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On the Cover: Teacher Profile-Hazel Patterson PDF Print E-mail
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Written by Marie Black   

LA Yoga Magazine Cover
April 2008: Volume 7, Number 4
Hazel Patterson has a problem. “Once you have the information, if you perform the act, you are guilty of committing the sin,” she warns, speaking not as one might assume about the current political administration, but rather, of her chocolate habit. She recently heard that some forms of dark chocolate are filtered with ground-up animal bones during the manufacturing process. As a vegetarian-leaning-towards-vegan chocolate lover, Patterson is appalled. “I think there may be one type at Trader Joe’s that isn’t,” she says, hopeful. No doubt, this petite powerhouse will find out.

Patterson practices this adherence to ahimsa (nonviolence) toward animals, teaches it as a value in her yoga classes and extends this commitment to ahimsa toward her relationship with the Earth. Her passion for the environment comes from the belief that it’s a crime to do harm to the planet. An active National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) member, Hazel met her boyfriend David Singelyn on a dating site for environmentalists (earthwisesingles.com). They’re connected to the internet dating scene, as Singelyn runs a liberal dating site of his own at democraticmatch.com. The two maintain an organic garden together and Patterson’s passion for recycling includes projects such as craftily reusing empty tea candle tins collected from yoga studios by filling them with beeswax.

Hazel Patterson
She encourages students to practice ahimsa and treat their bodies as she would like us all to treat the earth
The former ship-building and coal mining town of Sunderland, England, which buttresses up to the North Sea, may seem an unlikely birthplace for a future yoga teacher and environmentalist. She recalls the stark coastal area whose winter ambiance was howling winds and stinging rains. Nonetheless, she would regularly brave the elements to seek out bits of nature and walk her dogs. And she recalls caravan trips where her entire family, including dogs and birds, would pack up and journey to the countryside to be among the green. She credits her mum with giving her an early, deep love of nature and the desire to protect it. Her mum also introduced Hazel (at the young age of four) to her other love: yoga. Hazel recalls seeing her mother doing yoga in front of the television watching her “pull her buttocks flesh away from her sitz bones.”

Since those days in front of the TV, Hazel’s own road to becoming a yoga teacher has been winding indeed. She left Sunderland for London at the age of 18 to take a civil servant position in the Diplomatic Service. But the monolithic halls of Whitehall, London’s seat of government, held few charms for her. She swung from being a Grade 10 Clerical Officer to a stint as a bohemian squatter before arriving at the University of Surrey, where she majored in art and dance. She then landed in L.A. in 1991, and for a time rebelled against the seemingly perpetual upbeat nature of its residents. But Hazel grew to love Southern California and its openness to new healing modalities. Within a year of her arrival, she started taking yoga classes “because I couldn’t find any good dance classes.”

She has practiced a variety of styles of yoga and lists a number of influences, including Shandor Remete, Lisa Walford and Paul Cabanis. In 1999, she enrolled in her first teacher training program at the Center for Yoga with Diana Beardsley and has completed additional teacher trainings in Kundalini Yoga and at YogaWorks. Patterson combines a love of the grounding detail of alignment with the incorporation of circular movements of the joints such as the ankles and hips. As a dancer and lover of dance, she also integrates movement work by Martha Graham in her classes and practice. She says: “This way, yoga becomes a dance…the dance of Shiva.”

She encourages students to practice ahimsa and treat their bodies as she would like us all to treat the Earth. This is particularly important to her, since many of her classes are level one, where she teaches people just off the street in their first introduction to yoga. In any class, her favorite moment of teaching is “when the whole class is breathing together.”

Hazel Patterson Praying
Her favorite moment of teaching is when the whole class is breathing together.
Starting this April, Patterson progresses onto YogaWorks Teacher Training track where she’ll first assist teacher trainers and over time become one herself. She feels honored; and she says it’s a wonderful thing to go on to teach people who want to teach. It’s a way for her to contribute, to reach people and have a voice for positive change, a theme in Patterson’s life.

Now, if she could just get her candidate of choice – Obama – to change his stance on nuclear power (he’s pro). “It’s the one area in which I really disagree with him.” With Patterson’s dedication, discipline and personal charisma, she might just succeed.

Hazel Patterson teaches at YogaWorks Center for Yoga, YogaWorks Westwood, the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica and Adult Education classes in Culver City.

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Marie Black is a yoga teacher, actor and writer living in Los Angeles, who is currently and painfully giving up coffee.

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