HARLEY TAKAGI KANER (they/he)
As a lifelong dancer and dance teacher, I have always found joy in movement and fulfillment in sharing it with other people. I am by nature an impatient and anxious person, so I always avoided yoga, which I found to be boring and unrewarding. It wasn’t until 2020, isolated in my apartment, working through a gender transition, and recovering from debilitating back pain, that I decided to give yoga another chance as a way to get reacquainted with my body. I got hooked on a video series called “Yoga For Men” (intended to be inclusive, not exclusive), and within only a few weeks found myself practicing daily. I loved the way asana practice woke up my whole body and challenged my mind. When I fall in love, I tend to go all in right away, so after four months of practice, I impulsively signed up for a 200-hour teacher training with Ame Wren through Boston Yoga School. As the training came to an end, I realized I wasn’t ready to give up that deep immersion in yoga studies, so I immediately continued into a 300-hour training at JP Centre Yoga. Although I’d never taken classes there previously, the studio felt (as it has to so many others before me) immediately like home, and the training was life-changing.
Through my 500 hours of study, I have learned not only about teaching but about how to be a person in the world; yoga has bestowed upon me a feeling of stability and illuminated a path towards being integrated, not divided. Because of yoga, I have been able to face my deepest fears and channel my climate grief into activism. I have been able to ease my suffering not through denying the truth, but by facing and embracing it. Yoga has also eased my transition and helped to create a sense of strength and power in a movement form that feels less gendered than many dance traditions.
I hope to help students find the same joy in movement that has always meant so much to me, and I am deeply grateful to the JPCY community for giving me that opportunity.