|
Today's Featured Biography
Genie (Deva) Parnell
Deva (Genie) Parnell is owner and director of Discovery Yoga Center in St. Augustine, Florida, where she and her staff teach classes, train teachers, and offer a variety of workshops, retreats and training programs for yoga students and teachers alike. The center includes a main studio, meditation room, retail shop and guest-rooms for out-of-town students.
Genie became interested in yoga in the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, she had become a certified Kripalu Yoga teacher and was teaching evening classes while working as a graphic designer and raising her daughter, Leslie. In the mid-1980s, after Leslie left home, Genie moved to Lenox, Massachusetts and joined the residential staff at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, the largest yoga center in the country, where she lived and worked for twelve years.
While at Kripalu Center, she became a senior program director, curriculum developer and teacher-trainer. She was instrumental in the development of Kripalu Yoga and Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training, and trained over 2000 yoga teachers. She was also director of staff yoga education, and in 1994 was awarded the Kripalu International Network's Global Service Award.
These days Genie is known by students and friends as Deva. The Sanskrit name, short for Devakanya, was given to her by a former teacher. She has written several training manuals and many articles for the Kripalu Yoga Bulletin under the name, Deva Parnell. She has produced a number of home-practice experiences on audiocassette, including Yoga Breaks for the Person on the Go, Sun Series, Kripalu Vigorous Yoga, and Yoga & Self Trust. She has also been interviewed by Yoga Journal, Yoga International, New Age Journal, Fitness Magazine, The St Augustine Record, The Florida Times Union and other publications. In 2001, Florida Living magazine featured her as one of "20 Intriguing Floridians".
She continues to teach her popular "Yoga and Walking" program at Kripalu Center. But her real passion is training yoga teachers…60-80 per year in her nationally recognized, 200-hour Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training program. She also offers a Yoga Alliance registered 500-hour teacher certification.
Deva and her husband, Hugh White, returned to Florida in 1999. They now live on St. Augustine's Vilano Beach, just a short drive from Ponte Vedra, where daughter Leslie lives with her husband and two girls, Lindsey and Madison. Deva and Hugh enjoy swimming, walking on the beach, bicycling, boating, scuba diving and, most of all, grand-parenting.
VIEW ALL BIOGRAPHIES
|
Indicates an included photo
