It is our privilege to be of service to you.
We each come to our mats for our own reasons and with our own stories.
Meet our BlissPowered Team through their stories!
If you are interested in being considered as a valued member of the BlissPowered Team,
please email applications@blisspoweredyoga.com for further details and information.
Angie Haug
This discovery of yoga has been a great introduction to myself – the good, the bad and the ugly. It was not easy for me to walk into that very first yoga class, entering the room with extreme shyness, low confidence and little self worth. I was expecting the practice to change me externally. I had no idea I was about to embark on a life long discovery of love.
A co-worker had asked me to purchase a 10 class pass sale at a studio in the SW so we could try it out together. It seemed I had everything against me with no prior fitness routines or training and already being thirty-three years of age. My lack of physical and emotional strength was very evident. My mind screamed at me to sneakily escape the room of people who already knew what they were doing. I can even recall wanting to dodge into the washroom just so I could take a break. I stayed there in my discomfort for reasons I could not even explain to you. Maybe it was that amazing magical feeling I felt when class was finally over. I soon found myself looking for studios closer to me. I found one in the NE that very quickly became home. I’ve never learned so much in all my life; self worth, unconditional love and freedom from mental slavery.
After four years of practice, I decided to embark on a teacher training program. I had no intentions of teaching yoga. I told myself I just wanted to deepen my own practice. Truth be told, I still had some deep work to do on self-confidence. I did not think I would have the mental capacity to lead a whole class. The training not only made it very evident that yoga was my passion but it proved to me that I could do absolutely anything with hard work, perseverance and strong intentions. I have endless gratitude for all my life lessons from my past and the ones still to come.
It is my pleasure and duty to welcome you to a safe and sacred space for you to come discover what this practice has in store for you. It is YOUR practice and I am grateful to be by your side as the sweet wisdom of the yoga path invites the layers of self to unfold. This may take many lifetimes of practice and today is the perfect day to start. How lucky are we to have the opportunity to embrace this wisdom in this moment, in this body and within this spirit? It is my greatest honour to walk this path with you, moving, breathing, singing and learning together.
Humbly in your service ♡ Angie
Eunmi Choi
What does yoga mean to you? Be caring, daring, and sharing.
It was six years ago when I first walked into a yoga studio, a year after I moved to Canada. I was searching, with great hopes, for something to help me to get away from constant negative, depressing conversations I had with myself.
As an active person, I was soon fascinated by the fast and challenging movements of vinyasa yoga. It was physically demanding yet simultaneously liberating. The magical breathing referred to as pranayama yogic breathing helped me get through challenging moments during my practice and has been an essential tool for me to cope with difficulties in my life.
My passion for energetic movements led me into being happily obsessed with alignment and the importance of yoga foundations.
These last few years have been a learning process; accepting myself as I am and acknowledging my gift to share with others. My sincere desire as a teacher is to create a safe, challenging, yet playful atmosphere for students to explore.
I will close by expressing my gratitude to my teachers for their unconditional love and trust and to many beautiful souls I’ve met along my yoga journey.
Namaste, Eunmi
Shannon Angell
I grew up in the prairies and was introduced to figure skating at an early age. I remember all those freezing, early morning practices and not wanting to get out of bed, but still craving the physical movement and flow skating brought me. I loved to move freely to music without constraints, just feeling and calming my body, heart and mind. Little did I know at the time that this movement was my introduction to my love of yoga and meditation.
Fast forward many years, after a busy life working as a Social Worker, I was diagnosed with cancer in 2014. For the first time in my life, my body felt like an enemy and alien to me, and I became completely disconnected. I struggled deeply with all of the why me’s, what if’s and was scared to my very soul. During treatments, I attended yoga classes as a way to support my journey, knowing I needed to find a way to soften these edges. I fell into a daily routine of taking a yoga class, treatments and rest. I found healing, release, and my warrior spirit in that yoga room. Every savasana was a release of tears and energy, every strong posture a reminder I could do hard things, and little by little I felt my body, mind and heart slowly begin to align again. Yoga changed my life in every way. I became a full time yoga student, connecting with practice and community, learning and growing.
In 2016 I obtained my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training. Soon to follow was Yoga Nidra Teacher Training, Yoga Thrive Teacher Training for cancer patients, and Bliss Bowls Certification for Sound Healing. I began to teach and share my journey with others. This was the greatest gift my cancer diagnosis gave me. I have been blessed to teach in many different settings, including offering trauma informed/adapted yoga classes to individuals who experience disability, addiction and mental health.
I love to travel and hike, and being in nature is when I fully feel alive. I have a small yoga space on the beach in Mexico and teach classes there in the winter months – meeting beautiful souls from all over the world who share a love for yoga. This has truly deepened and developed my personal practise. While in Mexico, I volunteer with a turtle conservation team, and a beach dog rescue. These experiences have taught me so much and also brought the sweetest little soul into my life, my dog Diego!
I am always a student first in yoga and in life. I believe in sharing yoga from the heart – creating space that is inclusive, safe, challenging and fun; connecting to the root of why we do yoga. My wish is for students to leave my classes feeling relaxed, empowered, refreshed, strengthened and balanced, taking the discoveries from their yoga practise into their daily lives.
