Dani Pogachefsky

Meet Dani Pogachefsky - international yoga, meditation, and spiritual teacher and guide. Dani spent the better part of 10 years traveling far and wide, studying yoga, meditation, healing arts, human behavior, biomechanics, mind-body-spirit connection, trauma, the nervous system, mantra, philosophy, mysticism, spirituality, and other modalities with preeminent teachers in their respective fields. She travels the world to garner unique perspectives and expertise, combining her studies to make once obscure teachings accessible to modern society.

Her passion and purpose on the planet is to help unleash the full capacity of human potential, and empower individuals to embody and express their most authentic self. Dani believes in the power of inclusivity, belonging, and conscious relating. She infuses these principles into everything she does, creating a safe environment for students to be their full, unadulterated self!

When Dani isn’t traveling the far corners of the planet studying local wisdom, she is based in the United States. Dani is passionate about sharing what she has learned with others through one-on-one guidance, group classes, and retreat settings around the world. Dani believes that the key to expansion is exposure: internally (to what motivates one’s actions and beliefs) and externally to new environments, belief systems, cultures, and ways of being. It is through this exposure that she sees the greatest potential for individual and collective evolution. For this reason, she is so excited to travel with groups, sharing her unique skills and teachings while exposing students to new cultures, perspectives, and experiences around the globe!

My life was pretty typical:

Loving family - standard American norms and expectations: go to school, get into college, get a job….I honored the traditional trajectory up to getting a job - next expectation would be find a partner, get married, make babies, hold down a 9-5 (or NYC, where I was working, more likely a 7:30am-8pm), pay the bills, rinse and repeat.

By age 25, I was working at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. An Estée Lauder company, in their global marketing department, under the No. 3 woman in the brand worldwide. I was going through the motions, but not particularly well - I worked hard by day, and partied harder by night. I attended elite social engagements, worked in an elite job, had epic friends and a sweet apartment in the coolest neighborhood of downtown NYC. On paper, I had it made - but behind the facade I was completely lost, drowning in an identity I had carefully curated to appear to have it all together. The more I crafted and identified with this ideal character, the further removed I became from the essence of who I truly was and am.

MY JOURNEY

My spiritual journey launched in true New York City fashion: it all began thanks to a consistent Equinox gym yoga practice, a fortuitous friendship in the Hamptons, and fateful 7am Soul Cycle class.

I found myself lost, confused, indifferent, and anxious. I was perpetually getting sick and exhausted beyond the norm. After my 5th ER visit in about as many months, I decided something had to go give. Later that month 3 tragedies hit close to home: a college peer passed away unexpectedly, a dear friend was paralyzed from a motorcycle accident, and another friend received burns, lost hearing as a victim of the Boston Marathon bombings. It was the trifecta shake up my system needed to catapult my life into a new direction.

I started asking myself existential questions, such as “If any of these tragedies were to happen to me, would I be content with what I’ve contributed to the world? Would I be proud of the way I spent my days?” I fell into an existential spiral, questioning the meaning of all the actions I took - until I finally took action towards a more meaningful life!

I bought one way tickets and started traveling around the world on what I deemed my “happiness project” - I was on a mission to understand the meaning of true joy and contentment and committed to traveling far and wide if necessary to harness wisdom from around the world - to gain access and exposure to perspectives and ways of existence that had been lost on the capitalistic and materialistic societies in which I had been raised.