Alissa Firth-Eagland
Broadcasting from: Guelph, Ontario, Canada (Traditional Territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alissabree.online/
I’m a movement and asana teacher of white settler descent (British, Scottish, Polish, Czechoslovakian) living with disabilities. I gratefully live and work in the Dish With One Spoon Treaty area, between the Great Lakes. I come from families of caregivers, orchardists, gardeners, florists, artists, and teachers. Lived experience with traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-concussion syndrome, and mental illness informs my teaching. My training has encouraged me to question everything I think I know about yoga, movement, and safety. I am fortunate to count as my teachers Myriam Khouzam, Leena Miller-Cressman, Emma Dines, Leslie Stokman, and Cecily Milne.
Folks practicing with me can expect to question what they have heard about movement and actively co-create safety for themselves. My purpose is to nurture embodied learning, genuine curiosity, and personal choice for those who wish to move with more ease. My ultimate goal is to facilitate movement practices for others like myself who might benefit from biomechanically sound, trauma-informed asana. As a teacher, I cultivate a safety mindset and am committed to continually expanding my skills in trauma-informed teaching.
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Thoracic Action: Essential Neck, Shoulders, and T Spine
Let’s mobilize your neck, shoulders, and thoracic spine to address feelings of “stiffness”. These areas are designed to move separately but sometimes get stuck moving together. This check in with your upper body offers gentle challenges to feel more spacious in this area. The only props needed ar...
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Love Your Hips
If you want to care for your hips, explore this easy, breezy, slow and accessible journey. This class offers diverse movements to prepare your hips and pelvis for more challenging postures such as 90/90/90s. Grab a blanket and a chair and let’s get started.
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Reach for the Sky
Sometimes you have to reach farther! Here’s a sweet little opportunity to test how your eyes are working in partnership with your spine and pelvis. We will strengthen our shoulders, isolate our pelvis, and explore powerful overhead reach. Then we will investigate side angle pose and culminate the...
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Be Mine, T-Spine
The area behind our hearts can often be tricky to access. Between deskwork, texting, and all the other stuff we love to do in front of our bodies, our thoracic spines are asked to flex most of the day. How are those 12 vertebrae moving in partnership with and independently from your shoulders and...
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Elbow Grease
This practice is a chance to check in with your elbows and forearms through a series of functional movements. We articulate the bones and joints in many different ways safely, as preparatory work for modified Half Locust. Have a dowel, blanket, and two blocks handy for this practice.
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Headstart - Eye and Neck Prehab
All day we use our eyes and neck yet so rarely do we coordinate these two areas together at end range. This brief practice starts with head ramping, neck range of motion work, and strengthening actions for your eyes. At the end, we practice expanding our field of vision in a modified Triangle pos...
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Yummy Ham Sandwich
When our hamstrings are juicy and alive, they can add fluidity to our entire movement practice. If you sit a lot, you’re sore where the back of your leg joins your bum, or your forward folds feel tender, this is designed for you. We will activate the entire back line of your legs and build awaren...
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Floor Based Hip Mobility
Challenge your pelvis to move fluidly in several different orientations to gravity. Explore your hip joint end range in some unusual ways with the support of props and feedback from the floor. This practice is designed to maintain your hip strength with movements you might not do every day. All y...
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Spring in Your Step
Layering foot, ankle, and knee work, let’s see what the form of Warrior 2 feels like in your body when you build it from the ground up. You’ll have chances to see what changes from beginning to end as you ebb between detail work and fluid self reflection. A dowel, 2 blocks, chair or wall will hel...
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Bow Pose AKA Tummy Time
Adults don’t spend much time on our bellies, extending our backs and floating our limbs, but babies sure do. What can we learn from tummy time? Short, sweet, and steady, this practice offers lots of prep for easeful prone back extension to get you ready for Bow, as well as Camel and Bridge. A bla...
