“Yoga is not a magic pill where after a few classes the practitioner is transformed. Yoga is a practice that requires discipline in every way imaginable. Transformation is only possible with diligent practice. From there, growth is inevitable.”  ~ Yiwen

Yiwen’s Story

Deepest Gratitude To:
Tim Miller (Ashtanga Lineage) – Yiwen considers Tim her first true teacher who taught her discipline and compassion when things got tough in this very challenging practice.
Annie Carpenter (SmartFlow Lineage) – Yiwen holds Annie in the highest regard and is indebted to Annie’s clear, precise, intelligent and no nonsense style of teaching. Annie is Yiwen’s teacher for life.

Grateful to have had the opportunity to build a strong, thriving yoga and healing community over the last six and a half years, Yiwen left SF Bay Area and moved to Portland, Oregon in December 2016.

Yiwen’s yoga journey began in college thirty years ago. Unlike many teachers who fell in love with yoga during their first yoga class, Yiwen’s love and dedication to yoga grew over time. Many decades on the mat, her yoga practice remains to be her true lover and mirror. She believes that the degree of her personal growth and health is directly correlated to learning how to work through and overcome the extent of challenge yoga presented:
Concentration of mind
Intensity of practice
Rigorous investigation of balance
Unrelenting self-inquiry
Sustainable desire to evolve

In speaking of love, the wisdom of Philosopher Alain Badiou puts love into perspective: “Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”

Over two decades of teaching, Yiwen has taught thousands of yoga students and mentored countless yoga teachers. Her teaching, informed by years of training and experience, can best be described as methodical, disciplined, safe and sensible. She is keen on the relationship of opposites, on the principles of anatomical alignment and movement, as well as on the awareness to breath. Yiwen is also trained and certified in various healing modalities, i.e. Reiki, Thai Yoga Massage, Trauma Informed Yoga, Vipassana meditation, etc.

In 2011, Yiwen followed her dream and built a yoga and healing center in SF Bay Area (www.prajnacenter.com).  The success of the Prajna Center was attributable to the high standards of experience and training Yiwen set for the faculty of teachers hired. At the end of 2016, Yiwen moved to Portland and transitioned Prajna Center to the capable hands of one of Yiwen’s faculty teachers.

Yiwen is pleased to announce that she resumed teaching workshops and weekly yoga classes in Downtown Beaverton. Please check out her CLASSES. (Note: All classes are now held via ZOOM until further notice.)