Narin has been practicing yoga for much of her life and studying seriously and consistently since 1996. She has practiced various styles (including Iyengar, Kripalu, and Vinyasa) and has been teaching since 2004, focusing in the past ten years upon training and teaching in the Purna Yoga tradition. She is a Purna Yoga Professional trained and certified at the advanced 500 hour level.

Grounded in a therapeutic, alignment-based approach to yoga, Narin’s classes focus upon careful sequencing, alignment detail, and building awareness of breath, intention, and movement. She emphasizes the role of yoga as a complete holistic method that includes the study of nutrition, meditation, and pranayama. She is a teacher and ongoing learner who studies and applies yoga philosophy to her classes and her life.

As a South Asian teacher and scholar, Narin has knowledge of the long and complex history of yoga and understands its cultural roots. Narin is thrilled to be teaching yoga in a historic space right in her own neighborhood of Grant Park and loves sharing her classes with the community.

She has been collaborating with Lynn Brandli, an Atlanta based Iyengar yoga teacher and owner of Yoga Poses Daily. Together they have run their Little Yoga Co-op space in Grant Park since May 2018.

Check out the story on Narin in VoyageATL Magazine here: http://voyageatl.com/interview/meet-narin-hassan-tend-yoga-wellness-grant-park/

Narin has a Ph.D. and M.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Art History and English from the University of Rochester. She is certified as a RYT (Registered Yoga Teacher) at the advanced 500 hour level. She is currently certified as a Purna Yoga Professional from Purna Yoga College in Bellevue, WA. She began teaching yoga informally as a graduate student in the late 1990s and practiced yoga and Pilates while working on her dissertation. Her book, Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medicine, and Colonial Mobility (Ashgate, 2011) examines how Victorian women travelers to India and the Middle East engaged with medicine in colonial contexts. She has also published articles and edited book and journal collections on topics related to literature, cultural studies, and gender studies.

She continues to research the relationship of gender and medicine in global contexts and is now writing a book on gender and yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has written articles on the cultural and historical roots of yoga and its migration to the West in academic journals and book collections. Here are links to some of her recent publications related to critical yoga studies:

Special Issue of the scholarly journal Race and Yoga: https://escholarship.org/uc/crg_raceandyoga

Chapter in a recent book from Routledge: Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom (Cara Hagan ed.):

https://www.routledge.com/Practicing-Yoga-as-Resistance-Voices-of-Color-in-Search-of-Freedom/Hagan/p/book/9780367470524

Chapter on Yoga and Nineteenth-Century Medical Culture in a recent book: http://services.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1830-1900/literature-and-medicine-nineteenth-century-volume-2?format=HB&isbn=9781108420747

New Collection in the journal, Medical Humanities on the special issue topic, “Global Health Humanities” see the introduction here: https://mh.bmj.com/content/48/2/133.long

Related Podcast: https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2022/07/07/global-health-humanities-a-june-special-issue/

Check out the blog section of this site for more info on her work as a scholar of critical yoga studies.

Narin balances her teaching of yoga with a career as a university professor. She believes the practice of yoga has improved her various facets of her life including her academic research and teaching. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Media and Cultures at Georgia Tech.