Cultivate Yoga MKE

Family Yoga in the Park is here!!!

Connecting with nature right away Saturday morning under the shade of the trees. Space to breathe. Fun games to connect with your kiddo(s). Getting the chance to stretch your body and shake off the week. (And afterwards walking over to the farmers market of course!)

To start, we'll try out *Saturday mornings at 9:30-10:15 am at South Shore Park*.
This may change over the course of the summer.

*First class is SATURDAY JUNE 27!*
(and will run through the end of summer break)

☔ Class will be canceled in the case of inclement weather (or if I'll be out of town!) - be sure to check in on Insta/FB before class each week.

Please come with:
🌞 A mat or blanket
🌞 Sun protection - your choice of sunscreen, hats, and/or sunglasses
🌞 Water bottles

This event is free, with donations for my time gratefully accepted via Venmo or cash.

Suggested ages: Poses and games will be geared toward 2-9 year-olds, but all ages are welcome, including baby siblings. 😊

Where to find us:
We'll meet on the *east* (lake) side of Shore Dr. (if you're on the farmers market side you need to cross the street!) Look for us on the north side of that grassy area. It's a group of trees directly across from the boat launch. Swipe through for a visual and map.

Happy summer friends! Hope to see you there! 😎

The *only* KIDS YOGA SUMMER CAMP in Milwaukee! (that I know of!)

🌞 KIDS YOGA SUMMER CAMP at ADVENTURE ROCK WKP 🌞

AdRock's yoga summer camp is the perfect place for your 6-11 year old to move, climb, get creative, and make new friends! In between sessions of yoga (poses, games, breathing and mindfulness practices) campers will participate in team-building games, a daily climbing session, and exploring the week's theme through crafts. Each week has a different theme so feel free to register for multiple sessions!

These are the weeks I'll be teaching:

Energy Rainbow (June 15-19)
We will learn about the 7 Chakras (energy centers in our bodies) and their corresponding colors, movements, and poses, allowing what we learn inform the way we move our bodies, the art we make, and the games that we play!

Empowered Animals (July 6-10)
We will learn from the wisdom of different animals each day - letting the animals inspire ways to move our bodies, change our perspectives, and learn about ourselves!

See, Hear, Feel Yoga (August 17-21)
We will explore mindfulness using the 5 senses. Expect games, art, and of course yoga poses to explore the world around us using sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste!

(Another yoga teacher will be teaching a 4th week as well - Elements of Yoga on July 27-31 🥰)

Register now via link in bio or at AdventureRock.com/camps *scroll down to YOGA camp for my camp* (but I also recommend AdRock's climbing camps while you're there!)

🚨Registration for June's camp closes NEXT MONDAY 6/8 - reserve your spot today!

*Bonus class!* and our last of the season at Healium!

The last Yoga Together class at Healium Hot Yoga (until fall) will be on:

🌸 Sunday May 31 at 3:30 pm 🌸

Join me in this class designed for little ones ages 2 to 6 and their parents/caregivers! Kids and their grown-ups will use physical poses, mindfulness practices, and games and activities to practice connecting with their bodies, breath, and with each other.

Each child must attend with at least one adult. For multiple children: please email [email protected] to arrange for additional child sign-up(s) and payment.
All abilities and levels of experience welcome (for kids and grown-ups!). If you have any questions about whether this class is a good fit for your child, reach out to me.

✨ Sign up at HealiumHotYoga.com or via link in bio ✨

Our last *free* family yoga class at Tippecanoe Library is coming up -
🌞 Saturday, May 30 at 10 am 🌞

(Hopefully we'll be back again in fall, but don't miss your last chance to join us this month!)

About this class: Children 2-7 years old (ish) and their caregivers are invited to practice mindfulness through a variety of physical yoga poses, breath practices, stories, games, and activities to cultivate connection with the body, breath, emotions and each other. All experiences and levels are welcome.
Please bring one mat per person if you have them; I will have a handful to borrow as well. Class is a total of 1 hour long, with the last 15 minutes as time for a craft so folks can mingle and chat. And shout out to Ms. Lizzy for helping make the craft time run so smoothly, and for setting out on-theme books for you to check out each month!

Hope to see you there!

