Unity Yoga

If you’ve been feeling the pull to come back to the studio, come.

If you’ve been craving practice, ritual, refuge, or simply a place to put down what you’ve been carrying — there is room for you here.

This Full Moon opens Pitri Paksha — a sacred time of remembering and honoring our ancestors, tending what has been carried forward, and making space for what is ready to be returned.

There are times when the veil feels thinner.

When memory moves closer.
When the people who came before us feel less like the past and more like something living quietly beside us.

We do not come to practice to transcend our humanity.

We come to meet it.

The grief.
The love.
The patterns we inherited before we had language for them.
The lives that made our lives possible.
The things we carry because they are ours — and the things we may finally be ready to put down.

You do not need to know what you believe.
You do not need to have the right words.
You do not need to arrive healed, clear, or certain.

Just come as you are.

Bring your body.
Bring your breath.
Bring your people — living and dead.
Bring the questions that do not have answers yet.

For the next two weeks, we will be holding this season gently in the field of the studio: remembering, listening, grieving, honoring, releasing.

Some things are not meant to be solved.

Some things are meant to be witnessed.

Some things are meant to be laid down with reverence.

And some things are simply asking us to remember that we did not arrive here alone.

If something in you recognizes this, come.

We’ll meet you here.

There are seasons in a space, just as there are seasons in a life.

Coming out of the fall equinox, there is a noticeable shift in the studio. The light changes. The days begin to fold inward. We move toward the full moon and, soon, into the fortnight of the ancestors—a time that asks us to remember what came before us, what we carry forward, and what we are ready to lay down.

This photo is from another season of Unity. Different hair. Different moment. So much still unknown.

And somehow, here we are.

Our 300-hour teacher training has begun. A new group is learning to look beneath the shapes of the practice and into the deeper work of attention, relationship, nervous system, ethics, and presence.

Applications for our next 200-hour training are open, and another group will soon begin at the beginning.

Foundations is about to start.

Classes continue. People walk through the door. Mats roll out. Someone practices for the first time. Someone returns to something they have practiced a thousand times and discovers that it has changed because they have changed.

This is the part of running a studio I love most.

A studio is never finished.

It is a living thing made from everyone who has practiced here, taught here, cried here, laughed here, rested here, learned here, left here, and found their way back.

We keep tending it.

We honor what came before.

We pay attention to where we are.

And then, slowly, we make room for whatever is becoming next.

The fall equinox has always felt like one of my favorite thresholds in the studio.

A moment of balance between day and night, light and dark—and then, slowly, the beginning of the descent.

There is so much arriving in the months ahead. The Fortnight of the Ancestors. Goddess season. The goddess pujas. The rituals and gatherings that return every year and somehow meet us differently each time.

Maybe you can already feel the ancestors drawing near.

Maybe you’ve noticed the sun setting somewhere different through your window. The mornings arriving differently. The quality of the light changing. The air beginning to shift.

There is something about this season that asks us to notice.

I was in class today with Yoli, our beloved studio mentor and my spiritual guide, talking about the spaces in between—the places where we are no longer where we were, but we haven’t yet arrived at whatever comes next.

And I realized I had woken up this morning already there.

Not needing an answer.
Not needing to move anything forward.
Just needing a pause long enough to let something settle.

Our world gives us very few invitations to do that.

Everything moves quickly. We are encouraged to decide, respond, produce, understand, keep going.

But nature doesn’t move that way.

There are thresholds.
There are descents.
There are pauses.
There are spaces in between.

Maybe that is part of what we come to practice together.

The studio is not always a place to become something.

Sometimes it is simply a place to pause.

A place to process.

A place to breathe.

A place to notice what is changing around us—and what is quietly changing within us.

Welcome to the descent. 🍂

There is something fascinating happening in this round of our 300-hour.

There are a lot of super feelers in the room.

People who notice things. People who feel the shift before anyone has named the shift. People who pick up on what is happening in a room, in a relationship, in their own bodies. People with strong intuition who are learning the difference between intuition, activation, projection, knowing, fear, and all the other things that can speak through the same channel.

And it is fascinating to watch.

It is also fascinating to watch people bump up against themselves.

Because that is part of adult learning that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Nobody is making you do this.

There is no grade. No parent checking your homework. No professor threatening to fail you. You can technically move through adulthood without ever deliberately putting yourself in a room where you are asked to examine what you believe, how you respond, what you avoid, what you know, what you don’t know, and what happens when something challenges the story you have about yourself.

And yet, people keep choosing to come into these rooms.

They choose practice. They choose study. They choose discomfort. They choose curiosity. They choose to stay when they bump into an edge.

I get to watch this in our trainings, in our teachers, and throughout the studio all the time — these incredibly perceptive, sensitive humans learning how to trust what they feel without being ruled by everything they feel.

Maybe that is part of the practice too.

Not becoming less sensitive.

Becoming more discerning.

