About Michèle
Michèle Gunderson, Ph.D., C.Y.T.
Michèle has a gift for inspiring students to reach beyond themselves to achieve new heights in their writing, their yoga, and their lives.
One of her greatest joys is to pass on the wonder and beauty of a life filled with the deep peace of yoga and the joy of creative expression. Her students find that they sleep better, laugh and move more easily, and smile more often.
Michèle's passion for writing and yoga began early, from her story writing as a child to her diligent practice of Richard Hittleman's Yoga: Twenty-Eight Day Exercise Plan as a teenager. After several years as a fitness instructor, she rediscovered yoga in a modern dance class in the mid-1990s. An Iyengar yoga teacher trained at the Yoga Studio and internationally certified at the Junior Intermediate I level through the Iyengar Yoga Association of Canada (IYAC), Michèle teaches yoga at Yoga for Health and the Yoga Studio South in Calgary; she also teaches a year-long private coaching and mastermind program, with many students now completing their second and third year in the program.
Having studied various styles of yoga in Guatemala, Texas, San Francisco, Mexico, and the Kootenays, she found a home in Iyengar yoga after working with senior teachers whose strength, grace, wisdom, and joy inspired her. She has attended yoga workshops with numerous senior Iyengar teachers including Jawahar Bangara, Father Joe Pereira, and Geeta Iyengar, and her own yoga practice has been guided by regular study with one of the few senior Iyengar teachers in Canada, Margot Kitchen.
Nominated for a Students' Union Teaching Award at the University of Calgary in 2006, Michèle has taught literature and writing courses at the University of Calgary and at the University College of the Cariboo (now Thompson Rivers University). Her publications have appeared in Patchwork Journal, West Coast Line, Studies in Canadian Literature, and elsewhere. Although she enjoyed working as a university teacher and researcher, she longed to bring the joy of writing into the community, to make it accessible to everyone.
Michèle now teaches a broad range of students, from the diverse group of teleclass participants to the cancer survivors at Wellspring Calgary to the writers and yogis from three continents and numerous countries who read her monthly newsletter. She also wanted to bring the benefits of yoga to students, to enrich their writing practice and their lives; to this end, she founded the Language of Yoga in 2007, and has been teaching yoga and writing to hundreds of students since then.
Michèle is an Affiliate Member of Amherst Writers & Artists, a group whose methods of teaching writing are in accordance with the yogic principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence –– namely, that the craft of writing can be taught and learned with playfulness and ease, with awareness, great love, and joy.
In her classes, writing becomes a meditation, an entryway into a greater sense of presence, self-awareness, and peace.
