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The Resilience Retreat, 15-17 May 2026

Published by Minna

A Weekend of Trauma-Informed Yoga in Nature Friday, 15th May, 5pm – Sunday, 17th May, 2pm Grempoli Retreat, 7 Via Uscioli, Pontassieve (FI) 50065, Italy Join us for a weekend of regeneration, with time in nature and trauma-informed yoga. Experience the benefits of a simple, gentle yoga practice on body, breath and mind. Asana (postures), pranayama (breathing practices) and yoga nidra (deep relaxation) will be combined with an understanding of nervous system regulation. Over the weekend, you will develop an understanding of how trauma affects your physiology and psychology, as well as how yogic practices can support your capacity to find balance and restore resilience. Who it is for: This workshop is open for everyone interested in learning how to use the body, breath and awareness to overcome and heal from stress and trauma. While no previous experience in yoga is needed, those who are yoga teachers will learn skills to adapt yogic tools and techniques to their sessions with trauma survivors. Topics covered: • Practising yoga to free the body, breath and emotions from

Community Really is a Super-Power

Published by Minna

We received this precious feedback from our recent refugee yoga retreat, held for the second time at Lockerbrook Farm in the Peak District National Park in the UK. A mix of cultures, ages and backgrounds came together with compassion and embraced the yoga practices that were shared. *** Dear friends, fellow yogis, kitchen warriors, As we wrap up this unforgettable retreat, I wanted to take a moment — from the bottom of my stretched hamstrings and still-tingling chakras — to say a big, hearty THANK YOU. A round of belly-breathing gratitude to our wonderful teachers: Yanar, Kerry, and Lynn, who guided us through flows, stillness, journaling, and something called sankalpa, which we’re still trying to pronounce correctly. You taught us that transformation can be gentle… To all of you who washed dishes, chopped veggies, and scrubbed pots — you embodied karma yoga with sudsy grace. You reminded us that yoga doesn’t end with shavasana. Sometimes, it ends with compost. And then, just when we thought the magic had peaked, came the final night: a fire

Creating Safe Spaces in Lebanon for Trauma Recovery

Published by Minna

“It has been a disastrous period, but we have managed to be there for our community, to help in the ways we can, as much as we can. The tools we learned from you served us well.” – Roula Darwish, Beirut Roula, one of the community yoga teachers Tools for Inner Peace trained in Lebanon, started an initiative for women and children who had been displaced to Beirut from the south. Here is how she went about creating a safe space at the Houna Yoga Center, which she manages: “At first we had no other volunteer teachers to give classes, so I started to offer some simple trauma yoga practices to displaced women. Yoga nidra helped them to get rid of their fears and worries, to be more relaxed, more open. Then we started working with kids. We started with a small group, and then the group grew bigger and sometimes we had 30 kids.” Rima, also trained by Tools for Inner Peace, has been sharing her love and beautiful energy with displaced children. She

Swami Pragyamurti Hope Project

Published by Minna

Tools for Inner Peace has launched the Swami Pragyamurti Hope project to bring yoga and healing to street youth in Freetown, Sierra Leone (West Africa). With this work we hope to keep alive Swami Pragyamurti’s legacy. We have a match fund campaign running from 3rd to 10th December 2024, and would love your help. The Project The intention of this project is to: The Swami Pragyamurti Hope Project will use the manual she developed for teaching in prisons – theYoga Manual for Prisoners and Other Castaways – as a basis. We will train a group of 8-10 yoga teachers in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to share the practices and sequences from her manual. These yoga teachers will then teach her sequences in prisons and to hundreds of homeless street youth – including drug addicts, gang members and prostitutes – in the slums and ghettos of Freetown. On the Ground The aim of our yoga outreach work is to help generate new healthy habits and improve mental and physical health in prisons and marginalised communities. Many of

Changemaker of the Week

Published by Minna

We are excited to announce the we have been awarded $1000 by the Pollination Project and featured as their Changemaker of the Week. The Pollination Project feature story, authored by Liza Di Georgina, is titled Embracing Peace from Within in Sierra Leone. “Peace is not something you have outside but it’s what you have to have inside to be able to change things in the world, even if it’s very small; when you work on yourself and you create peace in yourself then you can start radiating that out,” Minna Jarvenpaa, founder of Tools for Inner Peace Read more: https://thepollinationproject.org/embracing-peace-from-within-in-sierra-leone/