Jill Dalsin
Growing up a competitive dancer and basketball player, I always had a drive for intense physicality. Humbled by a severe knee injury in 2012, and unable to resume my usual activities, I began going to the yoga classes at the gym where I had physiotherapy. It felt REALLY good. My curiosity spiralled, and over time I got more and more interested in the subtle yogic practices, at first as a way to cope with post-surgery pain, then my autoimmune disease which I was diagnosed with, and then how to control my mind and body’s reactivity during longer tattoo sessions (I know that last point sounds weird, but it really kicked off my meditation practice!)
In 2016, I completed my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training at Yoga Santosha. My interest in meditation piqued, and in 2017 I went on to complete a 50 hour Meditation Teacher Training at Define Yoga. Then my meditation and self-reflection practices really took off, allowing my values to become a little more clear… my intentions moving forward turned more towards cultivating a life where I could truthfully act from this clarity within.
In 2018 I was laid off from my corporate job as a geophysicist, and I was so glad that I had a steady yoga practice to see the situation as it really was… a blessing. I left geophysics with no plan to return, and instead have been spending time letting go of my previous beliefs of “perceived control and stability,” while opening myself to a vast array of opportunities that feel like a clear yes!
Yoga continues to transform my perspective on life, and is the practice that keeps me centered, creative, and playful. It’s my goal to hold space for students to cultivate awareness and be curious about their bodies, minds, and limitless potential, all while not taking it all too seriously!
Jordan Hoover
I started practicing yoga close to ten years ago and the process seems to be continuing to transform how I understand myself and interact with the world around me in new ways.
Prior to taking my yoga training and just after graduating from high school I was studying energetic practices such as reiki and I was attending the Wild Rose college of natural healing studying herbalism. Back at the beginning of my engagement with these different practices I wasn’t exactly sure why I was doing this but it seemed significant and meaningful. There seemed to be a noticeable benefits from the postural and breathing practices in a variety of different ways. Some of the yogic philosophy and information around emotion, energetics and chakras helped to enrich and deepen my understanding I received from reiki practices a few years prior. The past 7 years or so I’ve gone deeper into understanding the Mind, Cognition, Self/Identity and Awareness through reading, contemplation and meditation practice. These practices have transformed and refined my views on Self, Other and World, just as practices working with the body, breath, emotion and energetics have transformed my life on a more physical level. I enjoy this multi layered approach in my practice and teaching. I like to offer practices and insights that work with Body, Emotion, Cognition, and Awareness.
I am a continual student and do the best I can to teach from a place of experiential embodied understanding so that the information that is being brought forth is relevant, significant and applicable to practitioners.
Leanna Lutsch
You NEED yoga, he firmly told me!
My first experience with yoga came at the insistence of a personal coach I was working with at the time. I hated every minute of it…all 10 classes! I walked away and swore I’d never do that “yoga thing” again.
Years later, I was working for a company where that “yoga thing” reared its ugly head again. Team building meant showing up at a studio and doing classes together. My feelings about yoga hadn’t changed.
Don’t ask me why, but eventually I ventured into a studio on my own accord one more time. There on the wall was an invitation to participate in a 30 Day Yoga Challenge! That’s all my competitive nature needed. I signed up and decided I was going to win this thing at all costs! I’m a bit of a slow study, because it took several subsequent Yoga Challenges for me to realize beating everyone to the finish line was never the intention. But because I was on my mat every day, many times more than once, someone suggested I enroll in teacher training to deepen my practice. I had no aspirations of teaching…not ever…but I did the training…and caught the teaching bug!
But the biggest transformation didn’t come until years later. I had just guided a full class of yogis into savasana. As I sat at the front of the studio in the stillness, for no apparent reason, tears started to fall.
In a heartbeat I was transported back to an incident more than a decade prior. I was attending a personal growth and development seminar that included participants from every corner of the globe. Though I held my cards close to my chest, the truth was that my life was a train wreck and I was holding on by a thread, seeking answers that would save me from certain destruction. At the end of the week-long program, one of the Australian attendees found me in the lobby at the conference centre to say good-bye and “I love you”. I was stunned. He barely knew me. I was fuming because of his blatant disregard for both of our spouses. How dare he be so disrespectful? I wrote him a scathing letter explaining my outrage and forbidding him from ever contacting me again. For years afterward I would relive the discomfort of his professed love and get angry all over again.
And there I was, in front of my students having this flashback. The whole story began to spill from my lips. I had no idea why or where this was all going. You could have heard a pin drop. Slowly my students brought themselves out of their resting pose and leaned in to see how this story was going to end. I had no idea myself. And then it hit me! The declaration of love from many years prior, came from a human being that understood that underneath our judgments, assessments, considerations and human frailties to name a few, that there is only love when all those other things are stripped away. He saw through my pain and simply wanted me to know that I was lovable. In that moment, I regained the love I’d lost for myself.
In the days that followed, I tracked down my wise Australian friend, explained what happened and asked his forgiveness. “Welcome to the other side” was his response.
“Go out and spread your love in every direction and don’t forget to start with yourself. Now you are part of the solution on the planet, rejoice; for what you give out comes back to you in unknown and beautifully mysterious ways so many fold. I still love you just like I said to you so many years ago. Treasure that love and be an example of it. You are in a beautiful place as a Yoga teacher to do so. What a great achievement. Namaste beautiful girl, I honour you.”
And it was from that day forward, that I chose to end each class with “I love you”. I mean it with every cell of my being…I LOVE YOU!
And yes, Bob, I did NEED yoga! Thank you for planting the seed.
With heartfelt gratitude that we get to share this journey together,
Namaste,
Leanna