The teachers

Working teachers, lifelong students.

Our teaching team is small, deeply experienced, and unusually committed to actually showing up. Most have been teaching together for over a decade.

Founder & Director

Leena Miller Cressman

she/they

Leena has been teaching yoga in Kitchener-Waterloo since the early 2000s. She founded The Branches in 2021 after fifteen years of running Queen Street Yoga. Her teaching weaves traditional asana, contemporary movement research, and a stubborn insistence that yoga belongs to everyone — not just thin, flexible, twenty-something bodies.

Slow FlowRestorativeYoga NidraTeacher Training

Co-Director

Emma Dines

she/her

Emma teaches with the kind of warmth and wit that turns a yoga class into the part of your week you actually look forward to. She specialises in strength training, mobility, and helping students unlearn the all-or-nothing fitness culture they didn't sign up for. She co-leads the 250-hour teacher training.

Strength EssentialsDynamic FlowPush-Ups Made PossibleYTT

Co-Director

Leslie Stokman

she/her

Leslie holds the studio's restorative, accessibility, and trauma-informed work. Her classes are quiet, well-cued, and disarming. Outside the studio she's a working therapist; inside it, she's the person who'll remind you that you're allowed to leave a pose early.

RestorativeYoga NidraStrength & FlowTherapy

The wider team

More teachers, more bios coming.

Beyond the directors, our schedule is taught by a rotating roster of senior teachers, several of whom trained at Queen Street Yoga and stayed. Full bios are being added — for now, you can find each teacher's name on every class in the live booking schedule.

See every teacher in the schedule

Join us

The fastest way to know us is to come to a class.

Pick any class on the schedule. We'll learn your name.

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