Joy as Creativity

This 3-hour workshop invites us to pause and reflect on systemic and internalized oppression — both how they impact us and how we may be complicit within our sphere of influence. Through embodiment and joy, we’ll explore antidotes to oppression and paths to collective liberation.

This workshop aims to ground every being ready to bring liberatory practice and community building into their professional and personal realms and into embodied and conscious practices. The series will give participants the tools to engage in sustainable contemplative and radical work and offer an immersive learning experience taught via didactic, somatic, group, and individual activities. It will be transformative.

Frameworks Highlighted

• Neuroscience
• Stress Studies
• Mindfulness
• Spirituality
• Black Psychology
• Psychology of Liberation
• Anti-oppressive and Anti-Racist Praxis
• Collectivist and Afro-Centric
• Frameworks and Practices
• Intersectionality
• Activism
• Liberation and Consciousness
• Imagination and Futurism

• Participants will begin with self-attunement and regulation practices . They will articulate their feelings and emotions in session through embodied and somatic activities.  
• Participants will be introduced to principles of critical consciousness, collectivist  frameworks, and social activism as tools for radical (political and personal) healing for helpers and those being helped. 
• Participants will articulate a minimum of three ways collective joy is a path to liberation.

• Through individual and group work, participants will be able to articulate the connection between oppression, unimaginable future, and radical hope. 
• Participants will practice feeling and articulating the experience of imagination in their bodies.
• Participants will practice the experience of imagining collectively and will reflect and write their dream for themselves and the world.

Approved by Yoga Alliance

This program offers three continuing education hours (12 hours if all four workshops are completed).

This workshop offers 3 continuing education hours through co-sponsorship with the University of Pittsburgh's School of Social Work. These credit hours satisfy requirements for LSW/LCSW, LMFT, and LPC biennial license renewal. For information on social work continuing education please visit .

This workshop offers 3 continuing education hours through the National Association of Social Workers Pennsylvania Chapter.

This interactive 4-part workshop series stems from Felicia Savage Friedman’s 30 years of practicing, leading, and organizing anti-oppression Raja Yoga. In this historical and present-day analysis, we unpack systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.

You’re invited to join us for the or individual workshops.

March 6, 2025

Joy as Reconnection: Understanding Oppression and Dehumanization

March 20, 2025

Joy as Resistance: Antidotes to Oppression

April 3, 2025

Joy as Creativity: Imagining the World We Want

April 17, 2025

Joy as Spirituality: Our Divine Humanity

Host or Publisher Felicia Savage Friedman