Yoga Therapy & Dance Yoga

Using an Iyengar yoga base, Bronwyn incorporates yin (gentle) as well as more yang (dynamic) styles into a yoga therapy practice designed to strengthen as well as lengthen and stretch the body. Music and breath work are often brought in to encourage movement and physical opening within the poses. Students experience their bodies more fully and relax, calm, and center their minds. Sessions are adjusted to fit individual needs, and beginners are welcome.

Bronwyn has taught everything from Bikram, Ashtanga and Iyengar yoga in over a decade of yoga instruction. She has spent time in Mysore, India and studies with well renowned Iyengar yoga teachers such as Donald Moyer and Rodney Yee. Recently, her studies have been most influenced by the Axis Syllabus movement training program at the Nomadic College in Brazil. Through her Axis Syllabus dance studies, Bronwyn learned to connect yoga poses in new ways and understand more deeply anatomical structures that allow a sense of spaciousness in the joints through precise alignment as opposed to contortion. Rather than going on linear axis planes such as robots and patriarchal colonial square lines, Bronwyn’s anatomical studies have led her to view the body as a multi dimensional, tri-axial, complex, organic structure where mono-axial descriptions no longer service health or aliveness.

Bronwyn teaches private yoga therapy classes, ongoing public dance yoga classes, hand stand workshops and various other yoga classes at her Berkeley yoga space and in surrounding Bay Area studios. In the Axis Syllabus influenced dance yoga classes, you can expect to find ease and alignment by honoring the innate inner wisdom of our own body’s architecture, discover the depth of movement possible when the body is given the freedom to shape itself intelligently and honor its innate structural elements. Yoga therapy and dance yoga classes cover elemental salutations, inversions, and precise sequencing designed to invoke deep embodied presence and vitality.

Please check the Classes & Events page for details on upcoming yoga therapy and dance yoga classes and workshops in Berkeley, or visit the online scheduler to schedule a private session.

What is Yoga?

The word yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning to yoke or direct and concentrate one’s attention on; to use and apply. It also means union or communion. Yoga therapy is fundamentally a practice of refining the fluctuations of consciousness. Using postures, meditation, mantras, and breath, yoga cultivates deep awareness in the body, mind, and spirit. Yoga therapy and dance yoga is excellent for anyone wishing to create a clearer sense of ease, alignment, strength, and vitality in the body.

“[Yoga means] the yoking of all the powers of body, mind and soul to God; it means the disciplining of the intellect, the mind, the emotions, the will…It means a poise of the soul which enables one to look at life in all its aspects evenly.” –Mahadev Desai

“When his/her mind, intellect and self (ahamkara) are under control, freed from restless desire, so that they rest in the spirit within, a wo/man becomes a Yukta – one in communion with God. A lamp does not flicker in a place where no winds blow; so it is with a yogi, who controls his/her mind, intellect and self, being absorbed in the spirit within him/her. When the restlessness of the mind, intellect and self is stilled through the practice of Yoga, the yogi by the grace of the Spirit within her/himself finds fulfilment. Then s/he knows the joy eternal which is beyond the pale of the senses which her/his reason cannot grasp. S/he abides in this reality and moves not there from. S/he has found the treasure above all others. There is nothing higher than this. S/he who has achieved it, shall not be moved by the greatest sorrow. This is the real meaning of Yoga: a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow.” –Bhagavad Gita, chapter 6

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