Yoga as Medicine

Published by Minna

“Over the course of the year, many traumas have surfaced, providing me with the opportunity to observe and process them. This has led me to feel much calmer and more serene. I am grateful for this newfound inner space, which allows me to engage in even deeper introspection, dream bigger and take action towards my aspirations.” – Feedback from participant, Community Yoga Teacher Training, Lebanon Most of our trainees have experienced traumatic events in their lives. Many have been traumatised by their experiences of civil war and violence, the August 2020 Beirut blast, as well as more common causes of trauma that relate to childhood abuse and neglect, natural disasters and accidents, and sexual and medical trauma. This shapes their experience of even the simplest yoga practices. Trauma gets stored in the body as tensions and tightness. Easing the tension can result in being flooded by memories and re-experiencing traumatic events. One student gets triggered every time she plugs her ears and listens to the vibrations of the humming sound in Bhramari pranayama, so we

Suddenly There is Something More

Published by Minna

Shukriya, originally from Aleppo, has lived in refugee settlements in Bekaa valley, Lebanon, for the last six years. Tools for Inner Peace have been training her as a community yoga teacher for three years since 2020. She smiles when she talks about her experience, “Yoga relaxes me and brings me pleasure. The classes are really beautiful.” “I’ve been doing yoga for four years now, and so much has changed since the first class. After the third class I started experiencing big improvements. I felt changes in my breath and in my overall energy. Whatever stiffness I would feel, I would just go to the class and it would be gone. If I felt anxiety, it would just go during the class. “It became like an addiction. I had so much good energy. Every time I would come for a class, I would feel optimistic afterwards. I would feel fresh, as if reborn. It’s like every time you enter a class you’re entering a different world. You detach from the world, to a world where there

“Sow seeds of love wherever you go”

Published by Minna

– Quote by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati These are some personal reflections by Mantramala (Minna Jarvenpaa) on the Yoga Pura Vida teacher training that Tools for Inner Peace supported in Sierra Leone: The week before our departure from Sierra Leone was full of emotion: grief, joy, memory of old hurts, love. Over the course of the first eleven days of the training, participants had been finding their way into all the aspects of yoga, opening up, releasing tension, going deeper. Old memories were starting to come up, both tender and sad. On Day 12, we started teaching Yoga for Children and discovered that many of the participants had been orphans, street children or refugees from the civil war; some had survived sexual abuse or abandonment. Others had been pulled out of school and made to work in the streets by relatives. Several had never had the safety or care to really be children. All carried within them the inter-generational trauma of slavery on which Sierra Leone was built. Now we were asking these same people –

What the Research Says: a study of our Yoga for Peace project

Published by Minna

Mind, body and community: The potential for yoga as mental health and psychosocial support in emergency contexts Jessica Stone Lebanon is home to approximately 1.5 million refugees, numbering roughly a quarter of the entire population—the highest proportion in the world. Many Syrian refugees in Lebanon have witnessed or experienced physical, psychological or sexual violence, and continue to experience food insecurity, discrimination and social isolation. Reports of traumatic flashbacks, uncontrollable emotions, hopelessness, despair, and unusual physical and mental exhaustion are also common, as are high rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (1). Women in particular are increasingly exposed to sexual assault, interpersonal violence and survival sex work in the settlements (2), yet there are few mental health services available for Syrians in Lebanon (3), and even fewer that cater to women’s needs. To address these challenges, the organisation Tools for Inner Peace has been implementing a yoga program for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in informal tented settlements and community centres in the Beqaa Valley region since 2017. This program supports women to

Yoga with Impact podcast

Published by Minna

In a podcast with Danielle Begg, founder of The Yoga Impact Charity, Mantramala (Minna Jarvenpaa) tells a bit of her own story and how Tools for Inner Peace was born. They also talk about how yoga touches people from diverse backgrounds, how Tools for Inner Peace navigates cultural and religious boundaries, and share ideas about making change in the world. Click here to listen to the podcast. Yoga With Impact is a podcast interviewing experts sharing yoga and healing practices in diverse communities.