Oko Kanno

 I encourage my students to be the alchemist of their own practices. I teach several styles of yoga: Hatha Yoga, Yin, Restorative, Slow Vinyasa, Yin/Yang, Yoga for Cancer Survivorship, and trauma healing through yoga. In my classes, I often combine these skills and share what I have learned through my teaching path and life experience.

I am trained as a nurse in Japan, and my journey to practice yoga also began in Japan, where I received my first certification as a Hatha-Yoga instructor. After I came to the U.S., I started to dedicate myself and deepen my yoga skills as a student and a teacher. As I continued practicing, I determined that yoga is one of my life purposes.

Breathe Together Yoga (BTY) has become my spiritual temple, where I am fortunate to have many wonderful peers and teachers. Through my teacher training at BTY, under Jennifer Prugh, Noell Clark, and other wonderful and talented teachers, I received RYT-500 Yoga Alliance certifications. I also received a certification as a Jikiden Reiki Practitioner by Kinya Watanabe in 2019. 

I love being in nature, sitting near trees and water, listening to them speak, climbing trees, smelling ancient stones, being playful with myself. My other hobbies include cooking, reading, and Japanese calligraphy.

What does yoga mean to me?

When I started to practice yoga on a regular basis, I quickly found that yoga is so much more than a series of poses designed to help me become more flexible. Yoga helps my mental calmness, allows me more openness, and enables me to be more optimistic. As a child, I had a sense that emotional issues I experienced affected my overall health and well-being. I have learned that yoga supports my mental, physical, and emotional well-being and that living a life with yoga will help me for the rest of my life.

What is your teaching style?

I think my teaching is a hybrid style that combines traditional yoga and my own personal experience. I occasionally change my teaching plan that I made before the class by looking at who is in the class. If it seems appropriate, I sometimes bring my own yoga practice or an interesting theme from my personal daily practice to share with the people in my class. The theme can sometimes be about physical strength or flexibility, or some days it can be about emotional and/or mental subjects.

What aspects of practice do you look forward to steeping yourself in more deeply?

Since I started my yoga practice, one of my passions is improving myself as an individual, so I can help people who are struggling in their lives, due to their negative childhood experiences. My belief is that yoga is fun and joyful, and we can find who we really are through the practice, both on and off the mat. Sometimes the higher energy from the Universe will help us find who we are. I would like to make my yoga practice deeper as a combination of yoga and Reiki treatment, and I hope it will help people overcome and deal with their trauma effortlessly and improve the quality of their lives.