How a Sommelier, a Yoga Teacher, and a Fragrance Maker Became the Same Person

Last night I lit a candle in my kitchen.

Sandalwood. Cedar. A quiet thread of smoke.

I poured a small glass of Pinot Noir from a winemaker I love. And before either of those things — before the match, before the pour — I took one slow breath in, and one slow breath out.

Three disciplines. One gesture.

I did not used to see them that way.

For most of my life, the three things I knew how to do best lived in separate chapters. There was the yoga teacher I had been for twenty years. The sommelier I trained to become at forty-eight. The fragrance maker I am now. Three careers, three vocabularies, three different sets of certifications hanging on three different walls.

It took me a long time to understand that they were never separate.

They were the same practice, taught to me in three different languages.

What the body learned first

I started teaching yoga in New York City in the late 1990s. At first as a moonlight — something I did before and after my day at a private school on the Upper East Side. Then September of 2001 happened. The city changed overnight. What had been a side practice became my full calling almost overnight — because the city needed something I could offer.

For close to twenty years I taught at Equinox and elsewhere across the city. I watched my career rise to a level I had not designed for, served thousands of students, was twice named by New York Magazine as one of the city’s best teachers. By any external measure, I had built the thing.

But here is what I want to tell you about. Not the career. The thing I was actually doing.

Every class I taught was the same lesson, said a different way. Notice your breath. Notice the sensation in your hands. Notice where you have stopped feeling. Notice the difference between effort and strain.

The yoga itself was almost beside the point.

What I was teaching — what every yoga teacher is teaching, beneath the postures and the cues — was attention. The discipline of bringing the mind back to the body, again and again, until the body becomes the most reliable instrument the person has.

Twenty years of holding that practice taught me something I would not understand for years afterward.

The body knows first. Always. The mind catches up later.

What the glass made structural

In 2016, at forty-eight, I left New York. Not because anything fell apart. I left because I looked at the woman I was becoming and decided she deserved a different landscape to grow in.

Part of leaving was training to become a Certified Sommelier. The Court of Master Sommeliers program is rigorous in a particular way. You learn to look at a wine before you smell it. To smell it before you taste it. To taste it in three movements — the first impression, the middle development, the long finish — and to let each one tell you something the next one will confirm.

You learn the vocabulary for what the body already knows.

This is the part most people miss about sommelier training. It is not a memorization course. It is an attention course. The certification asks you to slow down enough to notice what you have always been noticing — and then to put structure around it that other people can use.

What I had learned in twenty years of teaching breath, I learned again in front of a wine glass. Same instrument. Different application.

Here is the truth I came to. A wine glass and a yoga mat are not different teachers. They are the same teacher, holding two different doors open. Both ask the same question.

Are you actually here? Are you receiving what is in front of you, or are you skimming past it?

What the candle pulled together

I made my first candles in my kitchen, in a small place along the Sonoma Coast where the redwoods meet the Pacific. The bookshop I had opened during COVID was failing. I needed another outlet — one that could carry me and my family. So the candles started as a creative practice, and the practice became the business.

What I did not know then — what I came to understand only over years — is that scent is the most direct line we have to memory and to the present moment, both at once. Fragrance moves faster than language. It bypasses the analytical mind and goes straight to what the body has stored.

A wine has a story you have to slow down to hear. A breath asks to be felt. But scent — scent does its work in a single inhale. The room changes. The nervous system changes. A memory you had not asked for arrives uninvited and stays.

The candles were never products. They were always practice objects.

When I sit at L’Atelier Fragrance Bar in my shop in Duncans Mills now, and I help a guest blend a fragrance that is theirs alone, I am doing the same thing I did in front of a roomful of yoga students twenty years ago. I am asking them to turn the analytical mind off. To trust the intuition. To ride the wave of the unknown and be okay there. To trust the yes that arrives in the chest before the mind has time to evaluate it.

The fragrance is the artifact. The practice is what they leave with.

Three languages, one practice

Here is what I want to name out loud, because I spent years not naming it.

The yoga teacher, the sommelier, and the fragrance maker were never three careers. They were three languages for the same practice.

The trained capacity to receive the world through the senses with discernment, presence, and trust. I call it The Five Senses Practice.

It is not a soft skill. It is a trainable discipline. Sommelier work is one form of it. Yoga is another. Fragrance making is a third. Painting is one. Wine-making is one. Cooking, gardening, music, ceremony, parenting — anything that asks you to stop the mind long enough for the body to lead — these are all forms of the same practice.

And here is what took me decades to understand.

We have been trained, slowly and thoroughly, to think of the senses as ornament. As pleasure. As something extra you add to a serious life when there is time. The whole architecture of how most of us work — the deadlines, the screens, the speed — is built on the assumption that the body’s information is less reliable than the mind’s.

Anyone who has spent time with a wine glass, or on a yoga mat, or with their hands in a creative practice, has felt the other truth. The body is not the inferior instrument. It is the first instrument — the one that registers what is true before the mind catches up.

This is what I am writing about in the book I am working on now — Wax & Reverence — and what I am building into a framework I call The Five Senses Practice. It is, in the simplest possible terms, the practice of using your senses on purpose.

Not because beauty matters more than productivity. (It does, but that is a different essay.)

Because the senses are how you know what is true.

The discipline I wish I had named earlier

I am writing this for two readers.

The first is anyone who has spent years in serious work — in any discipline — and has felt the quiet pull of an undercurrent you could not quite name. The thing your work was actually teaching you, beneath the credentials and the titles and the vocabulary. If that pull is the senses, the body, the practice of presence — pay attention. There is a through-line in your work that you will eventually be able to see only by looking back.

The second is anyone who is leading something — a business, a team, a creative life — and has noticed that the most decisive, most resonant choices you make do not arrive in a strategy document. They arrive somewhere lower than language. In the chest. In the gut. In the moment your body said yes before your mind had time to construct the argument.

That is the practice. It is real. It is teachable. And the people who already have it built almost always built it without naming it.

I am naming it now because I think it matters. The leaders I admire most are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones who have stayed in their bodies long enough to receive what their work is actually telling them.

This is the practice. Three doors, one room.

Begin where you are

If you are reading this and something in you went quiet — that is worth following.

Begin where you are. Light the candle. Pour the wine. Take the breath. Do not rush past the part where you receive it.

The practice is already here. It has been here all along.

You just have to stop being too fast to notice.

Wax & Reverence — the book on sensory living and The Five Senses Practice — is forthcoming from The Fragrant Page imprint. Join The Fragrance Society for first access and seasonal sensory practices.