Allison English

Allison English is a Certified iRest® Yoga Nidra teacher and a Certified Forrest Yoga Teacher. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology and a B.A. in Italian, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has been an avid student of meditation and yoga for more than 20 years. Initially meditating as a part of her figure skating training as a teenager and doing yoga to overcome physical injuries, Allison stuck with both practices as means to navigate the pathways of life that came her way. She has been teaching yoga and meditation since 2002. When a traumatic head injury sidelined her teaching and practicing in 2008, Allison was introduced to iRest® Yoga Nidra as a possible meditation technique that could help. Not only did it help heal the symptoms of her brain injury but it also gave her a meditation technique that she fell in love with and wanted to practice all the time. Other meditation techniques had come and gone – always feeling like something was missing from them – but iRest® Yoga Nidra felt like a wholeness she had not experienced before. Within every iRest meditation, Allison found an inquiry and an experiment of sorts into understanding the fabric of everything. These inquiries and practices also brought together so much of what she loves to explore: science, philosophy, breathwork, movement and joy. She also found a place where she could process and learn about a backlog of emotions, thoughts and feelings waiting to be welcomed. iRest® Yoga Nidra offers a safe space to explore whatever arrives in each moment of life from a place of responsiveness and presence. As a daily iRest practice developed in her life, Allison had a yearning to know more about this method and why it worked on so many deep levels. She completed her Level 1 and 2 teacher trainings in 2014 and immersed herself in multiple retreats to develop her personal practice and experience with iRest. In 2018 she completed her certification process as a full iRest® Yoga Nidra teacher. You can find Allison leading classes, introductory workshops, private meditation sessions and more in Chicago and on retreats around the world. Visit www.yogabyallison.com to learn more or to sign up for an upcoming session.