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"A magical sisterhood, circles of community rippling out like a stone tossed in the river, expanding and growing in all directions, building with the force of the seasons. A 20 year old and a 60 year old share a tent, a story, a meal, and a mountain view...
This is Wild Women Workshops."
A History of Wild Women Workshops
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A sun salutation below Mt. Whitney, Sierra Nevada CA
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Wild Women Workshops offer adventures integrating the tools of yoga and creative writing in wilderness settings. Our courses are designed to foster self-exploration, expression, and empowerment within a safe and supportive community.
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Wild Women Workshops combine the richness of the disciplines of yoga and creative writing in natural environments. With these tools, we create space for meditation, silence and union, and the cultivation of each women's own distinctive voice.
We seek to create community among women from all phases of life.
We teach wilderness self-sufficiency.
We are dedicated to keeping our trips affordable through scholarship.
We believe in the healing power of wilderness, through self-discovery, spirituality and creativity. Wilderness is a natural place for women to experience their own strength and to encourage it in other women.
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Wild Women Workshops is a concept that began in response to a tragic murder of a good friend and fellow Yosemite Institute field instructor, Joie Ruth Armstrong, in July 1999. Women of the Yosemite community, strong women, were immersed in deep sorrow, pain, and fear. The idea of our first "workshop" was born with the intention to promote healing through communal yoga, writing, and backpacking.
In the spring of 2000, we proposed our idea for a "workshop" to the Matthew A. Baxter Memorial Award, a fund established after Yosemite Institute instructor Matt Baxter died in a rock-climbing accident on El Capitan. A fund was established in his name to award Yosemite Institute instructors with financial support towards any well crafted dream. We received the award, as well as generous support from the Yosemite Institute, enabling us to fulfill our dream to bring women into the back-country, write in our journals, share our stories, and explore our spirituality through the practice of yoga. In fact, the response to our trip posting was so positive that we had to schedule two workshops that summer.
The overwhelming success of these first two workshops prompted us to continue our mission. In 2001, we achieved non-profit status through a partnership with local resident Peter Mayfield and his business Yosemite Guides, a project of Social & Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE). We have since become our own non-profit 501(c)3 project under the fiscal sponsorship of SEE.
Women of all ages and from all over the nation have experienced weekends or weeks of adventure with our organization. We offer trips of different lengths and to different parts of the world. We have an office and office supplies. We have become our own unique community of men and women dedicated to celebrating life and exploring wilderness. Our aim is to stay a small organization with high quality programs. A goal of ours is to keep our trips affordable to all women who wish to enroll. We are actively seeking donors to build our scholarship fund.
Every trip honors the way Joie and Matt lived. We honor their sense of adventure, life, love, spirituality, and community. We are happy to say, there is a whole community of Wild Women and supporters of Wild Women. Thank you all. Keep "gulping life"!
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Wild Women Workshops' curriculum is what makes our trips unlike any other.
The practice of yoga has come to mean different things to different people. One Sanskrit translation of yoga is Union. In our Workshops our aim is to explore that union with ourselves, each other and our natural world. Our focus is on the process and flow of yoga and not on the "final" pose. All levels of yoga are welcome.
Creative Writing offers a balance to the inward practice of yoga. We work at finding our individual voice while playing and practicing with intriguing topics and exercises. Our focus is on self-expression and the act of sharing and not on the inner critic. All levels of writing are welcome.
The Wilderness provides some of the most serene and inspirational places to continue a yoga and writing practice. As anyone who has spent time in wilderness can attest, there's nothing like it to make you dig deeper, try harder and think more clearly. While in the backcountry, we cover such living skills as equipment use, safe travel techniques, route-finding, meal planning and cooking and how to practice a low impact ethic.
All of our courses incorporate our core curriculum of blending yoga and writing and most of our courses seek to do this in a wilderness setting. With the exception of our weekend workshops, all of our trips are for women only.
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Wild Women Workshops P.O. Box 102 El Portal CA 95318
209/379-WILD (9453)
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