Tracy Lease
800 IAYT, 500 RYT & CPT
Director of Full Life Yoga Studio
Tracy Lease, yoga therapist, owner and director of Full Life Yoga Studio, guides students in Yoga, Pilates, Qigong & Mindfulness. Tracy empowers each unique individual to move towards optimal health. Tracy teaches mindful, joyful movement and self-discovery and carries her years of teaching experience and her personal meditation and yoga practices into each session with the desire to help others live with ease and awareness, expanding their love of life and self in her classes, workshops, retreats and private sessions.
An experienced educator, Tracy brings her years of teaching elementary, middle school, and college students to her yoga teaching. Like the trained Montessori teacher she is, she watches students closely, even on Zoom, and listens carefully during private sessions.
In a yoga asana practice, Tracy helps students modify poses and create a comfortable practice for themselves, even in a group setting. Tracy languages precisely and models poses clearly so students learn different options in poses so they can find the variation that is right for them. She teaches students the benefits of poses, movements, meditation, and breathwork so they can create a home-practice that will enhance life.
Tracy has spent years studying anatomy and asana alignment and teaches workshops on body parts and systems with the intention of helping people to better understand their bodies. Whether she is teaching a workshop on the feet, osteoporosis, spine health or the nervous system, the workshop will be well-researched and fun, giving people useful ways to incorporate what they learn into their daily lives.
Tracy’s extensive training began in 1991 and includes her 800-hour yoga therapy training with Sarahjoy Marsh. This training has given her many tools, including a deeper understanding of neuroscience, art and cognitive therapies, yoga philosophy, anatomy and Ayurveda to better help students and individual clients in their process of self-discovery and healing. Tracy’s yoga asana education is mainly Anusara & Iyengar based. She is fully trained and certified in Classical Pilates.
Tracy began teaching yoga outside of her classrooms in 2005 and has taught in Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and California as well as at Esalen Retreat Center on the Big Sur coast. Tracy also guides international retreats to Mexico, France and Japan. Tracy took over Full Life Yoga Studio in Nevada City, CA in 2018 and moved the studio onto Zoom when the Pandemic hit. Tracy teaches many Zoom classes each week as well as offering remote private sessions. She holds private sessions & small group classes in her home studio in Grass Valley.
Tracy wants yoga and other movement practices, relaxation and mindfulness to be accessible to all people. She has taught mindful self-awareness, yoga and breath in domestic violence shelters, jails and public schools.
One of Tracy’s greatest teachers has been her own body. Discovering structural scoliosis in high school due to extreme pain, Tracy has been working with two extra vertebrae and four curves in her spine most of her life. Her spine led her to Pilates where she learned to integrate limbs and work from the core of her body, a lengthened and strengthened spine, during her Classical Pilates certification.
Tracy also had extra bones in her feet which were removed in 1979. She has worked hard to bring back natural muscular strength in her arches and awareness in her feet. Experiences with her spine and feet help her to have empathy for students and their body challenges.
Tracy is on a lifelong yoga journey. As an only child that moved often, Tracy spent much time alone and played, danced, swam, skied, cartwheeled and explored movement, the wilderness, and quiet. She was also close to a grandmother who had chronic pain and an auto-immune disease that slowly took her life. Tracy believes and hopes her skills and body awareness can help those who are suffering the way her grandmother did reduce pain and find ease.
Tracy’s most recent exploration has been Qigong and she wraps Qigong exercises into her yoga classes. Often teaching an older clientele, Tracy has seen Qigong bring ease and fluidity to people suffering from chronic pain. Tracy really gets to know students and then helps them find practices that are the best fit for their uniqueness.
Yoga is a way of life for Tracy, and she hopes to this share journey with you.
QUOTE
I love movement, breath, stillness and teaching. I enjoy seeing individuals discover avenues into body, mind and heart that guide them towards self-healing. Movement and breath are play, adventure, and study and offer us freedom, awakening and joy. I would like everyone to experience safe, alignment-based movement practices and the healing and contentment I have found in learning to deeply relax into the current moment.
-Tracy