Leslie Carleton

Leslie Carleton (UVY founder and owner) has been practicing yoga since 1988 and teaching since the early nineties. She trained first as an Iyengar instructor with Gabriel Halpern in Chicago, and over the next several years worked with many senior Iyengar teachers. In the late nineties she began practicing Ashtanga Vinyasa with Tim Miller. She continued to teach, blending Iyengar Yoga’s alignment focus with Ashtanga Yoga’s breath-guided movement. She completed Ashtanga teacher training with David Swenson in 2003 and later studied with Shiva Rea, David Williams, Beryl Bender Birch, Schuyler Grant and other “innovators” of classic form. What she teaches in her flow classes is essentially a form of vinyasa yoga that blends influences of Iyengar and Ashtanga traditions to create a balanced and creative practice. Her hatha classes are informed by Iyengar and Prajna yoga (Tias Little) traditions. As a teacher, Leslie offers her students a practice that is meaningful within a contemporary and personal context—the joy and fire of challenge tempered by intelligent alignment and our unique bodies and circumstances. More recently Leslie became a certified SATYA (somatic movement) teacher through Prajna Yoga and now offers this nourishing practice in many of her classes. Leslie lives in Thetford with her husband Greg and their pup Tiko, and has two grown sons, Liam and Dylan.