Our story
The Branches opened its doors in 2021 — but the practice that built it goes back to 2005, when Leena Miller Cressman founded Queen Street Yoga in downtown Kitchener. For fifteen years Queen Street was, by any honest accounting, the heart of the K-W yoga community: hundreds of trained teachers, thousands of students, and a community that kept showing up.
In 2020 we made the call to start over with a new name and a new building. Same team, same lineage, same ethic — clarified and renewed. The Branches is what happens when fifteen years of teaching in a community shows you exactly what you want to grow toward.
What hasn't changed
The thing we got right at Queen Street — the warmth, the welcome, the refusal to be a hot studio or a fitness chain — is the thing we kept. We still teach yoga as a practice that includes meditation, contemplation, study, and service. We still believe the body you have right now is the body that gets to practice.
What is new
- A new building at 9 Samuel Street, with two practice spaces — Ground Studio on the main floor and Sky Studio on the third.
- Strength training as a first-class offering alongside yoga.
- Sliding-scale pricing as the public default, not a quiet exception.
- An on-demand library so practising at home is the same teaching, not a downgrade.
- Continuing-ed modules for working teachers in the community.