Bikram Yoga Toronto East

People sometimes forget that yoga helps the mind as much as the body — but not Ruzica LeBlanc. She’s the owner of Bikram Yoga Toronto East, a hot yoga studio in Scarborough’s West Rouge neighbourhood. LeBlanc’s career embodies this dual focus, as she made the leap to teach yoga after studying to be a lawyer in Croatia and working in the advertising and entertainment industries in Toronto. She took her first yoga class in 2002 and immediately noticed an improvement in how she felt after finishing it: “When I walked out of that class, I felt like I was on top of the world. Whatever happened in the class, it was a breakthrough. It was like, ‘Oh my god, this is it.”

Now, people from across the region are flocking to have the same experience. After renting the studio space at the beginning of 2007 and renovating it, Ruzica opened it on a lucky day — July 7th, 2007. The reaction from the surrounding community was immediate: “I had something like 300 emails, and people kept asking me ‘When?’ ‘When?’ ‘When?’ So when we finally did open, on the first day there was a line-up and we had a full class.”