more liberated moves
The outpouring of support for our Liberated Moves series has been incredible. We have received enough donations to extend the series and platform more Black movement teachers!
We are excited to platform teachers from Hamilton and Toronto, ON Canada. Clairandean, Jasmine and Simone are graduates of GBFTT and we are so proud to amplify their voices. Jamilah, Rochelle and Faith are teachers with the our friends New Leaf Foundation, who do such beautiful work, honouring the sacred bridge between wellness, empowerment and community.
These classes are free and exclusive for BIPOC. We believe in exclusive spaces for marginalized folks in order to create safer spaces where healing, connection and liberation can begin.
See below for dates, registration links, teacher bios and class descriptions.
To non-BIPOC wanting to support, you are welcome to donate to teacher fees by sending an email transfer to hello@goodbodyfeel.com with “Liberated Moves” in the message. OR you can purchase a $20 donation here.
Sundays 9:30am EST
Click on the dates below to register.
Click on the handles to view each teacher’s instagram account.
July 12 // Simone Aziga (@simoneaziga)
July 19 // Jamilah Malika Abu-Bakare (@jamilahmalika)
July 26 // Jasmine Smikle (@senimsaj)
August 2 // Clairandean Humphrey (@clairitytarot)
August 9 // Rochelle Miller (@microrevolutions)
August 16 // Stylo Starr (@mouthfullofstars)
August 23 // Faith Jones (@fitnesswithfaith)
August 30 // Gabrielle Marquez (@gfwildheart)
Simone Aziga
Simone is an emerging movement teacher based in the Hamilton and Toronto area. Born and raised in Hamilton, Simone has familial roots extending back to the island of Jamaica.
Having studied ballet from her childhood to late teens, Simone has always felt her most fulfilled through movement. More recently, she is informed by the GOODBODYFEEL Teacher Training program.
Using a careful balance between high intensity and grace, Simone’s approach to movement encourages you to test the limits of your inner strength. Her hope is that those who join her classes feel empowered, confident and seen in their own bodies.
Class Description
This class will be a prop-less, full-body practice. As we move through familiar and new shapes, all your major muscle groups will get some love. Expect a dynamic blend of Pilates and yoga with some dance-like sequences sprinkled in from the outset and throughout. Our playlist will feature some soulful Sunday morning classics.
Move with Simone on July 12
Follow Simone on Instagram
jamilah malika abu-bakar
jamilah malika abu-bakare is a Teacher Trainer, Senior Teacher and Mentorship Lead at New Leaf Foundation, teaching faculty for Kathryn Bruni’s Mindful Strength Teacher Immersion and Brown Girls Yoga collective member since 2011. her grace and skill relating anti-oppression as a practice akin to our mindful movement practice is rooted in her work as co-visionary of the (now defunct) Positive Space Initiatives at Kula Annex dating back to 2010. in addition to teaching trauma-informed, mindfulness-based yoga, she is an artist and a writer (SAIC MFA ‘19.)
Class Description
jamilah malika most loves to me teach her personal practice, which she calls lowslowflow. this practice focuses almost wholly on postures from our backs and bellies, as well as seated and kneeling. with movement sync’d to breath, this slow and steady flow grows a gentle yet precise attention through curiosity and calm.
Move with jamilah on July 19
Follow jamilah on Instagram
Jasmine Smikle
Jasmine is a yoga, pilates, and barre teacher based in Toronto, ON. Her love of movement started at a young age when she began dancing ballet. In her teens she began practicing yoga asana and functional mobility to help heal recurring injuries and connect intentional movement to breath.
Her trainings include GoodBodyFeel’s inaugural 200hr TT, a 50hr Barre TT with Morgan Cowie of Mosaic Yoga; a 50hr Restorative TT with Kim McBean; Reaching In, Reaching Out with New Leaf Foundation; and various intensives.
Jasmine believes that rest is radical, that movement is a great tool for healing, and that our bodies, especially the bodies of marginalized folx, are to be held with the utmost care.
Class Description
Expect a focus on core and glutes, tools to lengthen the spine, mobility through functional yoga shapes, and a juicy rest to close out our practice. Some movements will be connected to rhythm, but the encouragement is to find the natural rhythm of your own body and breath, and to follow that.
