Susan’s introduction to yoga began twenty years ago with weekly classes in the Chapel of the Mother House (a sacred space indeed!) at Mount Saint Vincent University, in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was in this space that she discovered the positive and profound impact that yoga can have on one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Susan completed her 200-hour yoga teacher certification in 2009 (Atlantic Yoga Teacher Training). Shortly after finishing her training, she relocated to Ottawa with her family and began teaching from her small home studio. With a special interest in how yoga can help specific health conditions, she continued her studies and became a certified yoga therapist (C-IAYT) in 2020.
Susan uses a light-hearted approach to create a sense of safety and ease in her classes, offering options and modifications as an invitation to students to honour their specific needs. She sees yoga as an amazing tool for physical, mental, and emotional transformation, health, and healing.
Susan is also a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher and licensed facilitator of Sundara Yoga Therapy’s Overcome! program, which focuses on teaching people to use the various tools of yoga to self-regulate their nervous systems enabling them to manage and overcome, for instance, acute stress, trauma, anxiety disorders, and depression. And recently, to ensure her own and her students’ safety while practising yoga with Osteoporosis, she became Bone Fit™ Trained through Osteoporosis Canada.
Susan’s background is in health policy and planning. Before making yoga and yoga therapy her primary focus, she worked for almost 25 years with provincial departments of health, regional and district health authorities, and health-related national not-for-profit organizations.