Yoga Writes

My Courses Are In Progress

Having just completed my first yoga teacher training – a 200-hour series of workshops and classes at Octopus Garden Holistic Yoga in Toronto, an excellent on-line course of study, I’m embarking on teaching creative writing and yoga together.

Sometimes there will be more writing than yoga, sometimes more yoga than writing.

I continue to take workshops and classes and will be developing my teaching with care and time.

Creative Writing

I have published in multiple genres (see my bio). I taught creative writing in the Department of English and Film Studies and during the Women’s Writing Week at the University of Alberta where I was a professor for 32 years until my retirement in 2019. I taught workshops in Canada and in Britain.

I’m working on several creative nonfiction writing projects. One is a memoir about genealogical history, the improvised nature of family and kinship. It focuses on the three orphans in my family – my paternal great grandfather, my maternal grandmother, and my daughter.

And I’m continuing to write about yoga in a series of blogposts on this website called “YogaWrites”….

Yoga

My first yoga classes were in the late 1970s.

I studied Sivananda Yoga in Toronto and lived at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram on Paradise Island in the Bahamas for four months in 1979 where I watched a teacher training close up and attended many yoga related workshops. I also visited often the Sivananda ashram in Val Morin, Quebec.

At the same time I studied yoga with Esther Meyers who opened her studio on Brunswick Avenue in Toronto in 1979. Sadly she died in 2004 but she left a legacy of students and teachers and her studio Esther Meyers Yoga Studio lives on in Toronto.

Over the years, I took classes with a range of teachers from Iyengar to Ashtanga and Flow and Yin Yoga. I was a busy professor who didn’t take much time for self-care especially when I adopted a toddler as a single mother in 1999.

So it has been a long journey spiralling into and out of my yoga practice over my lifetime. This makes it all the sweeter to rediscover the pleasures of yoga at Pur Resilience on-line studio in January of 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and thanks to the encouragement of my long-time friend Kim Echlin who studied yoga with Esther Meyers as well. Over the past year my yoga practice deepened and on the advice of my teachers I found Octopus Garden and their wonderful teachers. I am an eager student and have listen to recordings of yoga classes and take one or two classes a day. I’m also working to develop cross-training so as to avoid injury. At Octopus, there are barre classes and pilates classes that are excellent. As well I’m beginning weight training with a friend who is an expert in this field.