Seated cross-legged on a yoga mat at Studio Tula in Princes St, the willowy 42-year-old yoga teacher with the engaging smile outlines a journey that has taken her from New York to Dunedin, via places like Cambodia and India.
Now she’s out to demystify yoga and show Dunedin people that it is not all about skinny women wearing overpriced yoga pants with their legs in the air.
"What I want people to understand is it’s really accessible and there’s something for everyone. It’s not just sitting on a mountaintop meditating for days on end. It’s not what you might think it is," she said.
She was born in New York City, in the hospital where her father was a doctor and her mother a nurse, and her childhood dinner table conversations understandably covered plenty of "blood and guts".
A self-professed tomboy, her "go-to book" was a pop-up anatomy book. Her brother is now a cardiologist.
Her career began in hospitality in Manhattan, where she eventually became general manager of a restaurant group.
It was ahead of its time, she said, both with its menu and with a fuel station out the back where biodiesel trucks and vans were filled with the restaurant’s used oil.
She caught the travel bug and started with a trip to Chile. She later headed to Cambodia, where she "hung out" with monks building a school and she still helped fund that school.
Returning to New York to move in with her mother who was not well, she was wondering what to do with herself. Her mother suggested she go back to school.
So she went to massage school, originally to help her mother who was suffering from bad migraines.
She loved it and went to India to do massage, where she became immersed in "everything India", including yoga.
During her many trips to India, she trained and taught as a 200-hour multi-style teacher and then co-wrote the 300-hour level training with her training institute, Trimurti Yoga, in Dharamsala and South Goa.
When her mother died, leaving her with "a little cushion of financial security", she decided to give up everything and travel for a year — aged 40.
"Why not be homeless? How chic is that?" she joked.
As she was packing up her New York apartment to head to India and "who knows where", a friend from high school was home from New Zealand visiting his parents.
They went to a yoga class, sat in the park, had coffee and spent hours talking. He returned to Dunedin, she went to India and he sent her a ticket from India to Dunedin for Christmas that year.
The couple are now married — "with house and dog" — and her husband, Dr David Ciccoricco, works in the English and linguistics department at the University of Otago.
In Dunedin, she encountered an "ideal situation" having earlier met Lisa Ambrose.
Ms Ambrose opened Studio Tula, a dance, yoga and wellness studio in the historic Bing Harris Building.
The studio offers yoga classes, as well as regular dance, yoga and wellness courses, workshops and training.
Specialising in human anatomy and physiology, she taught mindful vinyasa style classes and guided people to focus on their specific body’s structure, Mrs Lebowitz-Ciccoricco said.
She also lectured on the anatomy of Asana, and the basics of Ayurveda, linking yogic tradition with modern practices.
She was also behind Trimurti Yoga NZ, bringing the Trimurti Yoga teacher training course — that she earlier completed — to Dunedin in March, hosted by Studio Tula.
The 200-hour multi-style yoga teacher training course, held over 10 weekends, had only been available in India and Bali until now, she said.
Ultimately, she hoped to also hold a month-long immersion programme over the summer.
While people were sometimes a little intimidated by yoga, it could easily be incorporated as a daily process, she said.
She was thrilled with the amount of interest in yoga in Dunedin.
There were also a large number of yogis in the city who wanted to share their knowledge.
"They are just willing to pay forward what they’ve learned," she said.
