Patty de Llosa has studied many spiritual teachings while making her living as a mainstream journalist at Time, Leisure and Fortune magazines and raising a family in New York and Peru. She began to learn the Gurdjieff sacred dances and movements as a child from Gurdjieff himself in 1948, and has studied and taught them ever since. In 1962 she learned Tai Chi from Master T. T. Liang, just arrived from Formosa, and has been practicing and teaching from then on.
She has led group classes, daylong workshops and weeklong intensives in the Gurdjieff work, T’ai Chi, Qigong, Taoist meditation, and the Alexander Technique. Among recent public venues are the New York Open Center, Columbia University Graduate Theater Program, Wainwright House and the Lake Conference Center in New York State; Northern Pines Health Resort in Maine; the Peruvian Aikido Association in Lima, Peru; and the Society for Experimental Studies, Toronto.
After graduating from Swarthmore College (BA) and the Sorbonne (MA), Patty worked as a reporter for Time Magazine for six years, in the Business and Art sections. She then married a Peruvian and raised three children in Lima where she also wrote from time to time for the local magazine Caretas.
When her husband became governor of Loreto (a jungle province that occupies one-third of Peru), she served as president of The Green Cross, supplying treatment and medicines to the needy in the Amazon jungle, and coordinating with the Peace Corps a summer visit of American doctors to set up practice, and young people to help build roads and schools. Returning to Lima after a military coup, she founded and ran the first foreign chapter of the United Nations’ preschool, International Playgroup, for eight years.
On her return to New York, she spent six years as managing editor of American Fabrics & Fashions Magazine, moving on to become associate editor of Time Inc. startup magazine Leisure, and finally deputy chief of reporters of Fortune. She retired in l999 to take the three-year teacher-training program at the American Center for the Alexander Technique, while working halftime as communications director of internet startup e-academy, inc. and writing her first book.
She has written The Practice of Presence: Five Paths for Daily Life (Morning Light Press 2005), Taming Your Inner Tyrant: A path to healing through dialogues with oneself (A Spiritual Evolution Press 2011), and Finding Time for Your Self: A Spiritual Survivor’s Workbook (Oxford University Press 2015). She also co-edited Walking the Tightrope: The Jung-Nietzsche Seminars as Taught by Marion Woodman. Currently, she is consulting editor of Parabola magazine and the Daily Good. She is also a life coach, and teaches Tai Chi, Qigong and the Alexander Technique in New York City.