Welcome! I’m Clare Norelle, a bilingual community yoga teacher in Madison Wisconsin. I offer a variety of yoga classes in English and Spanish, including yin yoga, gentle hatha, flow yoga, chair yoga, and yoga for families and young children.
Through Greenroot Yoga LLC I also offer individual and group sessions in Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), an adjunct treatment for complex trauma, and presentations in English and Spanish about complex trauma and body-centered healing.
The earth our mother always says yes. From the skins of the mountains to the depths of the sea, across all her vast surfaces, she blooms with as much life as can possibly be. Yesses everywhere swimming and floating and running, dancing a trillion dances for the sun. Can we learn to bring as much life as we can to every place that we are, as she does? Can we learn to nurture what we love and not kill what we fear? What is the answer? Yes.
–Anne Herbert
Calendar and resources
June 12th 2021
Hello there, from the cusp of summer in these northern lands..
I hope that you’re okay, maybe even doing well. If you have experienced loss, or fear, or other hardships in these months of the pandemic, I wish you comfort and healing, and send you love.
With pandemic conditions lifting in our part of the world, I’m heading out of town for a bit to see my family on the west coast. I won’t be teaching any yoga sessions online for the week of June 12th – 20th. MSCR summer classes will begin June 21st, while my free online yoga sessions will begin again on Tuesday June 22nd.
Would you like to join me for some free online yoga? Here’s my current schedule of ongoing live sessions. The passcodes should be embedded for all of my zoom sessions, but if you get asked for a passcode with the free classes it will always be “greenroot”.
To learn about community yoga classes that I teach online for Madison School Community Recreation, you can scroll further down the page; scrolling still further down you can also find links to many sets of peaceful yoga music that I’ve put together on Spotify.
Yoga para el Sueño:Martes 9 pm, hora de Wisconsin, 8 pm hora de El Salvador; 7 pm en la costa oueste de los EEUU. Una práctica muy suave para ayudarte a dormir bien; gratuita cada semana.
Yoga for Sleeping (in Spanish) Tuesdays 9 pm in Wisconsin, 8 pm in El Salvador; 7 pm on the west coast. A very gentle practice to help you sleep well; free weekly sessions.
Gentle Yoga:Wednesdays 7:30 pm in Wisconsin, 6:30 pm in El Salvador; 5:30 pm on the west coast of the US. A gentle practice to help alleviate stress and trauma; free weekly sessions.
Yoga Suave (en inglés): Miércoles 7:30 pm en Wisconsin, 6:30 pm en El Salvador; 5:30 pm en la costa oueste de los EEUU. Una práctica suave para ayudar a aliviar estrés y trauma; gratuita cada semana.
Yoga Suave para Aliviar el Estrés: Sábado 8:45 am hora de Wisconsin, 7:45 hora de El Salvador; 6:45 am en la costa oueste de los EEUU.Hatha yoga parado, sentado, y acostado en un tapete o colchoneta, para aliviar el estrés, fortalecer el sistema inmunológico, y aumentar el bienestar.
Gentle Yoga for Stress Release (in Spanish, early class):Saturdays 8:45 am in Wisconsin, 7:45 am in El Salvador; 6:45 am on the west coast of the US. Hatha yoga standing, sitting, and lying on a mat, to relieve stress, strengthen the immune system, and increase well-being.
If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. –Lilla Watson, Aboriginal elder, activist and educator from Queensland, Australia.
Even after decades of yearning and learning and working towards racial justice and reparations—really really imperfectly, pretty steadily—I still get inarticulate when I try to talk about these things. So I’ll just say that along with raw grief and fear over the latest deaths of so many Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people from police violence and Covid 19, I find unexpected hope in seeing how many people are contributing now, in so many different ways, to ending the violence and racial injustice embedded in our culture and its institutions. I stand with them, and with the people seeking ways to make this movement grow and become sustainable.
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I appreciate and feel so much gratitude for the long history of yoga in India: for the practitioners who carried it forward and developed it, and for the many diverse paths that they travelled with yoga over time, first in India and then out into other areas of the world. I love yoga practices for how they can support physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and for how they can strengthen a sense of self-determination, freedom, connection, and solidarity with the world around us.
So I want yoga to be accessible to anyone who wants to try it. For people of different backgrounds and histories and bodies of all kinds. Inexpensively or for free, whenever possible.
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More about the free online yoga classes
Some days quite a lot of people show up for these free classes, and other days one or two. Either way I like holding space for people to practice yoga together, and as long as people keep coming to these sessions, I will keep offering them.
You’re welcome to participate in any of my free community yoga classes for free, really. But if you’d like to take them and make a donation somewhere, here are some good places where you might do that:
All of the yoga classes I teach are informed by my training and certification in Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), emphasizing skills that can minimize the long-term neurological and whole-body impact of overwhelming experiences, helping to strengthen resilience, immunity, and general well-being.
