Julia Forest is an international yoga teacher, women’s health advocate, writer and closet artist who is passionate about health, environmentalism and yoga. She created the Yoga Leadership and Permaculture Program, the first yoga teacher training program that combines yoga, mindfulness, permaculture and leadership to transform lives and communities.
With more than a decade of teaching experience, Julia believes that yoga comes alive when practiced in every moment. She shares wholeheartedly the many blessings that yoga has brought to her life. Her passion for yoga, social change, connection and community has lead her to share holistic yoga teachings in many countries around the globe.
Julia is the founding director of Awakened Spirit Yoga and co-founder of the MammAlive Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on health promotion and women’s health education. Julia has been a facilitator for several successful yoga teacher training programs internationally and has been a supporting teacher for the Women’s Human Rights Institute at the University of Toronto since 2009.
During the past 15 years, Julia has been practicing and studying with extraordinary teachers in North America and in India and deepened her practice in several lineages such as classical hatha yoga, mindfulness meditation, vinyasa, Scaravelli inspired and kundalini. A self-proclaimed anatomy geek, Julia draws from more than a decade of experience in body-centered disciplines like massage therapy and physical rehabilitation and has taught individuals of many ages and abilities including teens, women who are pre- and post-natal, elders, as well as people living with MS, fibromyalgia, cancer, osteoporosis and chronic pain. She teaches from the heart and creates an environment in which her students can explore and discover their inner wisdom and potential. She believes that we all have within us what we for self-healing. The emphasis in her classes is on alignment, yoga as a tool for transformation, inner stillness, movement and breath for the cultivation of inner peace, health and wellbeing. Her classes combine traditional yoga technology applied in a modern context.
Julia has been deeply influenced by her many teachers and mentors Yogrishi Vishvketu, Jetsumna Tenzin Palmo, Thich Nhat Hahn, Monica Voss, Pat Harada Lindfoot and Judith Hanson Lasater. She delivers yoga teacher training programs, anatomy and physiology intensives, specialty workshops, classes and talks worldwide.