THREE MUSES YOGA
About Dilys Leman
I am a certified yoga teacher and graduate of the advanced teacher training program (750 hours) at Esther Myers Yoga Studio (EMYS)* in Toronto.
I began yoga in 1996 while living in Ottawa. Looking back, I can’t honestly say that I loved yoga from the start. I tried out various approaches and studios, but often felt frustrated during class, and could not relax and enjoy the process. I blamed my body – it wasn’t particularly flexible or well-coordinated, I concluded. And so I pushed it harder, forced my body into poses I didn’t understand the point of and wasn’t ready to do, and I got injured. I wondered secretly if this was how yoga would always be for me.
I moved to Toronto with my family, and once again hopped from studio to studio, sustained more injuries and bemoaned my body. I eventually dropped out of yoga classes altogether for about two years. And then I heard about Esther Myers Yoga Studio and showed up for an introductory class.
The approach there was slow, simple, deeply exploratory, meditative and student-centred. Within a year, my body was happily doing poses that had eluded me a decade earlier. My spine felt longer, more pliable, my mind calmer and better able to focus. Even my singing voice improved. Soon after, I enrolled in the teacher training program.
For my practicum, I taught mostly older students who had no previous yoga experience; many of them had chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, arthritis, lower back pain, and pain related to breast cancer treatment. The experience of helping these students to reap the benefits of gentle yoga was immensely gratifying. I wrote my final research paper on yoga for chronic pain. Now, when someone asks if they can do yoga, I tell them: If you can breathe, you can do yoga.
A little more about me: I am also a freelance writer and editor, and a published poet. My poetry book,
The Winter Count, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2014. One of my research interests is exploring how gentle yoga techniques can help to nurture the poetic imagination and vice versa. (I plan to offer workshops on this very topic.) I am a former educator (Ontario College of Teachers) and performing arts manager, and have undergraduate degrees in religious studies and education and a master’s in arts management.
*EMYS is a registered International Yoga Alliance (IYA) teacher-training school and a private educational institution certified with the Government of Canada.
