YogaCARE: A Yoga and Social Justice Weekend
- Reserve
- Details
- Comments
Interviews with YogaCARE presenters
The YogaCARE Retreat provides a transformational and restorative experience for people doing social justice work. Trauma-informed, brain-sensitive, and steeped in the rich traditions of yoga and mindfulness, our Yoga CARE sessions develop, inspire, and nourish our participants. Transforming communities in need requires full-hearted participation, with a consistent stream of one's own vitality, and a community of support for reflection, encouragement, and integrity.
YogaCARE: our annual retreat explores the teachings of yoga and social justice. As the practices of yoga are finding their way into settings beyond yoga studios, retreat centers, and spas, those of us bringing yoga into these margins need the nourishment of collaboration and community. To continue being resources in settings where people are under-resourced, we must also prioritize our own renewal. We'll also find ourselves doing better work and experiencing less compassion-fatigue when we have guidance for the inner work that allows us to be our most clear and vibrant self (when we are least likely to be activated by our students or the systems in which we meet them).
Retreats provide a protected and nourishing space for renewing our practice in our daily lives and in the ways we engage with our wider world. We created Yoga CARE to support yogis in exploring the teachings of yoga and their vital application to social justice. This retreat is grounded in the Bhagavad Gita:
Contemplation - inquiring into the seeds of human capacity and the seeds of suffering
Action - socially-engaged practices to nourish human capacity and address suffering
Restoration - understanding and integrating that which we’ve considered the shadow of human nature
Equanimity - maintaining our porousness and presence in the social justice margins
When yoga is accessible, inclusive and respectful of the diversity and dignity of all, it becomes a social justice catalyst – an opportunity for all to experience themselves
as capable of making Contributions to the betterment of the whole, as worthy of their own Advocacy,
Resilience and Empowerment.
Together with fellow teachers Chris Coniaris, Blair Bobier, and Vanessa Timmons we will explore the imperatives of the Gita: of action and non-attachment, understanding and releasing our conditioning, laying down our weapons and turning to our inner teacher, and re-dedicating ourselves to lives informed by love, justice and service.
We will also renew ourselves in the hot springs, sauna, ancient forest, and in each other's camaraderie.
Sarahjoy Marsh, MA, E-RYT 500, certified yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and author, is a vibrant, compassionate catalyst for transformation. Clear-hearted and sensitive toward our human condition, Sarahjoy ignites a person’s confidence in themselves as capable of traversing the challenges and joys of awakening from suffering. Through her decades of work with a wide variety of people, she has created an accessible library of tools that develop the life skills people need to re-create health (both physical and mental); to internalize their sense of worth, belonging, and capacity; and to thrive emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.
While fundamentally informed by the teachings of yoga, Sarahjoy also masterfully integrates her training in Eastern and Western perspectives, Ayurveda, art therapy and mental health, interpersonal counseling, neurobiology, reciprocal muscle inhibition, and kinesiology. She has an unwavering belief in people’s innate goodness and their capacity to re-awaken to their potential.
A sought after teacher of teachers, she leads multiple retreats, immersions, and trainings in the Pacific Northwest and internationally, and is a regular instructor at Kripalu Yoga Center and Breitenbush Hot Springs. Sarahjoy has been teaching retreats for 25 years. She also teaches 200-, 500-, and 800-hour yoga teacher and yoga therapy trainings in Portland, Oregon; as well as a 200-hour teacher training program in prisons for incarcerated adults to become yoga teachers on the inside.
Her book Hunger, Hope & Healing: A Yoga Approach to Reclaiming Your Relationship with Your Body and Food outlines her unique approach to yoga for recovery; integrating powerful yoga and mindfulness tools with modern day psychological modalities for an effective and comprehensive approach to healing.
Committed to supporting marginalized populations and using yoga for social justice Sarahjoy founded Living Yoga and the DAYA Foundation.
Visit Sarahjoy’s website or follow her Facebook page
Click on names to view Teacher Bios
MA, E-RYT 500, Founder & Interim Executive Director
Cancellation & Refund Policy: