Workshops
This Yoga & Spirituality Book Club is a space to explore meaningful texts through shared dialogue and lived experience, rather than lecture or instruction. Together, we’ll slow down, read thoughtfully, and reflect on how these teachings show up both on and off the mat.
The intention is to cultivate shared language, deeper connection, and community, allowing insight and understanding to unfold naturally.
What to Expect A small, intentional group of 10–12 participants
Light facilitation with a discussion-based format
A relaxed, welcoming atmosphere rooted in curiosity and listening
This is not a teacher training or academic study group. It’s a facilitated circle centered on reflection, conversation, and personal experience.
Participation & Group Flow
To support meaningful conversation: Participants may join up to 1–2 weeks late, but only at the start of a new book.
Lead by Petula Dias
Sunday, September 13
7-8:30 PM
9/13, 9/20, 9/27
10/4, 10/18, 10/25
11/1 & 11/8
Restore: A Somatic Yoga Series –
A Four Session Series to Learn How to Come Back to Yourself. These sessions are rooted in the neuroscience of the nervous system and the wisdom your body holds. This four-part somatic yoga series takes you through regulation, grief, anger, and boundaries — not as concepts to understand, but as experiences to move through. Feeling is where real healing happens.
Session One — What Is Regulation, and How Do I Move Toward It? Your nervous system has been working behind the scenes to keep you safe — and this session is where you finally learn its language. We will slow down and notice the sensations in the body through somatic inquiry and gentle yoga to help you attune to your nervous system and develop a relationship with it instead of against it.
Session Two — Grief: The Body Knows Loss
Grief is about any type of loss you might have experienced, not just death. Grief lives in body: the chest, belly, in your tears, and the heaviness you can't quite name. In this session, you'll use movement, and somatic practices to allow grief to move through you rather than stay stuck inside you.
Session Three — Anger: The Body's Flame Anger isn't the problem — stuck anger is and it can cause dis-ease and disease in the body. This reclaims anger as biological wisdom: a signal of violated limits and unmet needs that deserves a safe place to express itself. Together, we will express it through intentional yoga and somatic discharge so you can let your body complete what didn’t get completed in past.
Session Four — Boundaries: The Body Knows Where You End and I Begin Your body knew "no" long before your mind gave you permission to say it. This closing session teaches you to read your body's yes and no as the profound guidance they are —and to close the series by celebrating how much you've reclaimed. You'll leave with embodied tools to take back into your life, not just knowledge.
Laurie James is a certified somatic practitioner, coach, author, and yogi who has spent twenty years learning what it means to heal through the body because she’s lived it — and now teaches others to do the same. Her work blends somatic experiencing, coaching and movement to help women come home to themselves after divorce, midlife upheaval, or a lifetime of putting everyone else first.
Because each session builds upon the one before it, attending all four allows you to experience the full progression—from regulation and emotional release to stronger, more embodied boundaries.
We live in crisis and in savoring, often in the same breath. The middle path asks us to make room for both.
Over three hours, Elena Brower and Olga Sokolova will guide a practice toward that wide, soft place within us—one spacious enough for thought, judgment, and opinion to arise and move through without needing to remain.
Elena begins with asana and contemplative stillness, inviting us to witness the mind as it generates, holds, and releases.
Through movement, meditation, and quiet observation, we create a more spacious weave in the mind and body for whatever is present.
Olga then leads us into the body’s own architecture—its joints, fascia, and the innate intelligence connecting them. Through slow, fluid patterns of movement, we awaken sensation, curiosity, and a deeper capacity to listen.
As the afternoon unfolds, we move into rhythm, improvisation, and expression, discovering coherence not by forcing or performing, but by listening for what is already here.
A gathering devoted to the middle ground: between stillness and dynamism, structure and freedom, a world in crisis and the moments that make it worth living.
About Elena Brower
Elena Brower is the bestselling author of five books and has taught yoga and meditation for nearly three decades. Integrating her study of Zen with yoga asana, she creates practices that invite stillness within and around us. Now a chaplain grounded in service and care, Elena accompanies people who are dying and those living within the carceral system. Her work also includes teaching courses, creating art, and writing books and essays.
About Olga Sokolova
Olga Sokolova is a movement artist, choreographer, educator, and founder of MIDL GROUND Movement Practice, an integrative approach bridging somatic awareness, internal martial arts, biomechanics, functional mobility, and creative movement research. She guides participants toward movement that emerges through listening—exploring presence before performance, sensation before shape, and coherence before complexity.
