Tamara McLellan

is a lionhearted woman, mother, sister and daughter, living in the beautiful Okanagan.

She works as a yoga + meditation teacher, visualization guide and astrologer, weaving into her work all the ways that nature is part of who we are. That we are not outside of nature, but that we are nature and that what we work with in life is often a reflection of what is going on inside of us. She created a Listening to your Inner Voice series for Prairie Routes and has taught yoga at conferences to farmers and Agricultural professionals, in jeans nonetheless, who connected with the offbeat and casual way she teaches. She has taught workshops on mountain tops about what it means to live courageously on mountain tops and leads classes and day retreats in her hometown of Lake Country, BC.

She has raised thousands of dollars and spent innumerable hours fundraising and working with causes such as women empowerment, girls education and nature stewardship organizations. In 2019, Tamara did a barefoot TEDx talk for Kelowna Women to stay connected to her message. Shortly after, she organized the First Canadian Summit on Climate Action in Food Systems with her co-creator Brenda Tjaden. In 2020, she built a tiny offgrid cabin by hand and hammer. She has a big spirit, but a light touch.

Tamara has the highest level of respect for those that work in reverence to the land and all living things. Her big message is to remember the interconnection we weave with everything around us and to live our lives so that each breath has meaning: to live our lives so that we are fully alive.

Tamara is passionate about bringing depth to the speaker events she is invited too and to help those listening to tune inwards and listen to their Inner Voice.

My Story

To drink up my writing and monthly Lionhearted Temple class, visit my Substack.

Wild Breath’s mission is to celebrate our wildness within and help people show up for the entire range of being ALIVE, right to the moment we die.

This includes grief, fear, anger and rage right alongside love, joy and hope. This, to feel the whole gamut of emotions, is soul activism. When we come home to ourselves, it is reflected in everything around us and creates a wealthy inner spirit that is incomparable to anything on earth.

My being:

My love for the world is endless. I see beauty on beauty on beauty. I stop to examine the pine cones in spring, unfolding into the world. I take walks in the rain to feel the drops on my face. I see sunrises as the most powerful art we have in the world and tear up at dawn as the sun crests over the hills. I lay down on the snow in the winter when the first snow falls, letting it catch on my eyelashes, on my nose, on my tongue. I am most at home in the woods with mama birch twinkling beside me laughing a quiet chuckle with the breeze.

I turn my face towards the sun when it’s warm, and close my eyes to feel how utterly and truly alive we are. My heart is as vast as the ocean for the people I love, and there are so damn many of you. I want to eat up my friends, shrink them down and put them in my pocket. I want to nurture these moments of connection, this intricate web that I’ve weaved over this life. I want to make sure my family knows how perfect they are for me and I for them. I chose them as my constellation of teachers. I want to run at a breakneck speed towards the woods to create a life of awe and wander, running towards my one wild and precious life and away from the constraints of society. I want to breathe deeply and explore madly, new places and faces, in my own backyard or across the world.

I have sat in the fields with campesino farmers in El Salvador, learning about the way the ‘three sisters’ grow together (beans, corn and soy). I have eaten sticky bread and candy and drank warm chai in dusty mud huts with the colourful, strong and resilient women of Nepal. I have faced wildebeest with their wagging tails and snorting mouths in the bankenvelds of Africa and bled from the thorns that save themselves from a giraffe’s long tongue. I have discovered that there is no place for inner peace in India, except within oneself; a moving meditation with eyes open and a rainbow of smells, colours and sounds. I have partied in an ancient fort and kissed a boy from Sweden just to say goodbye. I’ve floated on the bluest-green water in Guatemala in hot springs so hot you could cook a chicken in them. I have almost been left for dead at a party in Zimbabwe and woke up in a small tin shack of a home there, in love with the local guide. I found out I was pregnant on the morning of my 30th birthday after a solo camping trip up to the Yukon; on land with roaming buffalo so beautiful, cold and silent that it gave me all of the answers I craved. I travelled and lived with my co-parenting partner for years past our break, with a line drawn down the bed, just to stay near my son’s warmth. I have quit jobs that I love wholeheartedly, for but a whisper of the next step. I have always followed my heart. I have been broken and left and broken people and left them. I have been lost. I have been found. I am home within myself and I believe the only place we are truly home is within.

My background:

I did my 200 hour training with Sonya and Jeff Thomlinson of Mindful Restoration. These teachers were integral to my yogic path of slow, mindful, trauma informed movement. I went on to study 100 hours of Yoga Nidra with John Vosler of the Amrit Yoga Institute, 25 hours with Yoga Outreach Trauma-informed yoga and then spent a week immersed in a yurt in Ontario, for over 60 hours on ancient and quantum practices of Yoga Nidra with Jana Roemer. I’ve co-created with nature for as long as I can remember and have taken courses in Wildcrafting Basics, Wildcrafting by Design and Yasei Shinrin Yoku (Wild Forest Bathing or immersing in nature as therapy) with Don Elzer of the Wildcraft Forest School. My son and I spent a week at the Art of Mentoring wilderness training on Salt Spring Island and I later worked with the Wisdom of the Earth School there. I’ve studied Dreamwork with Toko-pa Turner, End-of-Life doula training at the Douglas College and Griefwork with Josea Crossley. I have taken countless Astrology classes with teachers like Chani Nicolas, Jana Roemer, Linda Berry, Divine Harmony, Gemini Brett and more. In 2020, I built, by hand, an off-grid cabin.

My Training

Numerous Courses with The Scandinavian Institute of Shamanic Studies
Seidr Workshops with
Metaphysical Ministry Training, The Rising Sun Sanctuary
End-of-Life Doula Training BREV1100, Douglas College
Through the Dark Woods (Grief Course) by Josea Tamira Crossley
200HR Yoga Teacher Training, Mindful Restoration
100HR Yoga Nidra Training, Amrit Yoga Institute
30HR Trauma Yoga Training, Yoga Outreach Core Training
Wildcrafting Basics
Wildcrafting by Design
Yasei Shinrin Yoku by The Wildcraft Forest School
Countless learning hours with AstrologyHub
Ancestral Astrology by AstrologyUniversity + Lynn Bell
Sacred Astronomy by Gemini Brett
Family Astrology with Mars Stars Academy
The Astrology of Shadow Work by Divine Harmony
The Alchemy of the Asteroid Goddesses - Divine Harmony
Vibrational Astrology by Linda Berry

I will forever advocate for the wild spaces that we keep within ourselves because that is our sovereignty, the ultimate purpose, the point of why we are here on this little strange and magical home called earth. To find our wildness, buried deep within. To free it and to free all others in the process.

From my endless heart to yours,

Tamara