Carleen Birnes
Yoga Teacher •Yoga Barn Manager •Homestead Gardens Collaborator, "Yoga Teacher, • Adapt Certified Functional Health Coach • ACE Certified Personal Trainer • 200hr Yoga Teacher • Adjunct Professor, Anne Arundel Community College • Professional Stand Up Paddle Assoc. Instructor Trainer"
Carleen Birnes
When Carleen was nine, her mom decided to leave the corporate grind in suburban NJ to run a yogic retreat center in the Pocono Mountains. Suddenly, her world stretched into 70 acres of forest and meadows, and she had no one to explore it with but herself. So she wandered. She tracked beavers at their work along the stream, sank into secret mossy alcoves where sunlight filtered down like something holy, and let her small self receive the hug of towering pines.
Those years taught her the language of solitude and quiet, the way to let the world press close without letting it consume her. And somewhere along the line, she found a way to carry that grounding into the rush of modern life.
Today, Carleen sees the way people live as though they’re skimming over the surface of things, caught in the buzz of deadlines and digital screens, aching for something they can’t name but know they’re missing. She believes it’s this disconnection—from ourselves, from our true nature—that breeds the stress we feel pressing in on every side.
In her yoga classes, Carleen helps her students come home to their bodies. She invites them to root themselves, moving through asanas that ground and expand, breathing through moments of stillness and intensity alike. She teaches them breathwork and meditation to quiet the mind’s chatter and steady the heart, offering these tools like gifts for a world that doesn’t often teach us to slow down.
When she’s not on the mat, Carleen is teaching at Anne Arundel Community College in a course called Stress, Science, and Well-Being. It’s there that she helps her students understand not only what stress is but what it does to the body, and how they can hold it in their hands, soften it, let it go. Breath by breath, she gives them tools to make sense of the weight they carry.
This fall, Carleen is leaning even further into her calling as she pursues a certification as a Mindfulness Outdoor Guide with Kripalu. It’s another step in her own lifelong journey toward that steady place at the center of all things—the place she first found as a child in the Pennsylvania mountains.
Outside the classroom and studio, you’ll find Carleen out on the water surfing or paddling with her outrigger canoe team, or riding down a snow-dusted mountain, buoyed by the aliveness of nature that helps her tune into the whispers of her wild, open heart.
• Adapt Certified Functional Health Coach
• ACE Certified Personal Trainer
• 200hr Yoga Teacher
• Adjunct Professor, Anne Arundel Community College
• Professional Stand Up Paddle Assoc. Instructor Trainer
