Author Archives: The Branches

Formerly Queen Street Yoga Yoga & movement. Rooted in community. We’re here to create a better world with Yoga as our common ground. We lead down-to-earth classes, expert teacher training, and an engaged intergenerational community. We opened our doors in 2005, and have become known for our highly experienced teachers, our innovative approach to movement, and our efforts in community care and social justice. Our aim is to make the practices of yoga and meditation more inclusive, more accessible, and more relevant for your day-to-day life.

Matthew Remski’s Thoughtful Response to Our Inversion Policy

Leena’s recent blog post on our Inversion policy has received a lot of attention from the online yoga community. The post currently has over 7,500 views. Matthew Remski, who is part of QSY’s Yoga Teacher Training faculty and is currently teaching a course on Ayurveda here at the studio, has written a thoughtful response to Leena’s post, citing his own research into the intersection of yoga, injury, pedagogy and medical research.

Matthew’s response was published on Yoga International and had over 40,000 views in the first few days. We really appreciate the research Matthew has been doing in his WAWADIA project, and the greater context he is able to place this discussion in.

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Student Spotlight — Who Came to the Most Classes in 2014?

This Student Spotlight focuses on Jeremy, Barb and Mary, three members of Queen Street Yoga who came to an average of 182 classes each in 2014! Their combined total? A staggering 548 classes. They get the “Highest Attendance Award” from us. Congratulations!

Leena, the studio owner, joked “That’s definitely more than I practiced last year!”

Leena and Emma caught up with these avid yogis after an Hour Flow class last week. We took a photo, and they chatted about their favourite poses.Continue reading “Student Spotlight — Who Came to the Most Classes in 2014?”

In This Heart (Emma’s Savasana Songs + Free Download)

This post is brought to you by Emma!

Just before Christmas, I spent an afternoon in a friend’s basement recording studio. QSY students have been asking me for years to record the songs that I sing for them in savasana. I recorded five songs, and will be releasing them periodically here on the blog. Each song will be available as a free download, a gift from the studio to each of you. Thank you for being such consistent and caring members of our studio community!

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Headstand and Shoulderstand at Queen Street Yoga

This post was written by Leena Miller Cressman, director of Queen Street Yoga, about her current thinking and understanding of inversions.

We recently added the following statement to our “Studio Policy and Etiquette” document that we post around the studio and on our website. We are the first yoga studio community that we know of to make a public statement about this. We hope that this adds to important conversations about safety and risk in the wider yoga community.

Inversions at QSY: We choose not to teach full Headstand and full Shoulderstand (where weight is placed on the head and neck) due to safety concerns for the spine. We ask that students do not practice these poses before, after, or during public classes for the safety of all QSY members.

What’s an inversion anyway?

Different styles or traditions of yoga define inversions differently. Most generally, inversions can be any pose where the head is at a lower position than the heart and pelvis. This could include simple and common poses like downward-facing dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) or standing forward bend (Uttansana), but also arm balancing poses like handstand or forearm stand. The two poses often called “full inversions” in yoga literature are headstand (Salamba Sirsasana) and shoulderstand (Salamba Sarvangasana). Many teachers, such as BKS Iyengar, have gone as far as to say that headstand and shoulderstand are the King and Queen of all yoga poses.

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A Climate Change Collage

Emma shared this post about climate change and yoga teaching on her own blog yesterday morning. We’ve reposted it here to share it with the wider QSY community.

In the past few months I have been re-inspired (particularly by this article) to set the tone of my yoga classes to include the awareness of rapid climate destabilization (aka climate change) as a present reality and backdrop to the “personal” or “internal” practice of yoga. I have also started to (subtly, slowly) introduce issues of race/racism and gender/sexism into the space of my asana classes. I hope to become more skilled at grappling with these pieces in my own life, as well as making them familiar vocabulary/reference points in my classes. I feel a bit clumsy at the moment, almost like I am learning to teach all over again. These pieces (grappling with the reality of climate change, naming and responding to systems of oppression) feel closest right now to my spiritual core, so it makes sense that I am sharing them as part of my practice. I appreciate and acknowledge the work of others that continue to inspire and inform me in this arena (some of these others include Christi-an Slomka, Michael Stone and Matthew Remski). It is also such a gift to work side by side every day with Leena Miller Cressman, who values these pieces with the same fervour as I do, and together we are bringing these pieces to life at our studio.

So, last night in one of my classes at Queen Street Yoga I shared a passage, a poem and a question. I called it “A Climate Change Collage”. In my recent reading and searching for insight about the decline of the ecological world, I felt as if a conversation was emerging between the different pieces I was reading and collecting. I cobbled them together and read them to my class to frame our practice for the night. The passage was by Martin Keogh, from the introduction to a book of essays called “Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World“. The poem was by The Reverend Victoria Safford, and I had heard it read aloud by Parker Palmer during a recent podcast produced by On Being. And the question was from an interview between EcoBuddhism.org and Joanna Macy, which a mentor had shared with me earlier in the week.

