Resilience in Movement – Weekend Retreat

* This fall 2018 retreat has been canceled *

 

 

——————————————————–

Resilience in Movement: A Yoga Retreat for Social Justice

Sept. 21-23, 2018 on Whidbey Island

Welcome all Activists, Organizers, Healers, and Changemakers…Full tree with intricate root system

  • How are you holding up right now in your life and your work?
  • Are you working to balance the urgency of the fight for racial and social justice with the need to stay sustainable and not work straight into burnout?
  • Are you looking for practices to help keep you grounded and compassionate?
  • Would you like to spend time in community building more resilience and practicing tools to stay rooted and embodied through the joyous and the hard times?
  • Could you use time away to feed your spirits and tend to your heart so you can stay in the work you are passionate about for long haul?

Movements for racial and social justice need us, and this moment demands that we show up fully and deeply — rooted, grounded, and resilient, solid in our embodiment, compassion, and interdependence.  Join us for this Friday-Sunday retreat in the woods of Whidbey Island to make the time for the inward practices that build resilience for our movements.

Using movement, meditation, and contemplative practices, we will rest deeply and tune into to our innate wisdom, our needs, and our hearts in ways that we often can’t do in our constantly on-the- go lives.  We will work with the effects of anxiety, fear, trauma, and oppression on our bodies and spirits, while also tapping into and celebrating our joy, creativity, hope, interdependence, and resilience.

Come join us for our second (and maybe annual!) retreat to build the capacity to hold ourselves, our colleagues, comrades, and organizations with compassion, so we can build vital and powerful heart-centered organizations, campaigns, and movements. We will use the weekend to explore and ground in self-care, community-care, resilience, and practice within a framework rooted in an anti-oppression analysis of systems of power, whether we are at work, at movement-building, at rest, or at play.

We invite you to come with other members of your community so you can continue to explore and support one another beyond the retreat itself.  Let’s practice together to ground our work in love, hopefulness, and resilience, and to move forward into the new world we’re creating with integrity, embodiment, practice, and a deep commitment to caring for ourselves and each other!

We are excited to be building on the success, nourishment, inspiration, and collective wisdom from the first retreat. We are also reaching out to community leaders who are teaching or leading in the areas of movement, justice, community-care, and resilience. If you have ideas or requests for the retreat, or people you’d suggest we include in the planning, please feel free to reach out to us.

We hope that these retreats will become community-built and community-held spaces of rest and regeneration for social and racial justice work.


This retreat experience offers:

  •       Yoga and movement
  •       Breath practices
  •       Somatic exploration
  •       Nervous system resilience practices
  •       Meditation
  •       Sauna
  •       Delicious, nourishing food
  •       Community-building
  •       Self-care and community-care
  •       Space to rest and go inward
  •       Space to engage and connect with ourselves and our communities

Schedule:

 

Please plan to arrive at the Mukilteo Ferry terminal by 1pm on Friday to avoid extremely long weekend waits!

Friday

2-4pm           Arrival and Check-in

4-6pm           Opening Circle Practice

6pm              Dinner

7:30-8:30     Meditation

Saturday

7-8:30am      Yoga asana (movement)

8:30-10am    Breakfast

10-12           Discussion and meditation practice

12-4pm         Lunch and free time

4-6:30pm      Gentle yoga and mindfulness practice

6:30              Dinner

8pm              Bonfire

Sunday

7-8:30am      Yoga asana (movement)

8:30-10am    Breakfast

10-12:30      Meditation and closing Circle

12:30-1:30   Lunch

The Space:

The Yoga Lodge is a beautiful retreat space in the woods on Whidbey Island.  The space includes a bright yoga studio looking out onto meadow and forest, often with deer wandering by, shared lodging for up to 11 people in the Lodge (with additional spaces for camping and participants staying off-site), and fully catered meals. Rooms are shared rooms with three or four beds (mostly single beds, one double bed), some of which are top bunks with ladders. The dining room and kitchen are up a flight of stairs. Bathrooms are all-genders shared bathrooms with separate toilet and shower stalls. There is a pond, community trails, hiking, plenty of chairs and benches for sitting and communing with nature, a beautiful meadow, and a sauna for your use.

