Names and Dates and Times

I was born in 1964, nine months after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. I guess we can assume how my mother, Carole Lee Deangelis, and my father, Richard Patrick Rush, dealt with that moment of history. There was some dispute about the name I was to be assigned at birth, but my father’s will triumphed, and I assumed that name would be mine forever. In the 1980s, I learned differently, and assumed the name my mother chose, David, as my name in evangelical christian circles.

I began practicing asana in 2006 out of curiosity that developed as I was working through the collapse of my evangelical christian world view. What I found was a spiritual framework without any of the violence that was deeply embedded in christian teaching. One could reasonably regard the practices outlined in the Yoga Sutras as little more than a framework for practical experiments concerning spiritual phenomena. I have spent a fair amount of time over the intervening years reading into various vedic and tantric texts, spurred on by the clear insights into human psychology, including the paranormal phenomena which had been a part of my experience throughout my life.

Eventually, my teachers began to tell me that I needed to begin teaching in order to continue to advance my own practice. I was initially resistant to this idea, and it took more than a year for me to recognize they were correct. I completed my first full YTT with Meghan Currie in 2015, and began to teach in early 2016. There have been numerous CPD trainings and certifications since then. Most recently I have completed a 300 hour trainings with both Meghan Currie (20192022), and Tara Judelle’s Embodied Flow teaching methodology (2020). I am currently in the process of becoming a certified EF teacher.

Embodied Flow shifts the focus away from asana, away from the teacher, to try and present an experience that is both deeply rooted and transformative to the practitioner’s mind. It’s teaching is deeply rooted in Kashmir Shaivite teaching, while the methodology is deeply rooted in Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering in addition to more traditional methods of yoga meditation.

For me, these advanced trainings have been the most transformative for my self-concept as well as the way I show up as a teacher and in the world, generally. Through them, I was forced to come to grips with my own trans-gendered experience, and ultimately the intersection of my queer experience with my autistic experience.

I teach Yoga as the practices of liberation for the self; I try to live that practice. Once I recognized my autism and received an official diagnostic label, I recognized that a significant proportion of my students are attracted to my classes specifically because my teaching suits the neuro-divergent mind. In recognizing my queerness, I understood my attraction to Meghan Currie’s teaching because her physical vocabulary was unapologetically both feminine and physically strong.

It is as a result of these relatively recent changes that, at 60 years of age, I find myself in a place where sometimes the simplest of questions — "What’s your name?" — become terribly difficult to answer simply. "Day" is part of my compromise with my past self to make things simpler for my public persona as a yoga teacher. Many people call me "Caoimhe", and there are some places where I am known as "Aditi". Fortunately, there are cultures, both real and fictional that treat names as a story more than an individual identifier. By those standards I might be called

DeAngelis-Rush Richard-Patrick David “Day” Caoimhe-Aditi

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.