Announcing September 2018 Dates!
Resilience in Movement:
A Yoga and Social Justice Retreat
with RW Alves and Krista Hanson
Sept. 21-23, 2018
The Yoga Lodge on Whidbey Island, WA
Welcome all Activists, Organizers, Healers, and Changemakers…
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
Already know you want to join us?
The Schedule:
FRIDAY
2-4pm Arrival and Check-in
4-6pm Opening Circle Practice- Coming into Community
6pm Dinner
7:30-8:30 Meditation and discussion
SATURDAY
7-8:30am Yoga asana/ movement practice
8:30am Breakfast
10-12 Discussion and meditation practice
12-4pm Lunch and free time for resting, hiking, massage, time in nature, etc
4-6:30pm Gentle yoga, mindfulness practice, and group work
6:30pm Dinner
8pm Bonfire Ritual and Community Time
SUNDAY
7-8:30am Yoga asana (movement)
8:30am Breakfast
10-12:30 Meditation, Discussion, and Closing Circle
12:30-1:30 Lunch
After lunch, departing and making our ways back out into the world
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 loft beds 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.
Cost:
$425-625 sliding scale (staying in the lodge)
($50 discount for early-bird registration before August 1)
Fees per person include yoga, meditation, organic vegetarian meals, accommodations, shared bathrooms, access to community trails, tea, snacks, and sauna.
Camping and rates for staying offsite are also available; click here to learn more.
Non-refundable deposit of $150 holds your space, with remainder due by early-bird registration deadline (August 1). For later registrations, $150 holds your space until September 1, then full amount is due.
Early-bird registration deadline is August 1.
A limited number of community-supported retreat spots (financial-need-based, discounted spots) are available - please read here for more information.
We are also accepting contributions towards community-supported retreat spots so that we can offer more community-supported spaces. Please read here, and contact us if you are interested in contributing.
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 August 30, refunds will be 50%, or refunded in full minus the $150 security deposit, if your space can be filled.
• For cancellations after August 30, 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 let us know if you have other specific accessibility requirements, and we will do our best to accommodate.
(this will take you to a google form, which you can fill out and submit online,
and we'll follow up with you about payment and next steps)
We would love to have you join us!
We'll see you September 21-23 on Whidbey Island!
More about us:
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
RW Alves is a Seattle-based yoga teacher and yoga therapist who came to her yoga practice as a fat 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, including 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 continue bringing 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, somatics and somatic healing, nervous system resilience, and trauma healing. She is an E-RYT 500, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a certified 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.