Barrie Risman is a Certified Anusara Yoga® teacher based in Montreal. She offers hatha yoga instruction with a generous heart, sharing her knowledge fully and creatively in order to inspire, awaken and delight her students in the experience of yoga.

She has studied closely with John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga, since 2001. Her personal practice began in 1992 and includes study with Anne Farbman Brown of the World Yoga Center in New York City, Anusara Yoga teachers Jim and Ruthie Bernaert, Iyengar Yoga teacher Kevin Gardiner, and the Iyengar family in Pune, India. She received her Anusara Yoga certification in 2003. Barrie holds a B.A. in Anthropology from The George Washington University.

Barrie’s connection with the path of yoga deepened remarkably in 1993 when she experienced the Siddha Yoga™ path and became a student of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. Siddha Yoga was instrumental to discovering her life’s work as a teacher of yoga, as she subsequently dedicated seven years to serving in Siddha Yoga ashrams. During this time, she lived in India for four years, immersed in the study and practice of all the traditional aspects of yoga. Barrie was a key Siddha Yoga Hatha Yoga teacher and teacher trainer before moving to Montreal in 2005.

Barrie’s demeanour is approachable, energizing and uplifting, welcoming and challenging for practitioners of all abilities and backgrounds.  Her teaching celebrates the highest, most transformational aspects of yoga practice, reflecting the universal understanding that within each of us resides a core of innate goodness and perfection. To recognize and connect with this essence in ourselves empowers us to transform our inner experience and to also affect our outer experience.

Barrie currently offers weekly classes, workshops and immersions in Montreal, nationally and internationally.
Anusara Yoga is a modern, alignment-based hatha yoga system that upholds a broad-based tantric world-view maintaining that we, and all within our universe, are essentially good and fundamentally interwoven. Founded by John Friend in 1997, Anusara Yoga is one of the fastest growing systems of hatha yoga and has affected thousands of people through its heart-opening, welcoming embrace.

For more information about Anusara Yoga and John Friend, visit www.anusara.com.