Teachers
Dawn Curtis
Dawn is a full-time therapeutic yoga teacher and Yoga Therapist (E-RYT 500 and CYT) with 25 years of experience. Her goal is to help her students redefine what it means to be healthy. This means looking beyond health as simply the absence of disease to understanding it as the sum of physical, emotional, cognitive, metabolic, and behavioral factors. As a Wellness Lifestyle Coach, Dawn enjoys working with clients to help them achieve optimal health and well-being. She uses a functional medicine approach which includes lifestyle modification, nutritional supplementation, and cognitive therapy that considers the soul as integral to the whole picture of health. Dawn’s training includes Yoga of Recovery, Trauma-Sensitive Yoga, Yoga for Depression and Anxiety, Therapeutic Yoga for Seniors (through Duke Integrative Medicine) and Yoga of the Heart (cardiac and cancer) Therapeutic Yoga. She teaches group and private yoga classes in the Washington D.C. Metro area and is the founder and proprietress of East Meets West Yoga Center.
Ellen Collins
Ellen stepped into yoga late in life, after a career as an educator in secondary and elementary school. When a parent at her school offered the staff an after-school yoga class, she signed up, never having even seen a yoga mat, following her intuition that this might be a good thing. When that class ended, someone told her about “a great studio called East Meets West,” and she bought her own mat and started taking classes. Her intuition proved right, and she discovered yoga could be life-changing. This discovery, and her desire to learn more, led her to pursue teacher training, earning her RYT-200 in 2020. Since then, she has completed programs in Yin yoga, Divine Sleep Yoga Nidra, and, most recently, Integrative Yoga for Seniors sponsored by Duke University.
She takes an approach that combines meditation, breathing, and gentle movement. She believes that yoga is an invitation to nourish the mind-body connection and that it is accessible to all, regardless or age, physical limitations, or previous experience.
Margaret Stewart
Margaret Stewart, RYT-200, Y4C, loves making yoga accessible for everyone and everybody. She teaches Hatha, yin, gentle, and Yoga for Cancer, with an eye to bringing students into greater awareness of their practices, the power of the breath, and of providing interesting but appropriate challenges in every class. Her training is in alignment Hatha derived from the Anusara tradition. Margaret has been practicing yoga for more than ten years, and came to teaching after a cancer diagnosis. During treatment, yoga was a critical element in restoring both body and mind, and the yoga community provided a haven; she knew it was time to pay that blessing forward. When not at her mat, Margaret sails, paints, and spends time with her husband and dog.