The Heart of the Matter
Whatever arises within your mind, body and heart will be met with kindness and compassion.
The core of Take Heart Yoga is that everyone feels not just accepted, but wholeheartedly welcome in all their complex, messy, ever-changing humanness, met with consistent care and genuine embodied presence.
Together we can nurture the shift from stuckness and stagnation to freedom and flow.
Maybe slow and subtle change to start: what is unbearable becomes barely bearable and the tiniest spark of hope flickers.
You begin to have moments of greater self-awareness and self-regulation, and you notice your ability to pivot away from harmful patterns. With time, these small changes are catalysts for healing feedback loops of insight, integration and growth.
Your yoga practice offers opportunities to directly experience and explore what it is like to feel safely embodied, to experiment with what feels healing and what might foster empowerment and joy.
I am here to support you every step of the way and together we can meet the challenges that arise and savour and celebrate the process of positive change as it unfolds.
Anna Schneider (she/her)
C-IAYT, CYT, Ph.D.
My offerings are rooted in my own personal practice (since 2001) using yoga therapy tools to address challenges associated with complex trauma, emotional sensitivity, ADHD and related physiological symptoms. It is an honour to support others on their paths to integrative health as a certified yoga therapist (C-IAYT). I am also a psychologist and passionate about the science of well-being and exploring what it means to be a human who shows up for ourselves, others, and our world with intention, engagement and compassion.
Together, my personal and professional experience drives my dedication to cultivating therapeutic relationships and communities which fuel folks to recover a sense of inner freedom, process pain into insight and equanimity, and courageously take part in the world with rekindled vitality and resilience.
I specialize in translating current research and evidence-based best practices in yoga and somatic science into personalized effective tools for genuine change and empowerment. This work is part of my larger commitment to contributing to the movement of making the resources and support necessary for breaking cycles of personal and societal trauma available to everyone.
Unprocessed trauma lives in the body in a complex web of physiological processes.
Mental and physical health are inseparable. Imagine the racing heart and shortened breath of anxiety, the heavy fog of depression, or the sensitized nervous system reflecting traumatic experience.
Research has shown that somatic, embodiment-based, integrative therapies – like yoga therapy - are pivotal for retraining the nervous system to be responsive and resilient, for cultivating new neural pathways, and for growing healthy relationships, leading to sustained healthy momentum.
I am privileged to have trained in practices originating outside of my own ancestry. I respect this privilege by deep study of the roots and evolution of yoga and the responsible sharing of what I learn.
I acknowledge that what I teach is not my own, but the collective wisdom of so many others, and that I will forever be a student.