Clara Burns 

Clara began studying yoga out of her love of dance and comparative philosophy. She became devoted to yoga practice as a high school student, completing intensive coursework through  Himalayan Academy, and traveling to India, Nepal, and Japan to experience the connection between Yoga and Buddhist wisdom first hand. She studied comparative religion and psychology at Naropa University, complementing her studies in yoga psychology with Body Mind Psychotherapy. Devoted to natural childbirth & rearing, her four children were born at home, and she has made yoga for women a special focus, teaching yoga to women in all stages of life for over twenty years. 

Clara created Wild Garden Yoga to share her vision of yoga on and off the mat, supporting aspiring students to find their true basis of health and wellbeing in a personal awareness of their body and its connections to the natural & social environment. She offers yoga classes, individual instruction, and yoga therapy.

Clara is also a writer, translator, artist, herbalist, and deeply rooted permaculture gardener. 

Clara started learning Yoga at the age of fourteen, becoming a student of Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, whose teaching focused at that time on core Advaita Vedanta and Yoga practice.  She embarked on The Master Course through Himalayan Academy,  attending classes at the Academy's San Francisco Center twice weekly, as well as retreats at the mountain desert monastery in Nevada, while completing an intensive course in meditation and Yoga, and attending high school.  After her graduation from Himalayan Academy, Clara traveled for nine weeks on pilgrimage to India, Nepal, and around the world with Gurudeva and sixty-four other students, visiting ashrams and temples, meditating, and enjoying the darshan of many spiritual teachers and sacred sites.  She graduated from high school, and soon after devoted herself to Yoga study and practice as a full-time homemaker.  She continued to be a close student of Gurudeva's for several more years, and eventually parted in respectful friendship.

Since that time Clara continued to deepen her practice and broaden her experience through exploration of various traditions and teachers, including Kashmir Shaivism; Zen, Theravada, and Tibetan Buddhism; Hasadism & Jewish Renewal, and world spiritual practices/belief systems.  At Naropa University, after completing an MFA in Writing and Poetics, she fulfilled a long-held desire to enhance her Yoga practice with a deeper knowledge of the Sanskrit language, completing Naropa's two-year graduate Sanskrit program.