Irene Alexander has been studying yoga since 1998, and teaching in Seattle since 2004. She completed her teacher training at Pacific Yoga and has continued her training in the Anusara tradition with Denise Benitez, drawing inspiration as well from Donna Farhi, Shannon McCall, Buddhist meditation and modern dance. Along the way, she has been continually blessed and inspired by the ways she has seen yoga transform lives and bodies, including her own. Irene is a certified massage practitioner, bringing her knowledge of anatomy and a deep fascination with movement into her teaching. Her classes offer students a chance to come into their bodies, play, explore, and experience themselves in a new way, while building strength and grace.
Irene offers yoga, massage therapy and craniosacral work around Seattle. Find her on Facebook.
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Irene is at the top of my list of yoga teachers. In her classes I feel flow, strength, and
awareness of body. She is present to the class as a whole and as individuals.
— Sondra Kornblatt, author Restful Insomnia
From "Practical Wisdom", January 2012 Two Dog eNewsletter
I often remind my students that yoga is a practice. And we're not really practicing to get better at yoga. There is no final handstand exam, no award for flexibility. Ultimately, yoga is a road map and a set of tools. Over the centuries, the tools have been adapted, and new tools have been added, until there are almost an infinite number, each one tested and true.
The trick is that, like any tool, they can be used to different intent. One of the most obvious and most resisted arrival points on the roadmap of yoga is the truth that we are not in control of what happens to us. While we experience this everyday, our minds generally respond with strategies to gain control -- planning, blaming, and trying to anticipate and out-think the next unexpected turn. Yoga tools can be put to good use in this endeavor. As long as we get our practice in when we want, as long as nothing interrupts our morning meditation, as long as we can count on that one class or one pose that always seems to make us feel better, then we feel like we can handle anything.
And such practice may indeed serve us very well. But there may come a time when your schedule is utterly transformed by life events; or your body is transformed by illness, injury or time; or your thoughts and emotions seem topsy-turvy; and that well-worn and much-loved tool just isn't working the way it used to. If you think that yoga is that tool, and that tool is your only hope, you will add a lot of frustration and struggle onto your experience in a well-intentioned effort to help yourself out. But in truth, yoga is infinitely adaptive. The roadmap of yoga doesn't lead you to perfection; it leads you to exactly where you are. Which, interestingly enough, is probably exactly what you were trying to get away from! But once you know where you are, you'll know what fits, and you can find the tools you need.
In the upcoming months, I'll be offering a monthly Therapeutic Yoga workshop, designed to help you adapt your practice to your needs in the moment. If you're encountering a particular physical, mental, emotional or life issue, or if you want to learn how to personalize your practice, you'll leave with a tool kit and maybe a new understanding of what it means to practice yoga.
Here's a practice to start with:
We tend to narrow our focus and selectively filter our experience. This is essential for accomplishing many tasks, but can also become habitual. You may not realize how much energy you use trying not to notice things. So, every now and then, take a break and open your senses. Scan your body, noticing internal and external sensations. I think of it like a meeting check-in: who is here today? Pain, comfort, pressure, heat, cold, all acknowledged. Look around you, hear the ambient sounds, become curious about what you can smell and taste. Let the sensations arrive as they are, free of what they might ordinarily mean or signal to you. Notice what changes as your perspective broadens. When and if you choose to refocus your attention, see if you can be more conscious about how you filter your experience.
From "Meet the Instructors: Irene Alexander", December 2009 Two Dog eNewsletter
“Did you make that song up?’
“Well, I sort of made it up,” said Pooh. “It isn’t Brain,” he went on humbly, “because You Know Why, Rabbit; but it comes to me sometimes.”
“Ah!” said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.
When I was 12, I was introduced to meditation and Eastern philosophy by reading The Tao of Pooh. I would lie on the grass under a tree in my backyard and rest into the deep roots and slow turning of the world. The unfolding of life hasn’t always come easy for me, as for anyone, but I did find great peace and faith in that practice, and ever since then, I have seemed to fall into yoga no matter what I thought I was running off to fetch.
I have been a musician and an English teacher, and loved the creative and intellectual energy of those pursuits, but all the while I was loosing touch with my body. When I found yoga in college, I knew it was the most important class I was taking, though I couldn’t say why. Gradually my once-a-week practice became daily, and almost on the sly I discovered I had enrolled in a teacher training program. As I completed that training, an opportunity to travel to India arose, and while I was in India the group of students I was traveling with asked me to teach them yoga. When I returned, I kept teaching every chance I could, and while struggling to find the motivation to complete a PhD, I found myself wandering into the Brian Utting School of Massage instead, for an admissions interview. I was admitted, and admitted to myself that I was on my path. I feel continually blessed to be able to do work that brings delight, tranquility and health to my students, my clients and myself.
I am thrilled to be a part of the vibrant community of Anusara in Seattle, and especially to be a part of this warm community of teachers and students at Two Dog. In addition to my weekly yoga classes, I am a co-instructor for the YogaWorks teacher training in Seattle, and I offer regular workshops throughout the city. I especially love to teach classes that integrate anatomy into consciousness and movement. My understanding is greatly enriched by my work as a bodyworker, and I continue to expand my abilities and explore the many layers and realms of the body through fascial/structural work and craniosacral therapy among others. I am fascinated by the way our bodies and brains hold patterns deep in the cells and in the nervous system, and by how those deep patterns can be so open to shift and change with the right touch – literal of figurative. Through my work, I seek to facilitate those moments of alignment, like releasing your shoulders into a place of ease and freedom, or putting my body into the places where my heart has been all along.
I guess I might define yoga as those moments of falling into yourself; standing in your own feet on the ground right where you are and where you ought to be. Yogic philosophy tells us that this is always the case, but sometimes it is easier to see than others. Clearing the mist is the practice, leaving space for our songs to come in.
Irene's teaching schedule is included on the Yoga Schedule page, Yoga Workshops page and Special Events page.