If you wonder why I offer free online yoga classes in Spanish, it’s because in the past I’ve gone to El Salvador with the UW Madison El Salvador Mental Health Project, to offer Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY, an adjunct treatment for complex trauma) in Madison’s sister city of Arcatao, a site of civilian massacres during the civil war. Since the pandemic we haven’t been able to go back, so for the past year I’ve been offering these two online sessions for friends in El Salvador, and for others who want to join us as well. I also offer one free online session in English because I know what it’s like to not have money or resources, and I want yoga to be as accessible as possible for people.
Online yoga sessions, Summer 2021
For all of these online yoga sessions you’ll need to first download the free Zoom app here: https://zoom.us/pricing .
Mondays / Lunes
10:15 am Yoga Suave en sillas, Madison School Community Recreation (MSCR), 21 junio – 23 agosto, para personas con más de 50 años; una práctica relajante, sentada en sillas y parada usando sillas para apoyar el estiramiento. Para inscribirse:
7 pm MSCR Yin Yoga, Spring classes, 6/21/21 – 8/23/21 Slow, long-held stretches sitting and lying on the ground; good for flexibility and peacefulness. To register: https://mscr.org
Tuesdays / Martes
10:30 MSCR Gentle Yoga, Spring classes, 6/22/21 – 8/23/21 A gentle hatha yoga practice combining stretching, strengthening, balancing, and guided rest. This is a Goodman Rotary Class, for people over 50. To register: https://mscr.org
9 pm Yoga para el Sueño, hora de Wisconsin; 8 pm en El Salvador; 7 pm en la costa oueste de los EEUU. Una práctica muy suave para ayudarte a dormir bien en la noche; sesiones gratuitas abiertas a todxs, y sin necesidad de inscribirse.
Yoga for Sleeping (in Spanish) Tuesdays 9 pm in Wisconsin and 8 pm in El Salvador; 6 pm on the west coast of the US. A very gentle practice to help you sleep well at night; free drop-in sessions open to all, no need to register.
5:15 pm MSCR Outdoors (not online) LGBTQ+ Yoga, 6/23/21 – 8/25/21 An in-person class outdoors on the isthmus: this gentle hatha yoga practice for LGBTQ+ people combines stretching, strengthening, balancing, and guided rest. To register: https://mscr.org
7:30 pm Gentle Yoga (free): 7:30 pm in Wisconsin and 6:30 pm en El Salvador; 5:30 pm on the west coast of the US.Designed to support mental health and well-being, these sessions offer nothing extraneous–no poems, no singing, just a quiet practice of mindful movement, to help release stress, and to strengthen connections and integration in your nervous system.
Yoga Suave y Meditativa (en inglés, gratuita): Miércoles 7:30 pm en Wisconsin y 6:30 pm en El Salvador; 5:30 pm en la costa oueste de los EEUU. Una práctica suave para ayudar a aliviar estrés y trauma..
10 am MSCR Gentle Flow Yoga Spring classes, 6/24/21 – 8/26/21 A gentle flowing practice, creating rhythms of movement through standing, kneeling, sitting, and reclining yoga positions. This is a Goodman Rotary Class, for people over 50. To register: https://mscr.org
7:15 pm MSCR Yin Yoga, Spring classes, 6/24/21 – 8/26/21 Slow, long-held stretches sitting and lying on the ground; good for flexibility and peacefulness. To register: https://mscr.org
Saturdays / Sábado
Yoga Suave para Aliviar el Estrés (gratuita):Sábado 8:45 am hora de Wisconsin, 7:45 en El Salvador; 6:45 am en la costa oueste de los EEUU.Hatha yoga parado, sentado, y acostado en un tapete o colchoneta, para aliviar el estrés, fortalecer el sistema inmunológico, y aumentar el bienestar.
Gentle Yoga for Stress Release (in Spanish, free):Saturdays 8:45 am in Wisconsin, 7:45 in El Salvador; 6:45 am on the west coast of the US. Hatha yoga standing, sitting, and lying on a mat, to relieve stress, strengthen the immune system, and increase well-being.
10:15 MSCR Yin Yoga Spring classes, 6/26/21 – 8/28/21Slow, long-held stretches sitting and lying on the ground; good for flexibility and peacefulness. To register: https://mscr.org
For families with young children: This is a video recording of an online family concert that I did on March 18th 2020. The resolution & lighting aren’t great, but it’s some fun music for younger children, with some yoga mixed in….and kids who have been in family yoga classes with me might enjoy it.
The world is full of beauty, magic, miracles, and patterns that induce wonder… Emergence is one of the best concepts I have learned for discussing this wonder.Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships,listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.
The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive.And we are small.
But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change.Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embodythe just and liberated worlds we long for.
