Noah Mazé to Lead Local Memorial Day Fundraiser

Join donation-based yoga session with Noah Mazé in El Portal, California!

Noah Mazé is one of the most sought-after, advanced, and proficient practitioners and teachers of Anusara® Yoga, a style popularized by celebrity yogi John Friend. In Noah's classes, yoga philosophy, myths, and stories weave together with yoga postures, breathing practices, and meditation to create a powerful and transformative experience.

On Memorial Day weekend, Noah is teaming up with Balanced Rock for a weekend of yoga and hiking that will culminate in a donation-based fundraiser yoga session. The fundraiser will be held on Monday, May 30 from 9:00am – 11:00am at the El Portal Community Hall. The yoga session is open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Email info@balancedrock.org for an advanced reservation. The community hall can accommodate approximately 50-60 yoga mats. There will also be a silent auction including Giants tickets and a weekend stay for two at a beautiful cottage in Point Reyes. Food will be available for purchase after the yoga session.

There are also a few individual fee-based yoga classes with Noah available on Friday, May 27, Saturday, May 28, and Sunday, May 29. Only a few spots left, so reserve now!

Funds generated during Noah’s Memorial Day yoga session will be used for Balanced Rock’s scholarships and empowerment programs for low-income and underserved populations. Balanced Rock is a Yosemite-based non-profit whose mission is to inspire people to live more meaningful, healthy, and sustainable lives through deep connection to nature, community and themselves. Their programs for mind, body, and spirit wellness focus on journeys in the Yosemite Wilderness. Special programs have included free community yoga, Women of Color expeditions, and self-care courses designed for social workers.

One local program that will benefit from the fundraiser is the Yosemite Youth Expedition for Mariposa youth, a partnership project with Mountain Crisis Services, Ethos Youth Center, Mariposa Safe Families, and the Mariposa County Unified School District. This program brings local high-school-aged youth into Yosemite National Park on dayhikes leading up to a 4-day Wilderness Expedition. The next Wilderness Expedition is scheduled for June 16-19 in Yosemite National Park.

For more information, visit www.balancedrock.org, email info@balancedrock.org or call (209)379-9453.

Balanced Rock Gets a Shout Out in the June Yoga Journal!

We're pretty excited to be included in the article Call of the Wild: Climb, Paddle or Surf Your Way to Bliss on a Yoga Adventure.

The text reads: "Hiking and Backpacking: Explore hiking trails and hone your backcountry skills along with your yoga and meditation practice while surrounded by rocky bluffs, cliffs and waterfalls of Yosemite.

Thanks Yoga Journal!

Forest Inspiration with Andie Thrams

Andie Thrams is a visual artist, educator and occasional publisher as Larkspur Graphics. She will be leading an art and hiking retreat called "A Sense of Place" with Balanced Rock from June 10-12.





Text quoted from:
IN FORESTS, Volume XVI: Great and Graceful
By Andie Thrams; all images © Andie Thrams
This book is part of an ongoing series of artist’s books documenting my experiences in wild forests. This volume holds original journal pages made in August 2008, during an eleven-day backpack with my husband, Dennis Eagan, in Sequoia National Park. We spent much of our trip exploring Redwood Meadow, a complex of several wilderness Sequoia groups in the upper Middle Fork of the Kaweah River watershed.

Page 9:
In the stringer grove, above Redwood Meadow, midday. A creek meanders steeply down, appearing in pools and little cascades, then disappearing under ground or logs or boulders. The Giant Sequoias here grow along this unnamed creek, nearly in it, in places. It is steep terrain & quite shady. This grove follows the creek down to Cliff Creek where we slept last night beneath two Sequoias. A few Sequoias continue downstream from there, eventually linking up with the main Redwood Meadow trees.

Nearly always these trees grow in groups. It is hard to put words to the sense of connection amongst them and the other giant trees like Sugar Pine, Jeffery Pine and White Fir that grow with them. But the term, forest community, seems perfect. A wild ancient forest like this feels unlike any other. It is all pattern & chaos, ordered & unkempt. It feels deeply complicated, interwoven beyond comprehension. And, best of all, it feels like a place thriving, and of grace.

After a bit of time in forests like this, I also start to feel like a thriving being & filled with a sense of grace. I hear flickers, jays, nuthatches, chickadees, chickarees, woodpeckers, moving water, wind up high, juncos, winter wrens, and more I don’t know. Bracken & lady fern, California hazelnut, alum root, pyrola, gallium, a beautiful tall grass in the creek bed, pinedrops, & dried up still crimson snow plant, grey squirrels, bees, funnel-web spiders, and ants, no end to ants. (A person has to accept small creatures crawling on skin around these trees.) Also: snowberry, gooseberry, thimbleberry, currant and kit-kit-dizzee, dogbane, white-stemmed raspberry. I’ll never know them all! It is hot in the sun, but cool & breezy in the shade of these trees. Chickarees cut down cones, which sometimes crash through the branches to the ground. Wind blows down twigs & sometimes limbs, rarely a tree—we thought we may have heard a tree fall last night... so very good to be back here.