Sedona Yoga Festival (SYF) has been a beacon for the collective yoga community since 2012, facilitating connection between practitioners and their deepest potential. As the team behind the magic prepares for the festival’s 10th anniversary in 2023, they are manifesting the idea, Emerge to Imagine.
Festival producer Heather Shereé Sanders invites, “Come out, dear ones, and imagine the beautiful, abundant, equitable and just societies that we can co-create, and trust that it may always be even more wonderful than you can imagine. Recognize that with each breath you are a part of the whole of creation. There are to be many classes on relationship in this way. Relationship with the breath, with the natural world, with one another.”
“Sedona Yoga Festival has a heritage of innovation rooted in community for the purpose of collective transformation and the evolution of consciousness,” says Reggie Hubbard, director of programming. “This heritage, in combination with the natural beauty and powerful energetics associated with the land in and around Sedona, offer a robust synergy that yields healing shifts in mind and body to allow spirit to be more present.”
If you are ready for transformation and connection with community and the natural world, SYF is for you. SYF is committed to creating space for yogis to understand more deeply what it means to be one part of a diverse and growing collective. Taking place April 27-30, in the heart of Arizona, this year’s festival is one not to miss.
“As we move into our second decade of gathering in Sedona, we are refining a bit. Our traditional offerings of yoga classes and workshops, mindfulness, metaphysics, sacred chant, sound healing, kids yoga, CEUs, the 20-hour trauma-conscious training and excursions into the Coconino National Forest surrounding Sedona, are all still present yet we are choosing to create a more intimate experience,” Sanders says. “Capacity will be more limited than in years past, providing attendees the opportunity to relate with one another at a slower pace, with more time for introspection, shared inspiration and rest.”
This year, SYF has implemented a new programming team. The group is responsible for ensuring that the presenters attending the festival, and the classes offered, include professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds and styles. “We pride ourselves in finding amazing teachers that are not always drawn to the festival circuit and curating a program unlike any other, where each attendee may choose their own adventure from the numerous offerings available on the schedule,” Sanders explains. “We always have a huge roster of teachers so that none is deemed more important than the other. It is all the parts that make up the whole, as is acknowledged in this year’s theme : Emerge to Imagine.”
SYF features three days of energetic transformation through yoga and meditation, music, kirtan and sound therapy, excursions in nature and more. Each offering is a careful curation of a broad spectrum of voices and perspectives to share what Emerge to Imagine means for them. In addition to this, the festival is taking a stand for rest and compassion, catapulting the yoga community into a season of manifestation and communal healing.
Each morning begins with a ceremony and the opportunity to break bread, and from there the options for learning are endless. Last year’s trauma informed yoga teacher training is set to return — students can expect to be equipped with tools to serve themselves and their communities with increased awareness and compassion. The festival will also feature conversations about offering yogic practice with an eye toward more accessibility, expanding the notions of studentship beyond ableist, heterogenous, monochromatic norms. The evenings will feature keynote addresses, panels, sacred chant and entertainment.
“Our aim with the offerings this year is to support those who show up with the tools to increase awareness of how each unique way of being, each independent action, intention, thought is responsible to the whole, is interdependent in that we each affect the outcome for humanity. As we all emerge from what has proven to be a time of deep introspection — shadow work, even — and increased self-awareness, we are anticipating that “self” care begins to take the shape of community care,” Sanders shares.
“As we all emerge from what has proven to be a time of deep introspection — shadow work, even — and increased self-awareness, we are anticipating that “self” care begins to take the shape of community care”
“People can expect to walk away with a tender heart, expanded awareness of our common humanity, a refreshed mind/body/spirit and connections with other humans from this tenderness after a season of forced separation and isolation,” Hubbard says.
SYF is for everyone at all levels of experience. Yoga is so much more than asana, and SYF reflects that. The team asks attendees simply to come with an open heart and open mind, ready to be nourished and take the transformation, inspiration and empowerment experienced back to their own communities.
Learn more at sedonayogafestival.com.
Photo by Alan Alcid.
Paid partnership with YOGA + Life®.
