Still Practicing

Thirty years in, and the practice keeps unfolding.

I started practicing yoga in 1993, I was a student long before it was trendy. I've been teaching it full time for over two decades now. It has turned out to be my life's work. Even so, the practice is still unfolding for me too. I'm a student first, and that's what I bring to the people who practice with me.

In 2007, I opened Creating Space Yoga Studio in Oakville. For fifteen years it was a home for people who wanted more than just a trendy yoga practice. It became a place for music nights, mindfulness talks, book clubs, walking groups, workshops. The studio that physiotherapists, osteopaths and psychiatrists recommended for their clients. It was a real community, built slowly.

In 2022, I left the city for a farm in rural Ontario, and the studio changed with me.

I'd noticed something over the years that concerned me... students who only practice when a studio's schedule allowed it. Classes change, teachers move, studios close, weather gets in the way. Often, all of it standing between people and a practice that was theirs.

So Creating Space Yoga was brought into homes. Now it's a small group practicing together online... a few times a week, gentle and unhurried, welcoming to someone brand new and to someone who's been at this for many years. The goal was never to fill a room. It's to help each student build a mindfulness practice they can actually keep, on their own floor, in their own time.

Before any of this, I was a photographer, watching the way light moved across a body in motion. Looking that closely at something teaches you to notice what's actually there, not what you expect to see. That's the same skill I bring to a mat now, and to a life on this farm... paying attention. To breath, to weather, to the small shifts in a body or a season. I'm still looking through that lens. Just from the country now, helping a wider community learn to see their own everyday moments as clearly as I once saw light on a body in motion.