This month’s theme is:
Grateful for Mothers 💗

In honor of Mother’s Day, I want to take the time here and in class to give a huge shout out to mothers and all the hard, often unseen work that they do. (“Mothers” here could be grandmas, aunties, nonbinary parents, or anyone else channeling the divine feminine into caring for tiny humans). Aside from flowers and heartfelt thanks from the kids and dads this Sunday, I want to say directly mom-to-mom that I see you. I see all the invisible labor that moms do, the mountain of care and compassion and thought that goes into your actions all day every day, and I see how heavy of a weight it can be. I’ve been quite immersed in the world of mothering since becoming a mom (especially stay-at-home mom) and I am consistently amazed by the love, creativity, and *work* I see mothers doing. They are not only doing all the million daily tasks like packing lunches and doing laundry, but also planning and creating magic for things like birthdays, holidays, or even Sundays at home. All that while still caring for themselves (as best as they can), *and* growing and nurturing relationships with friends, other moms, and creating the roots that uphold a community of children, *AND* they are also using their creative energy and unique skills to care for the larger community - volunteering at school, organizing food drives or clothing swaps, basically creating the supportive, caring world we want to live in. It’s moms that are often the ones making it happen. (And shout out to the women without children out there doing lots of this work as well, and *thank you* for all you do to help take care of us moms - I have often felt very held and cared for by you 💗.)

Thank you, moms for all of your organizing, caring/maintaining, and creating. Thank you for your softness, your fierceness, your perseverance, your compassion, your hard work, and your unconditional love and caring for not only your kids but for your community near and far.

So this month I’m not inviting you to *do* one more thing, I’m sending you these wishes:
🌷 May you feel seen.
🌷 May you know you are loved.
🌷 May you take the space, time, and energy you deserve.
🌷 May you gift yourself what your body/mind/spirit is asking for this weekend (and every day).
🌷 May you know that you’re doing great work - keep going.💖

This month you can find me at:
💚 Tippecanoe Family Yoga - Sat. 5/30 at 10 am **LAST ONE** (until fall, hopefully!)
💚 Healium Yoga Together - Sun. 5/31 at 3:30 pm **LAST ONE** (until fall)

Looking ahead to summer: I’ll be at Margie’s Garden a couple days later in the summer, teaching Milwaukee Rec for big kids (starts late June), and teaching 3 Adventure Rock yoga camps for big kids (sign up today!). All details at CultivateYogaMKE.com.

✨Andddddd… I think this is the summer we start free/donation-based family yoga in the park on the weekends! Let me know if you prefer Saturdays or Sundays!

Happy Earth Day, Earthlings!

I've been talking about ahimsa in my classes this month - the idea of non-harming, and what that means in relation to the Earth (animals, plants, and more).

I started really considering what it means to walk through in our modern world trying our best not to cause harm to Mother Earth. Unfortunately, I think there are many times we are confronted with no good options and finding ourselves choosing the path that causes the *least* harm. I'm thinking of: choices at the grocery store, choosing other products for the home, choosing your mode of transportation, how much power and water we use, etc. Each of these has such an impact on not only the natural resources we are using (aka. gifts from Mother Nature) but also has impacts on climate change via the transportation needed for global shipping, and in many cases destruction of ecosystems to create space for agriculture, factories, etc. (and pollution from those industries). That is a lot of harm!

So aside from calling this to mind, I would be remiss if I did not use my platform (hooray for 500 followers on Instagram!) to ask you to consider the impact of eating animals. We read the book Our Animal Neighbors: Compassion for Every Furry, Slimy, Prickly Creature on Earth by Matthieu Ricard and Jason Gruhl, illustrated by Becca Hall in some of my classes. I was shocked to be reminded of these statistics in the back of the book (see images).

Setting aside the ethical question of whether it causes harm to animals for humans to eat meat and animal products (more on that below), if you are a person who cares about avoiding harm to the environment/our planet and helping combat climate change - I implore you to consider the impact eating meat has on the environment by reading facts like those in the images (and more). It is well known that animal agriculture contributes more to climate change than all forms of transportation combined.

A great place to start is trying for "meatless Mondays" or some other schedule of skipping meat at least a couple times per week. If you are interested in going plant-based/vegan, please don't hesitate to reach out via DM - I'm happy to share tips and advice! But please please know that this does not need to be all-or-nothing, even small changes and skipping meat occasionally could have a huge impact if enough Americans chose this route.

(And re: the question of ahimsa and animal suffering from the meat and dairy industry, please also consider opening your heart to learn about the extensive suffering caused by factory farming. My eyes were opened to this when I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer back in 2009, but I'm sure there are more updated resources to learn about this - books and many documentaries have since been made.)

(Oh and P.S. - "no" to AI and data centers! 🙅🏽‍♀️)

With the utmost love and compassion, thank you for reading. ♥

Coming up - the next Yoga Together class at Healium Hot Yoga is on:
🌷 *this Sunday* April 26 at 3:30 pm 🌷

Note: a new date is added as well - save May 31 in your calendar for the last of these for the season!

