How do we cultivate the skills to find inner peace and grounding amid ongoing conflict around us? Maha El-Sheikh join us to share the vision and journey of creation of Palestine's first entirely volunteer-led community non-profit yoga center, Farashe. Farashe, meaning 'butterfly' in Arabic, holds daily yoga and meditation classes, workshops and space for the community to come together in the West Bank to breathe, heal, play, and connect.

Farashe Yoga Centre

Instagram: @farasheyogaramallah

Facebook: farasheyogacenter

About Maha El-Sheikh

Maha's 20 years of experience working in the international humanitarian and development sector led to her current focus on the social injustices underlying our global humanitarian crises and perpetuated by the modern humanitarian aid system. She partners with relational facilitators and leaders in the economic, racial and climate justice movements, and with international humanitarian and development groups and organizations to reimagine humanitarian aid through compassion-centered, counter-oppressive frameworks. She offers a trauma-informed yoga, somatic, and meditation approach to explore the interconnection of individual and collective healing, social and systemic transformation, and justice. She co-developed Farashe Yoga Centre in Ramallah, Palestine in 2010, a thriving community yoga center in the West Bank, and is currently a core faculty member of Courage of Care Coalition.

About Farashe Yoga Center:

Farashe’s mission is to make yoga accessible for all living in Palestine, as a means to manage stress, improve healthy living, build resilience, and strengthen community bonds. We believe that yoga is a catalyst for transformation and growth within ourselves, families, communities, and the world, whether through physical exercise and healthy nutrition, or through community service and development.

Created, built, and run purely through volunteers and donations, Farashe is committed to the principles of “selfless service.” Our yoga teachers are all volunteers. Class fees are reinvested into the yoga center’s maintenance, teacher training and education, Arabic-language yoga resource development, outreach yoga sessions in surrounding villages and refugee camps, and to community development projects identified by the communities we work with. (from Farashe's co-founder)

Music in this episode by Steve Oxen, Kevin MacLeod and Serge Quadrado