A lifelong student, yoga teacher, and Registered Massage Therapist, Isabelle’s relationship with yoga was born less from a search for a career and more from a search for meaning.

Born in the United States and raised between American and Canadian cultures, Isabelle moved to Canada at nine years old. Her family carries Eastern European roots through Romania, Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe. She grew up in an environment where individuality and self-expression did not always come easily, and from a young age often felt different from the world around her.

Creativity became one of her first languages. She drew, painted, danced, moved, and found ways to express herself even when that expression was not always understood or encouraged. There was an independent spirit in her from the beginning—a need to experience life for herself and find her own way through it.

Her teenage years brought a more difficult chapter. Struggling with anorexia, depression, and self-harm, Isabelle found herself confronting questions of identity, belonging, and the meaning of being alive. Beneath those struggles was a deeper search: for something real, something that could give direction to her life and teach her how to inhabit her body rather than remain at war with it.

Movement gradually became part of that search.

After exploring different forms of yoga, including Bikram and Vinyasa practices, Isabelle eventually walked into her first Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga class with Patrick Winogrond. It was Mysore style: quiet and intimate, with only a handful of practitioners moving through their individual practices together.

Something about it immediately felt different.

There was discipline without performance. Repetition without stagnation. Silence, breath, effort, study, and the simple expectation that you would return.

She did.

Ashtanga became much more than a physical practice. It introduced Isabelle to yoga as a way of living—a daily sadhana, a discipline, and an ongoing relationship with oneself. The practice eventually brought her to India and opened a path of study that continues to shape her life today.

Over the years, Isabelle sought out teachers from different generations and branches of the Ashtanga tradition, studying with Saraswathi and Sharath Jois in India and continuing her education with teachers including David Swenson and Shelley Washington, Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor, Natasha Teran, Atsuro Chiba, Kino MacGregor, Tim Feldmann and others.

Among the teachers who shaped her most deeply was the late Tim Miller. Isabelle studied with Tim extensively, and his relationship to Ashtanga—his knowledge, humanity, devotion, humor, and way of carrying the tradition—left an enduring imprint on both her practice and her life. He remains one of her most important teachers and a profound influence on the practitioner and teacher she continues to become.

Her studies eventually led her into many years of continued education and mentorship with David Garrigues, completing his Ashtanga Yoga School certification program and continuing to study the physical, philosophical, and devotional dimensions of the practice with him.

More than ten years into teaching, Isabelle still considers herself first and foremost a student. Her education has been shaped not only by certifications, but by years of daily practice, travel, mentorship, repetition, questioning, mistakes, injuries, change, and simply continuing to show up.

Alongside yoga, Isabelle works professionally as a Registered Massage Therapist. Her years of working directly with the human body have deeply informed her teaching—bringing an understanding of touch, anatomy, movement, breath, and the subtle ways in which every body communicates differently.

Today, she directs the Ashtanga Program at Modo Yoga Vaudreuil while contributing to the wider life of the studio through its programming, workshops, and community. She is certified in Ashtanga, Hatha, and Vinyasa Yoga, yet her work remains rooted less in titles than in practice, experience, and continued study.

Her teaching is grounded in the belief that yoga asks for more than what happens on a mat. It asks us to pay attention. To develop discipline. To listen. To question. To remain students. To live with greater awareness of how we move through the world and how we affect the people around us.

For Isabelle, practice has never been about becoming perfect.

It is about becoming more honest.

About learning when to work and when to soften. About cultivating steadiness without rigidity, devotion without dogma, and discipline without losing tenderness.

Ultimately, it is about allowing the practice to slowly shape the way we live—with greater clarity, simplicity, awareness, and care.