Registration and Prices

$425-625 Sliding Scale – $50 Discount for Early Bird Registration (EXTENDED TO AUG. 15)

We hope to make yoga financially available to everyone!  Please see here for more pricing options, information about sliding scale, and more…

 

Refund and Cancellation Policy:

  • Your $150 security deposit is a non-refundable administration fee.
  • For cancellations through August 1, all payment will be refunded in full, minus the $150 security deposit.
  • For cancellations from August 1 to Sept. 1, refunds will be 50%, or refunded in full minus the $150 security deposit, if your space can be filled.
  • For cancellations after Sept. 1, your registration will be refunded minus the $150 security deposit ONLY if your space can be filled.
  • If we must cancel this retreat for any reason, your payments will be refunded in full.

Accessibility

No yoga experience necessary, all bodies and abilities are welcome. This is a queer-positive, poc-positive, body-positive, fat-positive, anti-oppression space.

The Yoga Lodge caters to those with chemical sensitivities, and uses natural cleaning products and low/no VOC paints, etc. The bathrooms are stocked with local artisan, handcrafted body care products (foaming hand soap, body wash, shampoo, and conditioner) made with pure essential oils and without parabens, phthalates, sulfates or petrochemicals. The Yoga Lodge is not a fragrance-free space, but we do ask that participants think about their use of scents and how this may impact others’ ability to participate and be present. Learn more about how and why to be fragrance-free here. Learn more about MCS here.

Some rooms at the Yoga Lodge are accessed by three stairs. Some beds at The Yoga Lodge are loft beds that are accessed by climbing a ladder; others are on the ground and not accessed by ladder. Please let us know if you require a non-loft bed, and please check in with the others sharing your room to ensure that folks get a bed that meets their access needs. The dining room and kitchen are up a flight of stairs.

Bathrooms are all-genders shared bathrooms with separate toilet and shower stalls.

Upon registration, you can let us know any food restrictions you have, and the catered meals will be planned to meet those needs. Please contact us with any questions or let us know if you have other specific accessibility requirements, and we will do our best to accommodate.  We have walked around and looked closely at rooms to see about access for people with limited mobility, and we would be happy to describe the space.

About RW and Krista:

RW Alves is a Seattle-based yoga teacher and yoga therapist who came to her yoga practice as a queer activist and a rabble-rouser, and for many years has focused on bringing diversity and social justice trainings into yoga spaces. She works with organizations like Bending Towards Justice and Off the Mat, Into the World to hold deep conversations about how our practice can inform and strengthen our justice work, and is excited to bring some of those conversations to the Yoga Lodge for this retreat! Her yoga teaching style is non-judgmental, body-positive, deeply inquisitive and self-reflective, and informed by years of study in social justice, body liberation, various styles of yoga, nervous system resilience, and trauma healing. She is an E-RYT 500, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a yoga therapist, and an American Sign Language interpreter. In all of her classes and offerings, she is most interested in creating and holding spaces where students can bring their whole selves and explore their experience and embodiment in empowering, self-reflective, and ultimately liberatory ways.

Krista Lee Hanson is a Seattle-based yoga instructor passionate about the deep mind-body-heart connection that yoga offers, and the inner and outer healing that can come from being grounded in our full human experience.  Krista is also a long-time organizer, working on issues of cross-border solidarity, immigrant rights, and disability justice, and she is the mother of two incredible young kids.  As a yoga instructor, Krista teaches movement, meditation and contemplative practices that come from traditional yoga teachings, while also creatively adapting her teaching to the individual needs and brilliance of each student in the room.   Krista is a registered 500-HR yoga instructor with additional training in yoga therapy.