Sundew is a tiny rural yoga studio where the practices honor yoga's South Asian roots as introduced through Carla Stangenberg of Jaya Yoga and the lineage of Sage Patanjali through Tirumalai Krishnamcharya and BKS Iyengar. Holly Zadra is a registered yoga teacher who operates the studio bumbling at times through her privilege as a cis, straight-passing descendent of Slavic-Bohemian-Irish immigrant settlers. Mom of four boys, writer, community activist, and partner in love, Holly facilitates classes while also always learning how yoga can help dismantle white supremacy and colonialism inside both ourselves and institutions. She is currently studying with South Asian, non-binary, trans, queer, and wheel-chair using yoga practitioners organized through the phenomenal Susanna Barkataki's Embody Yoga's Roots 300-hr YTT. Holly's yoga practice, her study of emergent strategy, and much of her formal education inform her current writing project that intersects labor, copper, and the inherited trauma of exploitation.

Sundew's community classes are held on Wabanaki land in the rural town of Pittsfield, ME.

Here's what guides us:

This ancient South Asian practice is deep, rich, complex, expansive, and lifelong.

We acknowledge, study, and practice yoga that arose from South Asian indigenous people seeking collective liberation. Our practice today derives from those black and brown folx living now, generous enough to teach and share their deeply rooted lineages.

Yoga asana can be poses, but it can also be the "seat of attention" and presence. We intentionally create space for breathwork, song, prayer, movement, silence, and meditation.

The practice is not always comfortable, especially when it includes confronting the oppressions in which we all swim. The practice can also create ease and space within oneself that facilitates navigation of the complicated now.
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Yoga practiced in community seeks to unite - self with self, self with others, self with purpose, self with higher power. We examine hierarchies, socio-cultural binaries, othering, and colonialism's continual harm in order to nurture connection and liberation for all.

It is perfectly good to practice at home alone; we also invite you to practice in community.

This heart-centered practice occurs in an honest space that welcomes all bodies, genders, races, religions as well as those who eschew such definitions.

We are all worthy. We are all whole. We are all enough. We are all practitioners.

As the brilliant Naomi King shared recently, "I promise to disappoint you. I promise to be disappointed by you." When that inevitably happens, let us call one another in so that we can return to right relationship. Let us understand in body, mind, and spirit what right relationship is.

None of us is free until we are all free.