Beth Tascione: The Yogi's Favorite Pose Is Among Family
Published in Northampton Living February 2025
For Beth Tascione, yoga had a mystical feel to it from the very beginning. While growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey in the 1970s, she met the “First Lady of Yoga” through a PBS special. On television, Lilias Folan sported a long black ponytail and shiny leotard that mesmerized Tascione – at least until she attempted Plow Pose in her living room. As the four-year-old lifted her hips off the ground and her legs over her head, her older brother saw an opportunity. Giggling uncontrollably, he sat on top of her. The magic was over.
Until high school, when Tascione chose to pursue yoga in her phys ed class. By adolescence she was a musical theatre buff and an ambitious student, and yoga seemed like a logical way to decompress. With about eight other students, she practiced in the storage room (the more popular sports took place on the gym floor), where her instructor managed to squeeze in some yoga mats and lead the girls through a simple practice ending in savasana, a resting pose.
“What I remember the most was relief,” says Tascione, who now owns her own practice and lives in Northampton. “I could feel my muscles relax and my headache dissipate, and I realized how much stress I’d been holding. Even though you could hear the teachers outside in the gym blowing their whistles, it felt like we were in a sanctuary.”
While Tascione pursued acting at the College of New Jersey, followed by the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, yoga faded into the background again. Then, in the mid-1990s, she and her partner Jonathan Weil moved to Manhattan, just a few blocks from a yoga studio tucked into a brownstone. Leaving the hustle and bustle of the city and disappearing into the quiet building, the smell of incense permeating the air, it felt like she was back in that secret closet.
Now she was a professional actor, drawn to work that could be competitive and even exhausting. “Everybody was just trying to out jazz-hand the other person,” she remembers. “It was so distressing to me, even though I also had some lovely little successes. As an actor, it’s constantly, ‘You’re not thin enough’ or ‘We don’t need your brown hair.’ It was so nice to go to a yoga class where you were okay as you are.”
Soon she found OM Yoga, a studio and dharma center run by Cyndi Lee. The vinyasa yoga integrated with Buddhist teachings resonated so much that Tascione felt like she had found her home, or the foundation of her practice. The next step was becoming a teacher.
It wasn’t a huge leap, as she already taught theatre and dance at local schools, but it was a big expense. For nine months, Tascione took a job as a corporate trainer at a bank to save money, and in 2003 she did her Teacher Training at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center in New York City. She loved “eating and drinking and thinking about yoga,” and began teaching the following year.
By then, she and Weil lived in a co-op in East Harlem, out of which she ran yoga classes and honed her voice. “Refining what I was saying – understanding what I was saying and why I was saying it – helped me improve dramatically as a teacher,” she says. Over time, she built a community, and she thought she and her husband would stay in New York forever.
But the Universe intervened. In 2012, they adopted their daughter Maddie and started to wonder what it would be like to have more space for the three of them and their two dogs. A colleague mentioned Northampton as a potential destination, and, unbeknownst to him, that coworker had grown up in Longmeadow. She offered to ask around about teaching positions, and a few weeks later, he was interviewing to be an English instructor at Longmeadow High School.
“I told him, ‘You’ll just go up to Northampton and get us some Hungry Ghost bread and eat at the Green Bean,’” says Tascione. “But two days later, they called and offered him the job. Part of me is super grounded, and part of me is also a little woo-woo. I thought, ‘Maybe this is a sign that we should just do this.’”
The move itself was more challenging. It was the dead of winter in 2014, and while Maddie adjusted quickly to preschool, Tascione felt uncomfortable in a big house on a quiet street. But soon she landed jobs at Yoga Sanctuary and the Northampton YMCA, and today, she teaches through her online studio, Yoga and Reiki Bliss, as well as at locations around the Valley.
“We definitely miss New York – that is my energy and my heartbeat,” she says. “But I think as a family we’ve landed.”
More Articles for the Author
