Still Practicing

Thirty years in, and my practice keeps unfolding.

I started practicing yoga in 1993. I was a student long before it was trendy and I've been teaching it full time for over two decades now. I would never have guessed that it would turn 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 intimate live classical concerts, mindfulness lectures, book clubs, walking groups, yoga workshops. The studio that physiotherapists, osteopaths and psychiatrists recommended for their clients. It was a real community, built slowly.

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

Over the years, I noticed how often a yoga practice depended on circumstances outside our control. A class time had to work, a favourite teacher had to be there, the studio had to stay open, and the weather had to cooperate. I wanted to help create something different… a practice that could belong to you, wherever you were and whenever you needed it.

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. My goal was never to fill a room with many mats. Rather, it was to help each student build a mindfulness practice they can actually keep, in their own home, in their own time.

In my life before yoga, I was a photographer watching the way light moved. Looking 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 they can.