Teacher Spotlight: Meet Dana
Dana Bartee has been teaching at OTY for almost a decade and practicing here for even longer. She is an OTY staple! With her calm and kind approach, coupled with her love for anatomy and prop exploration, her style is fun, smart and grounding. Plus, she continues to come to class all these years later, to learn and refine her teaching skills. If you haven’t checked out her classes yet, you gotta make it happen. Mondays and Wednesdays at 11:30 on Zoom!
Tell us a little about you.
I met my husband in kindergarten. We’ve been married for 16 years and have two amazing daughters, ages 11 and 7, and a 90-pound rescue dog. I was a high school English teacher before I became a mom; I still miss it, but I find teaching yoga much more peaceful! I love to travel, read, bake, and spend time with family and friends.
What is the biggest impact that yoga has had on your life?
I’ve been a yoga practitioner for nearly 20 years, so it’s pretty much impossible for me to imagine my life without yoga. The thing that has had the biggest impact on me has been doing my best to practice the yamas and niyamas—the first two limbs of the eight-limb path. It’s a constant learning process, and I know I will always have more work to do, but because of yoga I am more aware, more compassionate (with myself and others), more patient, and more able to let things go. I tend to be a very all-or-nothing person by nature, and yoga is teaching me to find better balance and to be able to inhabit the middle ground.
When do you apply the lessons of yoga in your daily life?
Constantly! There are countless moments every day when I apply the lessons of yoga—too many to begin to list here, so I’ll sum it up by saying: pausing. Pausing to take a deep breath, to soften my jaw, to check my reaction, to think before I speak. I used to be terrible at pausing. I had an immediate reaction to almost everything, and people were probably going to know about it! I can’t claim that I’ve completely moved past that tendency, but I’ve made progress. I’m more mindful of stopping to check in to my physical body, my breath, and my mind to try to see clearly what’s coming up for me in a given moment and react as skillfully as I can.
What are your 3 go-to poses if you need a quick practice?
I have tight quads and hip flexors, so supta virasana is a must. I usually also need an outer hip opener like supine figure 4 or gomukasana, and I can never get enough of the supta padangustasana series
What is your favorite style of yoga right now and why?
Right now I favor a mixture of slow, low-to the ground stretches and strong standing poses—sort of a yin/yang, I suppose. When I started practicing yoga in my early 20s, I loved challenging, sweaty vinyasa, and if an asana practice wasn’t physically difficult I felt like I was missing something. I still love a good flow and a challenging posture, but these days a gentler practice is often more beneficial for my body, and I like to slow down and dig into subtler movements and simpler shapes. It’s important to me to have the capacity for both strength and softness.
What is unique about your classes and your style of teaching?
In my align and flow class, I try to balance soft, mellow postures with muscular, strength-building shapes. I sequence very deliberately, and I try to spend enough time in poses to really feel what’s happening in the body. In yin, I intentionally allow plenty of silence so that students can connect to their own inner experience and just have some time in quiet stillness, which is something most of us probably don’t get enough of. Ultimately, I aim to investigate the connection between body, mind, and breath and encourage students to practice in the way that best serves them.