If you’re exploring yoga teachers in Vancouver specifically, you’ll notice a wide range. Some, highly trained instructors, some, less so. Neither is automatically good or bad, but transparency is non-negotiable. The benefit of finding a teacher within a lineage is that the history, texts, and teachings already exist for you to study, with or without the guidance of a teacher. If you like the teachings but something about a teacher rubs you the wrong way, you can always find

Teaching yoga involves more than demonstrating postures. It involves working directly with people’s bodies and minds, which carries the risk of harm if done carelessly or without adequate understanding. It also involves influencing internal states—calming the nervous system, opening emotional layers, and sometimes surfacing unresolved experiences. Students often enter yoga spaces in states of vulnerability, whether they recognize it or not.

Many of the meditation techniques widely taught today come from traditions that developed in very different conditions than the ones most of us live in. They were often refined within monastic or renunciate environments; places where life was intentionally simplified. Fewer distractions. Fewer competing demands. Long stretches of silence. No pressure of family life. A daily rhythm structured around practice. A method designed for one set of conditions is applied to another,

Kendra Coupland, a Black yoga teacher based in Vancouver explores burnout and how activists can make their social justice work more sustainable by pacing themselves and being mindful

When our nervous systems are overwhelmed, we do not become more revolutionary. We become reactive. We repeat. We end up harming or recreating the very systems we seek to escape. We burn out. Movements fracture. Regulation is not about sedation nor is it about obedience and discipline. It is certainly not about pretending everything is fine. When I say “regulation” as a meditation teacher what I am referring to is the capacity to stay.

My Tantric practice has widened my capacity for nuance, teaching me how to love fully without falling into self-abnegation or abandoning boundaries. My practice has become my refuge, a place spacious enough to hold my hurt, my rage, and my fierce, sacred love, and all of the mysterious ways that grace arrives to me.

"When we meet Durga, we are not meeting a distant, mythic warrior goddess. We are encountering the force of consciousness that lives within each of us — the part of ourselves that knows how to act with courage without losing compassion, how to stand firm in love even as we face what feels unbearable."

What Nectarines (and my Anxiety) are Teaching Me About Being Delulu. Lately, I’ve been catching myself grieving the end of summer. Not over the dwindling daylight hours or the slow creep of cooler mornings. No, my sorrow has been squarely aimed at… nectarines. Yes, nectarines. That, and their equally enchanting cousins: cherries. a crate of freshly picked nectarines Every time I bite into that juicy, sun-soaked flesh of a stone fruit I feel a pang of dread. My mind immediatel

The popular association between each cakra and a color from the ROYGBIV spectrum (red to violet) isn’t found in the original yogic texts. These assignments came much later—popularized by Theosophists in the 19th and 20th centuries and cemented by authors like Anodea Judith in the 1980s.

A practice in compassion with Kendra Coupland. Watch this compassion meditation for free.

Kendra Coupland is featured in The Narwhal’s photo essay: ‘Purpose and power’: Meet 10 BIPOC Adventurers Challenging Ideals of Who Belongs i

Committing to a daily yoga practice can be challenging. Here are 6 tips to help you maintain your yoga practice over the long run.

Most classical yoga texts like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or the later Hatha yoga manuals were written and transmitted by male practitioners, often ascetics.So it’s not surprising that menstruation was rarely discussed in any text; it simply wasn’t part of their lived reality. Some practitioners may feel compelled to keep up their practice. Others may feel compelled to rest. Yoga asks us to listen to our bodies in real time, and be responsive.

Self-care is a radical act. Self-care is about prioritizing the things we need to not just survive, but thrive, and those things don’t need to cost a ton of money. Here are six free self care practices you can do today.

To make reparations, is to repair or make right a situation in which someone has been harmed, and you have played a role.

What does it mean to be humble? Kendra Coupland, Vancouver yoga teacher, explains.

Our society really preys on the discomfort of this reality. From skin tightening serums to hair dye and botox and spanx and wrinkle creams, to diets and workout plans, so many of us run from age, from deterioration, from death …like it’s something that can be escaped, or at the very least, deferred.

My emotions are like the mud at the bottom of a pond. An upsetting occurrence is like a rock thrown in -all the mud gets stirred up.

Padma mudrā works specifically with the anāhata (heart) cakra. When we practice padma mudrā we make a conscious choice to cultivate a more loving attitude towards others, within the matrix of our own consciousness.