting Life, which is for people wanting to explore Krishnamurti's teachings in the context of their own lives.

Following Krishnamurti, Robert takes a critical approach to the various techniques of yoga. As much as the practice of yoga postures help the body to heal and the mind to experience increasingly steadier levels of attention, without self-observation in the practice of the postures the total inner revolution of the human being away from egotistic activity will never come about.

So Robert sees yoga postures as offering a mirror to our deep and surface levels of conditioning. This is what the ancient yogis were trying to help us become aware of. Robert's classes therefore offer students the possibility of exploring how our sense of who we are is created and maintained in our patterns of thought.

As we observe our memory, habits, ambitions, and goals expressing themselves in the way we approach a posture, a singular and illuminating moment of self-awareness dawns. The intensity of this moment is what yoga practice is about. This is what the ancient yogis called tapas.

In tapas it is not the heat that comes from stretching that matters the most. That is simply the heat generated by great effort towards a goal. We might experience tapas in a posture yet still feel frustrated and angry because we are not getting to where we want to be in the posture. But when you stop and ask yourself why are you doing the posture the way you're doing it, when you ask yourself what your goals and ambitions in this posture you are in are, when you see yourself projecting your past approach to a yoga posture into this one you are in and you realise that you are not here now at all, then the miracle of inner revolution, total self-transformation, happens.

It is this ability to think critically about what he is teaching and how it is approached that keeps Robert's classes fresh and interesting. His focus is to continually invite students to observe their thoughts as they practice each posture, to inquire into the activity of their mind, so that they learn about the practice of self-awareness and self-transformation from themselves and for themselves. It takes a lot of energy and it can feel like very arduous work but the technique of self-awareness is the most simple of all.

To live this way in self-awareness is what Krishnamurti described as being a light to oneself. You are not relying on a external technique like a yoga posture or a mantra or even having a teacher. A mantra will merely put your mind to sleep and if you rely on a teacher you will merely follow their conditioning. But when your thoughts can observe themselves you cut through all of this and set yourself free from your own conditioning. This is what the idea of a complete inner revolution means, and this is what Krishnamurti called real meditation.

Robert feels like he is a perpetual student, and is always at his most happy when he is reading and learning new things that he can bring into his own yoga practice and then into his classes. His skill as a teacher was recognized in The Coast newspaper, where readers voted him the Best Yoga Teacher in Halifax in 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007.

Robert's approach to teaching yoga now encompasses many strands of knowledge. One of the most important things he has learned is to take account of people's personality, especially their tendency towards introversion or extraversion, and their natural preference for learning by reading or listening, and for communicating by writing or talking. Understanding each student's temperament and learning style is the first step to helping them get the most out of their yoga practice.