Learning what belongs to you. Learning what doesn’t. Learning when to listen. Learning when to wait. Learning when the thing you are bumping up against might actually be the doorway.

I feel very lucky that this is part of what I get to witness here.

There are some traditions we return to because they ask us to slow down, remember, and make space for what is no longer physically here.

Our Silent Supper has become one of our most beloved rituals at Unity, and this year marks our fifth year gathering around the table.

On this particular night, we come together in silence to honor those we have lost, the ancestors who came before us, and the people whose lives continue to move through our own. We share food. We remember. We listen. We leave room at the table for absence.

There is something powerful about doing this together—not trying to fix grief or make meaning of it, but simply giving remembrance a place to live for an evening.

This year’s Silent Supper will be held by Danny and Marshall.

Saturday, October 31
8–10 PM
Unity Manayunk

The supper is free and potluck-style. We ask everyone attending to bring a dish to share; assignments and additional ritual details will be sent before the gathering.

Come as you are. Bring your memories.

We’ll set the table together.

There are so many beautiful spaces to practice in this city, each offering something of its own.

When Brittany and I reflect on what we do well at Unity—and what we want to keep cultivating—we keep coming back to something incredibly simple:

The breath.

There is something magical that happens when a room full of people begins to breathe together.

You can hear it.

The inhale of the person beside you.
The long exhale from somewhere across the room.
Then another. And another.

Until individual breaths begin to create something almost symphonic.

And somewhere inside that rhythm, the room changes.

We change.

Breath gives the nervous system another piece of information: you are here. You can soften. You do not have to remain braced for what comes next.

And when we practice together, we aren’t regulating in isolation. We are surrounded by other breathing bodies—creating opportunities for co-regulation, connection, and a gradual shift away from fight-or-flight toward rest, restoration, and greater nervous system flexibility.

This is something we want to keep bringing more deeply into the way we practice at Unity.

Not louder.
Not faster.
Not more complicated.

Sometimes the most profound thing happening in the room is simply the sound of everyone breathing together.

Arielle + Brittany are back at it again tomorrow. 🤍

When we first started dreaming about a 300-hour training, we kept coming back to one question: What would actually be useful?

Not just more information or another 300 hours to collect. We wanted to create the kind of space we would want to learn in now—one that explores what happens underneath the teaching.

How do we read and hold a room? How do we work with nervous systems, rest, repair, intuition, creativity, and ritual? How do we create something like Unwind—not by copying it, but by understanding what makes it work and learning to create something that is truly your own?

And then Brittany had one of my favorite ideas: What if you didn’t need a 200-hour to come?

Because this isn’t only about becoming a better yoga teacher. It’s about becoming a better space holder—and that work belongs to teachers, therapists, clinicians, healers, facilitators, and curious humans alike.

Tomorrow, we welcome five incredible humans into this nine-month journey with us.

We’ve dreamed about this one for a long time.

Welcome to the 300. Let’s see what we create together. 🤍

There is a moment when being a student begins to open into something else.

Not because you know enough.

Because you’re curious.

Our 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training is designed for curious humans ready to take their first steps into the seat of the teacher.

You’ll learn how to teach Level 1 + Level 2 vinyasa classes, with lots of time spent practice teaching, developing your own home practice, and beginning to find your voice.

Around that foundation, we open doors — into philosophy, subtle body, anatomy, meditation, breath, ethics, and the deeper landscape of yoga.

Think of the 200-hour as a menu: a chance to taste, explore, and discover what you might want to study more deeply for years to come.

You don’t need to know anything before you arrive.

That’s what the training is for.

Led by Sammy + Anne, who completed both their 200 + 300-hour trainings at Unity and are now stepping into the seat of teacher trainers themselves.

Curiosity is enough to begin.

Applications are open. Learn more through the link in bio. 🤍

Seven years of Unity.

Seven years ago, we opened the doors without knowing exactly what this place would become.

And maybe that’s the most beautiful part.

Because Unity has never really been something we built and then finished. It has grown through the people who have moved through it. Teachers and students. Friends and strangers who became friends. People who came for yoga and found something else entirely.

Over seven years, classes became trainings. Trainings became friendships. Friendships became collaborations. New ideas took root. People left and returned. The studio changed. We changed.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of Unity simply as a community and started thinking of it as an ecosystem — a living network of relationships, practices, teachers, students, ideas, and care.

And ecosystems are never static.

They grow.
They shed.
They adapt.
They surprise us.

Seven years later, Unity looks very different than I imagined it would when we began.

Thank God.

There is so much more life here now.

Thank you to every person who has practiced here, taught here, learned here, cried here, laughed here, taken a training, come on retreat, brought a friend, taken a chance on something weird, or simply walked through the doors and added yourself to this little ecology.

You helped make this place what it is.

Happy 7th birthday, Unity.

Here’s to whatever wants to grow next. 🌱