Yoga is a personal practice. No matter how many people fill the four walls of your favorite studio or yoga shala, everyone comes in with a different story about
why they partake in the ancient body, breath and mind exercise.
With the plentiful places to practice and instructors to learn from on the North Fork come endless amounts of unique perspectives. While holding a yoga teacher certification is now standard, many local instructors discovered their love for yoga through interesting and less traditional circumstances. They studied with different masters, including world-renowned yogis, and pushed through intensive trainings to bring the most informed versions of themselves to the mat.
Seeking something more
Jen Conway Farino, a 25-year North Fork yoga teacher who leads classes at Greenport’s Karunã Hot Yoga, Mattituck’s Yoga Folk and other studios on the island, suffered from postpartum depression after her daughter was born 28 years ago. Yoga quickly became her saving grace thanks to the mental and physical break it provided.
Soon into her journey, Farino was referred to a Cutchogue gym that offered ashtanga yoga classes, a fast-paced, physically demanding style. She became hooked and practiced well into her pregnancy with her second child, who is now 25.
Farino took some time off after giving birth. When she was able to get back into the studio, she sat her son in a baby swing in the corner of class while she picked the practice back up.
She and her husband were hoping to build a home and money was tight; sacrificing an extracurricular like yoga classes seemed like a practical decision. But when Farino told her instructor that she would have to cut back on classes, he opened a door to a new pathway — offering her the opportunity to occasionally fill in as teacher and practice for free.
“Back when I started, this idea of being a certified instructor was kind of new,” Farino says. “This idea of paying money and taking a course and getting a piece of paper.”
For the first eight years of Farino’s teaching journey, she didn’t have a formal certification. Instead, she attended training workshops with well-known yoga masters like Beryl Bender Birch, K. Pattabhi Jois and David Swenson.
“I knew what I knew from my mat, from the people who taught me and what I practiced and what I learned,” says Farino. She later fell in love with hot yoga and ultimately earned her yoga teacher certification from her favorite hot yoga studio, Peaceful Warrior in Rocky Point.
Rosemary Martilotta’s path was more unorthodox: She was more or less thrown into her yoga teaching role.
Martilotta, who teaches at community spaces like the Mattituck-Laurel Library, found her way to yoga 33 years ago, when she had her fourth child at 40. She needed an outlet but was initially skeptical of the yoga scene. Were these her kind of people? She fell in love during her first session.
“Some come for lunch and stay for life,” says Martilotta. “That was me — one class. I loved it.”
One day, less than five years into practicing, the instructor didn’t show up to the class Martilotta regularly attended at the George Young Community Center in Riverhead. Her peers asked her to lead it instead. Then a friend asked her to teach a yoga class at a beauty parlor, Hair Experience in Mattituck, on days the salon was closed.
She furthered her knowledge by taking classes across the island and gathering groups in people’s homes for sessions taught by yogi masters. In the 1990s she traveled to Providence, R.I., where Amrit Desai, the founder of Kripalu — a yoga practice and teacher training retreat — led Martilotta through two 2-week sessions to become a certified instructor.
“There’s no hesitation when you just have to jump into it,” she says.
Flowing through formal training
It wasn’t until Claire Copersino, a natural athlete and founder of North Fork Yoga Shala, faced debilitating, inexplicable gut issues that she found solace in yoga.
In March 2000, Copersino felt a calling to start teaching the practice she had found so much peace in.
“I woke up one morning and literally sat upright in bed and I was like, I have to become a yoga teacher,” she says. “It wasn’t like I had thought about it, it just sort of came to me.”
Her husband at the time pushed her to pursue her goal at a Kripalu immersive training in the Berkshires. For a month, she woke up seven days a week at 6 a.m. to study the psychology, anatomy and alignment components of yoga. The trainees ate an entirely vegetarian diet, had hands-on assistance during their physical practice and used chanting techniques to release and learn.
“I felt like my whole body was plugged into an electrical outlet,” says Copersino. “Your energy just really shifted.” Copersino, whose business was previously based out of Southold, now teaches at various locations around the North Fork.
Ina Visich, owner of Solntse Hot Yoga, also struggled with physical health issues and wanted to deepen her knowledge of ancient medicine while empowering herself to share her practice with others.
Visich opened her Wading River studio in 2016 without any instructors. During her search for teachers, she realized they were harder to find than anticipated. Still determined to bring yoga to the community, Visich signed up for a 200-hour yoga intensive teacher training in Babylon hosted by Always-At-Aum, which at the time was a transient yoga school.
Five days a week for months, Visich, who was still a beginner yogi, was training for her certification and running her new business — (fortunately, she found an instructor to teach classes) — while working as a full-time waitress.
“I was literally learning everything,” she recalls. “The physical practice and mental practice were a lot. I remember sometimes driving from yoga school to work and literally crying because of how much I was learning about myself and how much I was growing.”
Teaching the next generation
Savannah Sellick, owner of Yoga Folk, Paula DiDonato, owner of Southold’s The Giving Room, and Steve Schwab, Nancy Baylis, Lesley Carson and Luck Wallace, all students from The Giving Room’s yoga teacher training, were each seeking change from strenuous careers or looking to pursue an alternate path.
“I ended up falling in love with the practice,” says DiDonato. “It gave me a tremendous amount of peace.”
Sellick earned her certification from Always-At-Aum in a 200-hour winter intensive program taught by Robin Appel Maida. Maida taught prospective instructors verbal cuing and modifications for students with injuries and critiqued demonstration classes.
In turn, Sellick developed a thick skin, something that worked to her advantage when starting Yoga Folk in Mattituck last year.
“I think going through that training teaches you boundaries, it teaches you how to speak with slowness and how to think about what you’re really trying to convey through messages,” she says.
Visich, of Solntse Hot Yoga, loved her experience so much so that she has maintained a nine-year partnership with Always-At-Aum, providing 200-hour yoga teacher training to hopeful instructors at her studio.
DiDonato earned an advanced 300-hour yoga teacher certification from Jivamukti Yoga School in New York City. Four years after opening The Giving Room in 2010, she began offering a 200-hour yoga teacher training and has since graduated nearly 100 instructors, many of whom now teach at The Giving Room and some who even instruct within the yoga teacher training. The eight-week process, held four times a year, is available in person or on Zoom.
The training goes through the history of yoga, including ancient texts, in-depth meditation, breathing exercises, body anatomy as it applies to teaching, creating and guiding sequences for classes, alignment, and making yoga a lifelong practice and lifestyle.
“To me, yoga is a lot more than the asana, which are the poses,” says DiDonato. “It’s breathwork, it’s meditation, it’s concentration, it’s a commitment to an ethical lifestyle. It encompasses everything, so it came kind of natural for me to want to share that with the students in such a way where they could go on a similar journey and become yoga teachers.”
