Happy Yogi! June 2023
(photo by Habib Hassoun)
@Bloom, with Pat Harada-Linfoot & Jennifer Helland, August 2022
Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah —
Pantajali’s Yoga Sutra 1.2
yoga is the cessation of the modifications or fluctuations of the mind.
I practice and teach yoga on Treaty 6 land and the Métis homelands in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). This place by the river is traditionally a meeting place of Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, and Stoney.
My Training
I am available to teach non-lineage group, private, semi-private, and corporate classes in Hatha Yoga, Restorative Yoga, Yoga Nidra, Yin Yoga, Pranayama, and Mindful Meditation. Additionally, I conduct writing and yoga workshops.
My whole life has been informed by a passion for movement and disciplining my body. From the age of 5 until my early 20s, I studied many dance forms.
My yoga study began in 1978 at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas where I lived for four months. And I began classes in B.K.S. Iyengar and Vanda Scaravelli yoga methods when I returned to Toronto and the recently opened studio of the late Esther Myers (Yoga & You: Energizing and Relaxing Yoga for New and Experienced Students). Over the following decades I practiced Iyengar, Yin, Ashtanga, Pranayama, and Hatha Yoga. As well I practiced Pilates and Buddhist meditation.
Over the course of the COVID pandemic, I returned to yoga as a daily practice. Month by month yoga remapped my body. Yoga continues to help me manage a chronic autoimmune disease and its treatment.
My teacher trainings include:
- 2021-22: Four-month 200hr YTT Teacher Training (Hatha Yoga, Pranayama, Yoga Nidra, Tantric Yoga, Meditation, Anatomy, Sanskrit, Yoga Philosophy & Ethics)
- 2022: 6hr workshop on Inversions with Teddy Hyndman (Yoga Association of Alberta)
- 2022: 80hr Restorative Yoga Certificate
- 2023: Six-month 300hr YTT Advanced Yoga Teacher Training pedagogy and practicums (sequences, breath work, systematic alignment, harmonious flow, cues, transitions, ethics, safety, trauma, biomechanics, the cultural politics and business of yoga).
- 2023: 50hr Mindful Meditation Certificate.
- All of my training has been with the excellent Octopus Garden Holistic Yoga Centre in Toronto.
A life-long learner, I continue my yoga studies. I am so very grateful to all of my teachers especially Pat Harada Linfoot, Darcie Ladd, Jennifer Helland, Cindy Campbell, Angela Yazbek, Teddy Hyndman, and Lana Sugarman.
For my yoga class videos, see JaniceWilliamsonYoga on Youtube
Teaching Philosophy
I support yoga students in their learning at all levels and ages from young adult to seniors. I adapt classes to our unique bodies. Yoga meets us on the mat however we arrive. Through every yoga class one’s mood and energy shifts as we learn focus, strength, flexibility — and to let go. Yoga can offer an opening for us to be present to ourselves in the moment, the here and now. It offers an alternative to being mired in the past or obsessed about the future. In so doing, yoga provides opportunities for insight that help us move forward in our lives.
As a queer 72-year-old settler woman (she/her), aging feels like an accomplishment. The life force grows ever more intense. My yoga practice connects me to a body that is both frail and strong, restored and precarious, energetic and enervated, libidinal and filled with lassitude.
Yoga philosophy finds delight in the tensions of oppositional concepts such as Sthira which means “to stand, to be firm” in strength and steadiness and Sukha or the ‘good place’ of ease and softness.
Yoga sits comfortably with contradiction and paradox. The asanas involve counter-movements and forces. Over the course of our lives, our bodies fall apart and renew themselves. As we know more about the aging process, we understand the life-long importance of strength-building and mobility, as well as the value of a flexible spine.
Rise Up Yoga = resilience and spirited action.
The name is an homage to the pop song “Rise Up” performed by Toronto’s Lorraine Segato and The Parachute Club. This song became a rallying cry for the women’s and LGBTQ2S movements and at the yearly Toronto International Women’s Day march. When I lived in the city, I helped organize this 5000-person event with the International Women’s Day Committee and sixty diverse women’s organizations.
Other Certifications & Passions
I was fortunate to take one of the first Women’s Studies undergraduate courses in Canada in 1972 – a life-changing experience. My teacher and mentor, the late Professor Deborah Gorham, a feminist social historian, was a life-long inspiration.
My academic career continued with an M.A. and PhD in English and a series of interdisciplinary studies. Over 40 years, I taught at the University of Toronto and York University — and at the University of Alberta. My areas of specialization were cultural and literary studies, women’s studies, and creative writing. During my last three years at the University of Alberta before my retirement in 2019, I was elected Equity Chair of the AAS:UA, the 4000-member university staff union.
My publications include many essays and poems and seven books in the areas of human rights (misogyny, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia), women’s cultural studies, trauma, and social justice. (See bio.) The teaching of “difficult knowledge” informs my work, my own therapeutic journey, and my approach to yoga.
My Happy Place
- On my yoga mat
- Gardening and watching plants grow during latitude 53’s long summer days
- Writing alone or in a cafe
- Walking along the ocean with my beloved now adult daughter.
- Setting out on a cold Arctic-like day for a walk that invigorates: “No bad weather, only bad clothing!”
- Snuggling with my aging rescue toy poodle Simone de Bébé and my new West Highland Terrier and Poodle cross puppy named Ruby.
- Exploring the sensual and erotic with my companionable lover
No Gate No Lock 