MY JOURNEY

My name is Jaeden Riley Hildebrand. I was born May 26th, 1994 in Vancouver Canada. In the year 2000 I moved with my family to North Delta and met the person who would introduce me to yoga. It was one my best friends younger brothers who started off his own practice very deeply investing lost of time and effort into the Ashtanga series. As an outside perspective I saw the profound physical and mental changes and growth that came with an intense and dedicated practice. Seeing that happen first hand opened my eyes to the possibilities of yoga
My first public yoga class was in 2012 and it was a "hot yoga" class. I really enjoyed the feelings both physical and emotional that accompanied the moments after class. I really liked building the mental discipline required to stay in the room for the entire duration of the class. I began exploring various studios and finally settled on a home practice based in the ashtanga method. As my home practice deepened I began to experience lots of the changes and growth experienced by my friends younger brother and I understood how real the benefits to this practice were.
In the Winter of 2014 I began working in construction as a stonemason. I saw lots of people that were physically broken in some ways, unable to bend over or even get down onto one knee. I saw many ways in which bad physical and mental habits are formed and maintained (sometimes for many years) and I saw yoga as a way to break those bad habits and not only heal broken bodies but strenghen and invigorate them aswell.
The summer of 2017 was a particularily stagnant point in my life. My home practice began to falter and there was not much growth happening for me. Ive always felt that my voice and how I communicate to be one of my greatest tools. Ive felt that I can take abstract ideas or concepts and make them more tangible to the average person. When I truly began to consider becoming a teacher of yoga it just "made sense" to me and I applied to the Vancouver School of Yoga to further progress along this path. I graduated in May 2018 a 500 hour RYT with a wonderful sense of excitement and an equal level of ambition.