Trish Tillman has taught yoga since 2013. She initially started practicing yoga in around 2008, as a way of dealing with the physical stress and strain of her martial arts training on her body, as well as the mental strain of attending grad school. Her first class was a 90-minute hot yoga class, and ironically, her overall level of stress in her life was so high at the time that she found the 90 boiling minutes relaxing by comparison!
Trish completed her initial yoga teacher training in 2013, at Pure Prana Yoga in Alexandria, and her advanced teacher training in 2019, at Sky House Yoga in Silver Spring, with Hari-kirtana das and Ashley Litecky Elenbaas. She has also taken a yin yoga training with Paulie Zink, as well as a training through Beloved Yoga, and restorative yoga with Tara Lemerise.
As well as physical/ postural yoga, Trish enjoys studying and practicing bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, which is mentioned in the Bhagavad-Gita among the different types of yoga. Sheâs immersed herself in the essential texts of bhakti yoga, and the stories of bhakti yoga saints and leaders from the Middle Ages until the present. As a student of religious history, Trish is struck by how the language of devotion takes common patterns in every culture, as humans in different ages and different parts of the world all seek a meaningful relationship with the divine, and with one another. Bhakti yoga doesnât mean seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, or being blind to bad things happening, but rather, it calls us to relate to one another authentically, and always look for opportunities to serve each other.
Trish completed her PhD in History in 2018 at the Catholic University of America, and teaches history as an adjunct professor at University of Maryland. She has also taught college history classes at other colleges and universities in the DC area since 2012. Her writings have been published in Tarka, the print journal for Embodied Philosophy, the online yoga learning platform, and she has presented papers at conferences at Harvard Divinity School and at Notre Dame. Trish sits on the external advisory board for Harvard Divinity Schoolâs Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, a groundbreaking program at Harvard which seeks to bring together scholars of religion and spirituality, and practitioners of those same traditions.
In Trishâs view, sheâs seen spiritual practitioners look down on academics a bit as being all head and no heart, but neither should a balanced yoga student be all heart and no head. Yoga calls us to reunite the warring parts of ourselves back together, not silo ourselves off into different personas for each of our roles in life. What we are is ultimately bigger than this or that title we hold, and how we make one another feel is the most important thing of all.
