About
Isabelle Frenette is a yoga teacher and massage therapist based in Quebec. She has practiced yoga for over 25 years and taught since 2008, holding an Advanced Yoga Teacher certification (RT-500) from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Her practice also includes tai chi and chi kung. Since 2017, she has served as movement teacher for retreats organized by Association de méditation Parami. Her teaching focuses on gentle yoga, chi kung, and self-administered acupressure techniques integrated with mindfulness practice. She has worked with at-risk youth and older adults using trauma-sensitive approaches that emphasize choice and participant agency.
Teaching focus
Isabelle Frenette's teaching focus sits inside the secular mindfulness movement, with secular mindfulness practice as the working ground. The framing stays accessible to practitioners without religious commitment. Mindfulness is taught as what it actually is, a way of paying attention, with the deeper contemplative material emerging as it becomes useful rather than being asserted upfront. Trauma-informed teaching shows up as pacing, as explicit consent for difficult material, and as a willingness to abandon the schedule when a practitioner needs that more than the next instruction. Teen-oriented teaching keeps the language plain, the demands realistic, and the framing free of adult hand-wringing about what young people should be doing with their attention. The teaching is shaped by the silent-retreat container, with the long arcs and the sustained quiet that container makes possible. Across the body of work, the consistent thread in Isabelle Frenette's teaching is the refusal to let practice become abstract. The instruction asks for direct contact with what's actually arising, and the framing supports practitioners in giving it that. Recurring questions in the teaching include how to keep practice honest across years, how to hold difficulty without bypassing it, and how the dharma actually shows up in ordinary life rather than only on the cushion.
Background
Isabelle Frenette is a yoga teacher and massage therapist based in Quebec. She has practiced yoga for over 25 years and taught since 2008, holding an Advanced Yoga Teacher certification (RT-500) from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Her practice also includes tai chi and chi kung. Since 2017, she has served as movement teacher for retreats organized by Association de méditation Parami. Her teaching focuses on gentle yoga, chi kung, and self-administered acupressure techniques integrated with mindfulness practice. She has worked with at-risk youth and older adults using trauma-sensitive approaches that emphasize choice and participant agency. She has been the movement teacher for retreats in Quebec organized by Association de méditation Parami since 2017. Her approach has been to guide gentle yoga and chi kung movements, as well as some acupressure points that people can do themselves to relieve tension and bring vitality. She sees the movement practice as part of the mindfulness continuum of a retreat, where we slow down and turn inward. In her work with at-risk youth and also with groups 65 and up, she has been introducing the trauma-sensitive approach by carefully choosing the movements and using invitational language that allows the participants to feel empowered. Isabelle Frenette's teaching is anchored at Spirit Rock. The teaching draws from the secular mindfulness movement, with secular mindfulness practice as the working ground. Areas of particular focus include trauma, seniors, teens. The framing in Isabelle Frenette's work stays accessible to practitioners who don't carry a religious vocabulary. The instruction is grounded in what mindfulness actually does, in the body and in the day, rather than in tradition for its own sake. Practitioners drawn to Isabelle Frenette's teaching tend to be people who've already noticed that practice is a long arc, not a quick fix, and who want a teacher who treats it that way. Practitioners drawn to Isabelle Frenette's teaching tend to be people who've already noticed that practice is a long arc, not a quick fix, and who want a teacher who treats it that way. Practitioners drawn to Isabelle Frenette's teaching tend to be people who've already noticed that practice is a long arc, not a quick fix, and who want a teacher who treats it that way. Practitioners drawn to Isabelle Frenette's teaching tend to be people who've already noticed that practice is a long arc, not a quick fix, and who want a teacher who treats it that way.
Lineage
Isabelle Frenette teaches within the secular mindfulness movement. Isabelle has been practicing yoga for more than 25 years, and teaching it since 2008. She is a certified Advanced Yoga Teacher (RT-500) from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts. She has been the movement teacher for retreats in Quebec organized by Association de méditation Parami since 2017. Current affiliation runs through Spirit Rock. Isabelle Frenette teaches as a lay practitioner rather than from a monastic role. The lineage shapes the form of the teaching, not just its content. Practitioners encountering it find a transmission line still actively developing.
What to expect
On retreat with Isabelle Frenette you'll get long sits, walking practice, and dharma talks that build on each other across days. The container is silent or near-silent, which gives the teaching room to land in a way that single classes can't quite reach. Instruction stays accessible without religious vocabulary, and the framing welcomes practitioners who've come to meditation through stress, pain, or burnout rather than through tradition. Pacing is trauma-informed, which means slow when slow is needed and explicit invitations to titrate intensity rather than push through. The atmosphere is grounded rather than performative, and practitioners tend to leave with practical ground to keep working from on their own.