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Queen Street Yoga: My First Yoga Love

Long time QSY student Carina Gaspar recently moved to Toronto, and she wrote this humorous post for her own blog about “breaking up” with Queen Street Yoga. We’ve since decided with her that we don’t have to break-up, but she can be in a long distance relationship with the studio. We look forward to seeing her on weekends when she’s back visiting from Toronto!

QSY is the kind of place that stays with you long after you go home. Where you feel pulled to go back, as opposed to having to push yourself to go in the first place. Where you feel a little homesick when you’re away for too long. And it’s because it has heart. And kickass teachers. And big windows, comfy blankets, a studio with character and cuteness, an approach that’s holistic and open and fluid. And, at the moment, a pretty rad sticker collection.

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Unearthing Ideas of Privilege in Yoga

Kristina recently graduated from our 2014 Yoga Teacher Training Program and will be sharing her laughter and love of yoga at Queen Street Yoga, alternating teaching the Friday 5:30pm Hour Flow with her fellow YTT graduate Marta! Kristina wrote this piece about privilege in the yoga community after our October 2014 Yoga Teacher Training Weekend, in which we looked at the various ways that folks with different kinds of privilege (because of their race, gender, body type, sexuality) might experience a yoga studio (and the world) differently.

Cath in Dorset- Assistant Gardener — Assistant Gardener by Cath in Dorset

I’ve been practicing yoga for about five years now. As with anything new, in the beginning, I felt a little bit out of place. I was uneasy about getting dressed in the change room with everyone else, uncertain of where to place my mat in the class room, and sometimes embarrassed about my inability to move with strength or grace through many of the postures that everyone else seemed so comfortable with. Those fears were quickly dissolved by realizing that I wasn’t alone – others around me seemed to face the same fears, and those who had been around the block a few times were generally friendly and welcoming. All was good. What I didn’t realize was that this quickly-found comfort was, in many ways, a product of my privilege.

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The Making of a Yoga Mix Tape

Eric recently graduated from our 2014 Yoga Teacher Training. Throughout the program he has been interested in how music can enhance yoga (both home practice and teaching with music in the background). In this post he shares some ideas for creating a stellar yoga practice mix, and shares one of his own mix tapes.

Like so many things in yoga, opinions vary about the wisdom of sequencing a practice to music. I find certain kinds of music to be unbeatable ingredients for laying down a solid foundational layer in many practice spaces and themes. Well-curated songs can support strong, steady and rhythmic breath, plus provide non-verbal cues to keep a yogi’s mind intent through particular poses or tough portions of a sequence. For practicality’s sake, songs are also great organizing devices for what to teach when and for how long.

At the same time, I agree that music can present a distraction. I’ve been using a few basic filtering rules to choose songs that feel capable of overcoming this legit concern:

1. Avoid songs with lyrics – they can ignite inner dialogue and/or other faraway life experiences that can unexpectedly take anyone out of the practice room.

2. Don’t ever accept vanilla new age music or pick something just because it’s Indian.

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Why I’m Afraid to Become a Yoga Teacher

Tomasz Stasiuk - Do not fear failure — Photo by Tomasz Stasiuk

Our next Yoga Teacher Training Program begins in September 2015. Maybe you are thinking of applying, but some fears or insecurities are nipping at your heels. In this post, Marta (one of our 2014 Yoga Teacher Trainees, who recently graduated from our program) shares about the fear and anxiety that can come along with pursuing something that you love.

Fear. It happens to all of us. I’m not talking about the kind of fear that makes you leap out of bed in the middle of the night and run to the bathroom so the monsters don’t catch you and gobble you up (so far so good on that one). I’m talking about the fear of not being awesome.

I love yoga. I love doing yoga, reading about yoga, watching yoga, talking about yoga… you get the drift. Yoga has enriched my life in ways that I never imagined possible. It has given me tools to help manage my anxiety and depression. It has taught me how to practice happiness. It has challenged me to take a close look at what I think, how I speak, how I behave, and it is still doing so every day. It has taught me how to breathe.

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A Heart-Warming Letter about Yoga from QSY Student Glen Campbell

Glen Campbell wrote this letter to us about how yoga has changed his life. He feels that yoga has played a large part in lowering his blood pressure and allowing his body to do a “natural bypass” to assist a blocked coronary artery. It has also helped him relate more effectively with his teenage son, and enjoy running his company. We are so happy that Glen stepped out of his comfort zone to join us at the studio, and we are so happy to see him so regularly in class!

It was January of 2014 when I got hit with some bad news regarding my health. I had the same health issue five years earlier and it had returned. It was my heart again! I had been doing all the right things (diet, weight loss, don’t smoke, reducing stress and exercising) but my body rejected the stents that were put in my right coronary artery. It was 100% blocked again! My doctor told me nothing can be done surgically as it’s a difficult repair. Drugs were my only option and to just hope for the best. Every day I woke up and wondered if this would be the day I would have a heart attack. I could get through my day but if I did a little more than moderate cardio I could feel the pain in my chest. It was hard to plan for the future when I didn’t know if I was going to make it through the day. Not a great way to live. It was the darkest time of my life.

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