Clare Norelle

Clare Norelle is a bilingual community yoga teacher, songwriter, and storyteller in Madison Wisconsin.  She engages children and adults with warmth and humor, supporting a sense of connection with their own bodies, with people close to home and far away, and with animals, plants, and nature.

Clare offers a variety of yoga classes in English and Spanish, including yin yoga, gentle hatha, flow yoga, chair yoga, yoga & dance games for kids and families, and Yoga, Music, and Movement sessions for young children.  

Through Greenroot Yoga LLC she offers 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.  

Clare also offers performances for adults and for children, with songs in various languages and storytelling from around the earth.  She has several albums of music available, some for kids and families, and others for adults.

“Clare Norelle is a skilled, sensitive instructor of yoga.  She is acutely aware of the physical needs and limitations of her students, and her warmth, good humor and positive outlook help make her classes both relaxing and enlivening.”

–John

“Clare Norelle is an extraordinary storyteller and musician! Her performance was a great way to end our winter reading challenge.  There was a wonderful variety of stories, songs, and audience participation. Clare’s bright smile and energy captivated all ages.  We will look forward to having her at our library again in the future!  …Clare Norelle’s bilingual songs and stories more than met my expectations and the community’s.”

–Amanda Brueckner, Youth Services Librarian, Waterloo, WI

 

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

 

February 2019

Hello, and thank you for visiting this website!  Please scroll down for a schedule of winter classes.

In spring 2018 I finished a new album of music, Islands of Possible Things.  Some great musicians played on it with me, and I’m pleased with it.  I just finished putting it onto the Bandcamp website, where you can listen to the music and also get downloads if you like: https://bandcamp.com/search?q=clare%20norelle

In the fall I was interviewed about the album, and about songwriting, yoga for trauma, and life… by Mark Judkins Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio–if you’d like to hear that interview, you can go here: https://northernspiritradio.org/episode/song-water

Meanwhile during summer and fall 2018 I began facilitating individual sessions of Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), through the Dane County Comprehensive Community Services program for people on Medicaid.  I love the clients I work with through this program, and love seeing them benefit from this practice.

In October 2018 I was invited to be part of an ongoing mental health project in El Salvador, with Madison’s Sister City of Arcatao.  I was able to spend a short week there in January 2019 with a really wonderful group of people from around the US and El Salvador.  We talked with people in the community about their desire to have storytelling and therapeutic movement workshops to support recovery from the long-standing trauma that many still experience from the brutal violence of the US funded civil war of the 80s and 90s.   I was able to collaborate with Salvadoran psychologist Rosy Manzano to offer four workshops together on trauma and movement while we were in Arcatao.  It was intense and challenging work, but beautiful too.   A lot of people in the community attended both the storytelling and the movement workshops, and many talked with us afterwards about the ongoing project and how they’d like us to continue collaborating with them in the future.

The mental health project group will return to Arcatao later this year to continue our work with the community, but in the meantime I agreed to pull together some online resources for people there.  Most everyone I met in Arcatao had a smart phone and access to youtube, and some asked me to share things with them that way… So I’ve been preparing and soon will record in Spanish the series of short presentations that I do on different aspects of complex trauma and healing, to put on youtube; I’ll also post a couple of video practices of gentle Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) in Spanish as well.

Creating the online trauma healing resources in Spanish for people in Arcatao has made me want to do the same in English, for the people I work with here and for others who might also find them helpful.  So in these past weeks of deep snow and intense cold in Wisconsin, when many of my classes have had to be cancelled, I’ve been working on those, too.  I hope to have all of these resources, in Spanish and in English, available on youtube sometime in March.

For now you can access these English language presentations on complex trauma and body centered healing either in written pdf form, or in short narrated slideshows on youtube :

Complex Trauma and Body Centered Healing

Part 1 What is trauma? / Trauma in the nervous system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuAzNPPovX4&t=14s

Complex Trauma and Body Centered Healing Part 1 pdf

 

Part 2 Neuroplasticity, and trauma in the brain

Complex Trauma and Body Centered Healing Part 5, pdf

 

 

And finally, here is a schedule with some of my upcoming classes, presentations, and performances in and around Madison.  

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions–I’d love to hear from you.

Wishing you peace,

Clare

 

Winter / Spring 2019

Community Yoga Classes and Sessions 

 

Mondays

4/1/19 – 4/29/19

5:15 – 6:15 pm Trauma-Sensitive Yoga, 5 week series for people in recovery from trauma, at Shambhala Meditation Center of Madison.  $100 or sliding scale for five sessions, and audio and visual support materials.

Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) invites you to move your body at your own speed and on your own terms, using gentle yoga forms. It’s a chance to spend time being with yourself without an agenda: noticing the present moment; making choices for how to be in, and with, your own body; gently reconnecting with the many parts of your self as you feel ready to. There are no physical adjustments in TCTSY, and no pressure: you are welcome to come as you are.

Registration and payment are through the Shambhala Center website, at https://madison.shambhala.org/program-details/?id=388203 

 

4/1/19 – 5/13/19

7 pm Yin Yoga, MSCR East on Cottage Grove Rd.: http://www.mscr.org

 

2/25/19 – 5/6/19  

10:15 am.  Yoga Suave con Sillas para 50+, MSCR Goodman Rotary  Una práctica de yoga muy suave para personas con más de 50 años. Para aprender más o inscribirse: http://www.mscr.org/winter-spring-program-guide-book-spanish

 

Tuesdays

1/15/19 – 5/21/19

10:30 am  Gentle Yoga 50+ Goodman Rotary MSCR Covenant: http://www.mscr.org

1:15 pm   Gentle Yoga 50+ Goodman Rotary MSCR Odana: http://www.mscr.org

 

Wednesdays

Mornings & afternoons: TCTSY individual sessions by arrangement

 

Thursdays 

1/17/19 – 5/23/19

10 am  Flow Yoga 50+, Goodman Rotary MSCR Odana: http://www.mscr.org

Afternoons: TCTSY individual sessions, by arrangement

1/17/19 – 3/14/19    and   4/4/19 – 5/16/19

6:15 pm Family Yoga and Dance, MSCR Hoyt: http://www.mscr.org

7:15 pm, 9/13 – 11/08: Yin Yoga,  MSCR Hoyt: http://www.mscr.org

 

Fridays 

Mornings: Yoga, Music, and Movement Sessions for young children, UW Preschool Lab and elsewhere

Afternoons: TCTSY individual sessions, by arrangement

 

Saturdays

1/19/19 – 3/16/19    and    4/6/19 – 5/18/19 

10:15 am, 9/15 – 11/10: Yin Yoga, MSCR Odana: http://www.mscr.org

11:30 am, 9/15 – 11/10: Family Yoga and Dance, MSCR Odana: http://www.mscr.org

 

 

Saturday and Sunday, 5/18/19 – 5/20/19

Songs, stories, and yoga at Camp HOPE, a free weekend camp for bereaved families near Rosholt WI:  https://www.camphopeforkids.org

 

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 embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy