“My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all parts of who I am, openly”

Audre Lorde

About Tanya

For me, movement, meditation and coaching are all interwoven practices that can help you see yourself and your life through a kinder, more honest lens and experience being in your body and in this world in a gentler and more curious way.

I grew up in the Caribbean, in a bustling and beloved hotel, restaurant and retreat center, on the small island of Tobago. As a sensitive, bookish child, I had a very eclectic and lovely but sometimes overwhelming childhood. While completing university studies in post-colonial literature and art in Canada, I turned to yoga and meditation to help with the symptoms of depression and chronic pain that had become more pronounced away from home. Shortly after graduating, I signed up for a traditional 200 hour yoga teacher training as a way of learning to better manage my mental and physical health.

After returning to Tobago and starting to teach, I began to develop my own class style. I actively sought out more intuitive and therapeutic teachers that better fit my own evolving needs and the needs of the sheer diversity of bodies, ages and abilities that I was encountering on a daily basis.

As my yoga practice developed alongside my emerging work in community environmental activism and my ongoing involvement in the hospitality industry, I was drawn to deepen my study and practice of meditation, particularly the ideas of engaged Buddhism that was deeply rooted in a reverence for the earth and a more accessible, everyday mindfulness.

Over the next two decades, I studied and practiced Qigong and a variety of yoga styles from Iyengar and Scaravelli to Yin and Restorative. I found my root yoga teacher in Angela Farmer and her natural, intuitive approach. I've completed additional trainings in anatomy and physiology, myofascial self massage techniques and Ayurveda. In 2008 I certified as a Thai Yoga Massage therapist with the Lotus Palm School which allowed me to work with people in a more hands-on way. Retreats with Joanna Macy in 2011 and 2012 helped me to further connect my community environmental work with my movement and mindfulness practice.

I continue to study the connections between yoga, mindfulness and neuroscience with teachers in broader fields like Polyvagal Theory, Internal Family Systems and Somatics that directly address the impact of trauma on our capacity for embodiment, belonging and interconnection. I’ve completed Meditation Teacher Training with the Open Heart Project and Sounds True/ Institute for the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. I am also certified as a Mindfulness Instructor with MNDFL and as a Wayfinder Life Coach with the Martha Beck Institute.

I am fascinated by the power of deep rest to transform the way we engage with our day to day life and the communities and causes closest to our heart, particularly for those of us in caregiving, service and leadership roles. I am particularly passionate about using these skills to bring a greater sense of agency and purpose to people who find themselves on the margins in some way, who may be learning to navigate diagnoses of neurodiversity or hypermobility or may just find themselves at a transitional or transformational crossroads in life.

From a teaching and coaching point of view I have always been wary of ‘one size fits all’ approaches because I've seen and experienced first hand how they can exacerbate internalized tendencies of bypassing and perfectionism that make it much harder to cultivate an honest, loving relationship with ourselves and to find real, transformative connection and support in our lives.

The teachings that I’ve gravitated towards and the teachers that I have been lucky enough to learn from, speak directly to this connection between how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to our world with compassion and grace. I am eternally grateful to them for their insights and equally grateful to be able to do this work and to share it with you.