I'm Peter, a student of life and yoga who keeps getting to begin again.

I don't teach this because I've figured it out. I teach it because I need it most in the moments I haven't.

A girlfriend brought me to a Sunday morning class at Urban Flow San Francisco. The teacher was Rusty Wells — a former Franciscan monk — and the practice was Bhakti Flow: vinyasa with chanting and music and a working theology. After about a year of showing up, Rusty gave me a free ten-day teacher training. That was 2012.

Late in 2014 I took a year off. Five months in India, then Bali, then Thailand to study Thai massage, then a six-week trek into Tsum Valley in northern Nepal. The 2015 earthquake hit while we were in the mountains. A helicopter brought us out two weeks later. That ended the walkabout.

I came home and started teaching full time. Rooftops first, then studios, then apps. I was Headspace's first video yoga creator, and I've been recording for FitOn and Audible since. My Sunday morning class at Love Story grew to over a hundred people a week. Festivals followed — Lightning in a Bottle, Beloved, Mount Adams, Burning Man, Envision, Summit Series — and then the international retreats: Iceland, Greece, Bali, Turkey, Hawaii, Mexico.

From 2019 to 2023 I taught weekly classes inside San Quentin through the Prison Yoga Project. Four straight years. Showing up to a room of men in blue who actually needed the practice — not who thought it was cute — is what taught me how to hold a room without performance, and to treat people as adults. It's the truest version of the work.

The list of times I've begun again is long. The earthquake. A 2017 motorcycle accident that put me in the ICU for a few days. My mom's cancer. Heartbreaks I won't pretty up. Retreats I planned with my whole heart that didn't fill. A six-year Zoom sangha I ran daily through the pandemic — donation-based at first, then a real membership — that I eventually scaled back to once a month when the math broke.

Fourteen years on the mat now, ten thousand classes or so. The deepest stuff didn't come from the accumulation — it came from trying to use this practice in my actual life. The morning coffee, the hard conversations, the moments when nothing is certain. After all this time, the honest answer is still mostly I don't know, and that's the part I trust most.