Sarahjoy Marsh
Yoga with the Brain in Mind
Workshop September 23 & 24
Sarahjoy Marsh, MA, RYT 500, has been teaching yoga since 1993 and has specialized in Yoga for Recovery since 2001. She is the founder of the DAYA Foundation, a nonprofit yoga center that delivers accessible yoga alternatives and develops yoga therapy curriculum to train allied health professionals, yoga teachers, and students. Her background includes transpersonal counseling, art therapy, and community mental health, as well as the psychology of yoga, Ayurveda and rehabilitative yoga. Sarahjoy is also the founder of Living Yoga, a nonprofit yoga outreach program that brings yoga to prisons and rehabilitation centers. She is the author of Hunger, Hope, and Healing, a book on yoga for women with eating disorders, food addictions and body-image issues.
Register for individual sessions or the entire workshop.
Yoga for Your Right Brain: Rhythm, Imagination, Awe, and Delight
Friday | September 23 | 6:30-8:30 pm | $40
Our right brains are vast inner regions for awe, delight, timelessness, rhythm, and imagination. They also house our implicit memories and wisely store that which wasn't tended to in our early care environments. Implicit memory surges up when we feel “triggered” or when our stored sensitivities become aroused. The awakening of these sensitive areas in our pre-verbal reserves provides opportunities for healing, restoration, poignancy, kindness, and integration. Yet, whether or not we can welcome such opportunity relies on our ability to collaborate with our brain’s wisdom while tending to its vulnerabilities. This session will illustrate, in real time, the deep values of our right brain in yoga; and will provide teachers, therapists, and other practitioners with tangible tools to use with their students or clients.
The Senses: To Seduce or Not Seduce, To Indulge or Not Indulge
Saturday | September 24 | 9-11:30 am | $50
With an alive conversation between your thalamus and your koshas, we’ll explore the tremendous resource in our senses, with a nod to the sometimes-turbulent terrain caused by our sensory impressions, memories, interpretations, and misinterpretations. Where do pratyahara and the manamayakosha meet and when would they best collaborate? All five senses seek information to relay to important brain centers, providing us with our personal “stained glass window” through which we see and experience the world. This session will illustrate, in real time, how to make wise use of sensory input in a yoga practice, as well as how to develop a consistently reliable resource in pratyahara as a means to soothe one’s brain and drop back into one’s deeper wisdom, vijnanamayakosha. Ultimately, yoga teaches us how to lessen the coloring of our “stained glass window”, our conditioned thoughts and reactions; revealing clear perception and accessing compassion.
Basking in Ananda: The Yogic Roadmap of the Koshas
Saturday | September 24 | 1:30-4 pm | $50
The Koshas illuminate the layers of our human eco-system and remind us that our deepest nature is love and belonging. Both a hopeful vision and a roadmap for coming back home to this love and belonging, creating a yoga practice and cultivating a life rhythm in alignment with the koshas awakens, and restores, our deep recognition of this. More than merely cognitively, intellectually, or spiritually compelling, through yogic practices, this recognition infuses body, breath, senses, viscera, brain, heart, intuition, and ananda.
In this session, we’ll explore what gets in the way of living in this realization so many have repeatedly glimpsed yet haven’t stabilized in. Neuroscience helps us to understand how our brain supports (or derails) us in steadying our felt sense of homecoming. We will outline the daily yogic recommendations for nourishing this capacity. Practices will include asana, pranayama, mindfulness in the subtle layers of the koshas, pratyahara, chanting, and meditative inquiry. Expect an inward journey that evolves into a sense of intimacy with your fellow yoga companions here and everywhere.
Register for Entire Workshop | $120
