Current Offerings
Weekly Classes
I’m teaching vinyasa, yin, and chair yoga classes in yoga studios and community centres in Vancouver. If you want to practice in-person with me on a weekly basis in community spaces that I enjoy, my calendar is where you’ll find my up-to-date yoga teaching schedule.
Decolonize Yoga, Social Justice, and Ethics Workshops
I’ve worked with yoga studios and not-for-profits in creating and facilitating educational workshops on the topics of decolonizing yoga, the commodification of yoga and how to disrupt capitalist thinking in yoga, yoga and cultural appropriation, and ethics in yoga teaching. If you’re seeking a yoga teacher to work with, I love to share my learnings through an interactive style to empower student voices.
Aligned Partnerships
I am available to partner with folks who believe yoga can inspire us to live in alignment with our highest self, and contribute to the health of our communities.
Past Offerings
Retreats
I have lead yoga retreats in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. I have created retreats with collaborators and been invited to lead yoga for women’s spiritual retreats. I have led sessions on yin yoga practice, chakra discussion and journaling, and blending intuitive exercises including crystal work. My retreat themes have centred around rest, energy work, and embodied joy.
Radical Rest Group Program
Radical Rest is my signature group program centring the voices of the Asian diaspora. Hosted annually from 2021 to 2023, it has gone through numerous evolutions. First, as an online program with educational lecture and yoga practice, then as a grant-funded program that offered online practice culminating in a one-day private closing ceremony, to a fully in-person practice with group circle shares and guest facilitators in a classical Chinese garden in Chinatown, Vancouver. It is on hiatus.
Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher Trainings
I host a 20-hour trauma-informed yoga teacher training based on decolonizing, feminist, and anti-racist frameworks to understanding trauma and yoga. Designed to help yoga teachers support Black, Indigenous, and people of colour yoga students. Its unique curriculum emphasizes a trauma-informed lens can be applied to any yoga class.
Next training date: 2025.
“Irene teaches us to practice in connection and in relation to the members of your community. Though I’ve been practicing yoga for a long time, I learned from Irene’s pedagogy and yoga facilitation a refreshing and restorative way to ‘take yoga off the mat.’”
Sue
Benefits of Yoga
Nervous System Regulation
Yoga technologies allow us to be aware of the present moment. Not stuck in the past or thinking about the future. We learn to choose how we respond to a situation, an essential stress-relief tool. By softening, we tap into the parasympathetic nervous system to rest and digest. The breath is the backdoor to the nervous system. The more we regularly practice yoga, the more that regulating our nervous system gets easier, becoming second nature.
Rest and Relaxation
Through rhythmic breathing. intentional movements, and mindful consciousness, yoga helps to relax us inside and out. Yoga makes us feel more at ease in our physical body and mind. Generally speaking, slower movements with an emphasis on calming pranayama and meditation helps folk to rest, relax, and improve sleep. Practicing yin yoga with supports relieves tensions and stress at night can improve sleep quality for all ages.
Spiritual Well-being
Well-being is understanding health from a holistic perspective. By looking at mental, emotional, physical, energetic, and social health, we can determine how we can better handle stress and live a more active lifestyle. Yoga is beneficial to our well-being in a holistic perspective too. While the physical benefits are more obvious, the daily habit of yoga can motivate practitioners to improve their quality of life, cultivating a happier and peaceful life.
Interoception
Do you know how your body feels? To know ourselves is to connect to the wisdom of our animal body. Yoga improves the brain centres responsible for interoception, how we sense the messages the body sends us. Chronic stress can deplete a person psychologically. Ongoing stress can look like aches and pains. Yoga is powerful in releasing muscular tension that leads to consistent overwhelm, stopping chronic stress in its tracks.
Balance
The real work is what happens when we lose our balance. When our balance is better, we are less likely to fall or reduce the severity of said fall, making chair yoga for older adults an optimal fall prevention measure. Yoga poses that also require cross-body movements, controlled movements from different parts of the body at the same time, the coordination of left and right hemispheres, integrating brain function.
Self-Awareness
All eight limbs of yoga in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras serve the meaning of yoga which is to still the mental fluctuations of the mind. Once the mind is calm, we can then perceive our true nature, bliss. Self-awareness is a practice done uninterrupted over long periods of time. When we do the inner work of knowing ourselves, we can make better decisions for our . Self-awareness can serve us in our healing journey.
Mobility
Mobility is the ability to actively access range of motion in the joints, while flexibility is the ability to stretch, oftentimes passively. Both mobility and flexibility are important. Yoga is a safe practice to work on improving range of motion, relatively speaking, by strengthening and lengthening muscles. It also works on flexibility and connective tissue, improving our posture, and making it easier to move efficiently and pain-free through everyday life.
Community
The practice of yoga should bring us closer to each other, not divide us further apart. Yoga provides us with a sense of belonging with folks who share our interests and goals in life. When we are with like-minded people, we’re inspired to keep going, learning not just from teachers but from students. Yoga communities are vital third spaces, not home or work that promote social interaction with people and encourage public relaxation.
Strength
Vinyasa yoga is a full-body practice that builds physical strength. Yoga will strengthen arm muscles, back muscles, core muscles, and leg muscles, with the added bonus of often working on underused muscles. By requiring endurance in weight-bearing postures, yoga can enhance bone health, preventing the onset of osteoporosis, a disease that slowly weakens bones, increasing risk of fracture.