During graduate school, with all the time spending sitting in front of the computer, Vincent found himself with a slight degeneration of his cervical and lumbar spine. The chronic pain from this condition made it hard for him to concentrate on his thesis, so he decided to join a gym to improve his health. Out of curiosity, he took a yoga class, the first ever for him, at the gym, and he realized yoga actually is not as easy as he thought.

After his military service, there happened to be a 200-hour teacher training offered by Yoga Works, so James Brown became Vincent’s first teacher that led him into the teaching path. During the training, he came to have the firm belief that: “if you do a simple thing over and over again, you’ll become an expert. If you do repeated things mindfully, then you’ll be a winner.” It is like the Ashtanga practice. Every morning you do the same practice. Standing on the mat, you don’t have to think about what to practice today; you just need to follow the carefully designed sequence, one step at a time. There is no need to get all confused about what to practice. After all, when you don’t know what you want, how are you going to instruct students? For that reason, Vincent became certain Ashtanga is the style he wants to practice.

When he completed his training, Vincent started to teach and he maintained his daily practice. Since then, he had attended many master teachers’ Ashtanga workshops. In 2013, he went to Mysore for the first time to study with Sharath Jois and he plans on going back to study every year.

On his path of teaching, he doesn’t just teach Ashtanga classes, but at the same time, he still wants to share the Ashtanga practice to more people. For that reason, his teaching style in other classes reflects aspects of the Ashtanga practice, such as vinyasa flow and the pacing of the poses. He hopes students can learn to connect the breath and the body as they do the poses, discovering the balance between the two sides of the body and deepen into the steadiness of the mind.