Join me in this class designed for little ones ages 2 to 6 and their parents/caregivers! Kids and their grown-ups will use physical poses, mindfulness practices, and games and activities to practice connecting with their bodies, breath, and with each other.

Each child must attend with at least one adult. For multiple children: please email [email protected] to arrange for additional child sign-up(s) and payment.
All abilities and levels of experience welcome (for kids and grown-ups!). If you have any questions about whether this class is a good fit for your child, reach out to me.
Sign up at HealiumHotYoga.com or via link in bio

(Class will not be heated)

This month's theme is - Connected to Earth 🌍

Now that it's warming up, it's such a great time to reconnect with nature.... Noticing each new flower that blooms in your yard or neighborhood, noticing the different birds as they migrate back to our area, reveling in these warm sunny days when they happen to pop up before another cold rainy day comes. This month we've got Earth Day coming up, and it feels like an even more magical time to appreciate our planet as we watched Artmeis II send us new pictures and perspectives of its beauty and singularity.

Every day is a good day to reconnect with nature - the benefits to your mind/body/spirit are innumerable. Maybe you're like me and didn't get out enough over winter and just might find yourself feeling better the more sunshine, walks, and fresh air you start to get.

This month in class, I really hope to help kids and their grown-ups remember that nature isn’t something we go out and occasionally interact with, but rather we *are* nature. We are connected with everything on Earth - the rocks, the plants, the non-human animals, we are one. And in remembering that, we remember to treat all of our fellow earthlings with the utmost care, respect, gentleness, and empathy. How can we be gentle with the plants we cross on a hike, or offer support to the plants that grow in our yards? What does it look like to treat even the tiniest creatures - ants, spiders, bees with compassion? Sometimes I feel like adults have built up walls between themselves and certain creatures - what could it feel like to open your heart to *all* animals and plants you interact with? To *be with* them instead of exerting *power over* them? Together we’ll explore what ahimsa (non-harming) might truly look like as we interact with our fellow earthlings in today’s modern life.

So this month I invite you and your little ones to:
🌷 Get to know your plant neighbors - notice when new plants emerge this spring and perhaps take the time to learn the names of ones you’re unfamiliar with.
🌷 Greet your nonhuman neighbors - stop to notice and acknowledge the bird on the branch near you. Stop to watch the insects as they crawl or fly by, give them space to pass safely.
🌷 Start the morning noticing the sun and the sky, end the day noticing the phase of the moon.
🌷 Notice how the bit of Earth of you currently live on is part of a larger ecosystem. We don’t “own” land. Notice which plant and non-human animal beings share the space with you.
🌷 Notice how all the Earth Day caring-for-the-environment actions (e.g. cleaning up litter, planting seeds/tending plants, etc.) arise naturally when your heart is open and connected with the plants and animals around you.

This month you can find me at:
Tippecanoe Library Family Yoga - Saturday 4/18 at 10 am
Healium Yoga Together - Sunday 4/26 at 3:30 pm
Adventure Rock Kids Yoga - Wednesdays (now through 5/13) 4:30 pm (single classes now available!)

Save the date - next Saturday is our next *free* family yoga class at Tippecanoe Library!

🌷 Saturday, April 18 at 10 am 🌷

Save the date for the next one, too: May 30!

About this class: Children 2-7 years old (ish) and their caregivers are invited to practice mindfulness through a variety of physical yoga poses, breath practices, stories, games, and activities to cultivate connection with the body, breath, emotions and each other. All experiences and levels are welcome.
Please bring one mat per person if you have them; I will have a handful to borrow as well. Class is a total of 1 hour long, with the last 15 minutes as time for a craft so folks can mingle and chat. And shout out to Ms. Lizzy for helping make the craft time run so smoothly, and for setting out on-theme books for you to check out each month!

Hope to see you there!

KIDS YOGA (6 week series)
WEDNESDAYS AT ADVENTUREROCK MKE
4:30-5:30 PM
🌟 *Kids and parent/guardian climb for free each week!* 🌟

Class Dates:
Wednesdays 4/8 - 5/13

In this 6-week program, kids ages 6-11 will practice using the tools of yoga to release some after-school energy while also learning about mindfulness. Each week we’ll build physical skills like stretching, strengthening, flexibility, and balance, while also building social emotional skills like confidence, creativity, and self-regulation. Fun games, activities, and team-building challenges are woven throughout each sequence of yoga poses.

Each kid will receive a day pass to climb before or after class, as well as a day pass for their parent/guardian to climb before/during/after class as well!
This is a great opportunity for kids to try not one, but two new movement practices!

Register at AdventureRock.com! Space is limited. (Link in bio 🥰)
https://portal.adventurerock.com/milwaukee/programs/kids-yoga