Various options will be provided throughout the class.
The goal is that after our time together, you simultaneously feel grounded and light, and that you can engage with the world with a clear head, and a little more resilience.
Move with Jasmine on July 26
Follow Jasmine on Instagram
CLAIRandean
Queer Non-binary | She/They
Movement Instructor/ Tarot reader/ Artist
Clairandean is a multi-disciplinary artist, movement instructor and Tarot reader at GoodBodyFeel studio.
They provide mindfulness practices and a hybrid of Pilates and decolonized yoga to facilitate mind-body- spirit connection. Their practice explores intersectionality, accessibility and self-compassion.
Clairandean has released a lo-fi EP earlier this year entitled: Moving in the Dark. The EP expresses grief and longing and can be found on various platforms.
Class Description
Pilates is used to target and fire on the body and/or group muscles Yoga-ish poses are use to flow and release tension, tightness. Improvisation is also encouraged within poses, to help facilitate personal agency with the body.
Mantra/affirmation + Gentle opening
Core activation
Small Fire
Flow, release
Accessiblity
Move with Clairandean on August 2
Follow Clairandean on Instagram
Rochelle Miller
Rochelle Miller is a Multi-Disciplinary Movement Coach and Facilitator. In her teens, she trained in a variety of different sports before starting the practice of Mindfulness & Yoga Asana in her early 20s. This has lead to a curiosity, a self-inquiry, self-study, and a lifelong exploration of what it means to be healthy, happy and thriving.
She began teaching Yoga Asana in 2014 and has focussed her work on creating spaces for embodied movement in groups that have experienced trauma and/or mental illness. She is a Senior Teacher and Mentor at New Leaf Foundation (an organization that offers trauma-informed practices to youth), As a leader within the community, she facilitates movement and mindfulness-based workshops with some of its most vulnerable populations in the Toronto Area.
Through this experience, she is inspired to make movement accessible for everybody, she continues to learn different movement modalities and tools that support individuals to experience joy through movement. She invites you to show up as you are, to be curious and to have fun; to keep practicing and know that perfection is a myth, that through practice and time we build proficiency, confidence, and strength in our abilities, in ourselves.
Move with Rochelle on August 9
Follow Rochelle on Instagram
Stylo Starr
Stylo Starr is a visual alchemist and new movement facilitator based in Hamilton, Ontario. As a visual artist, Stylo finds voice and movement in both digital and hand-cut collage as primary mediums, and leads various workshops for all ages and levels of creative practice.
Stylo completed the Goodbodyfeel Movement Teacher Training in early 2019 and found a passionate intersection between ‘making’ and ‘moving’. Teaching out of the GBF Studio, Stylo leads classes focused on grounding, breathing, mindful awareness of the body and radical rest while experimenting with sound bath meditations.
Class Description
A grounded movement and meditation journey exploring breath, sound, self holding and stillness. This practice invites you to take hold of what gives you comfort and peace, and to surround yourself with these things as you move. Blankets and cushions encouraged!
Move with Stylo on August 16
Follow Stylo on Instagram
Faith Jones
Holistic Health and Wellness Personal Trainer/ Yoga Instructor/ Thai Massage Practitioner
Faith believes in wellness for everybody. With over 15 years of experience in wellness spaces she has extensive training in movement and massage, and comprehensive knowledge of trauma-informed & anti-oppressive frameworks. All of her services are rooted in accessibility & inclusion. Providing a holistic and interconnected approach she is fuelled by her curiosity to learn more about how the body functions and how we can move and train in a way to prevent injuries and live a life of functionality. Her goal is to provide safer spaces of self-inquiry, self-care and encouraging everyone to find their path to healing. She has worked with athletes as young as 3 years old, clients in their 90's, weekend warriors, clients healing from injuries, and everything in between. Faith offers private, group training, workshops & retreat services.
Class Description
Experience a class of movement, mobility and self-massage. Faith’s class will start with fun and playful functional movement followed by a relaxing restorative yoga practice incorporating self-massage and meditation. Explore different ways in which your body can move, while giving space for rest and relaxation.
Move with Faith on August 23
Follow Faith on Instagram and Facebook
www.fitnesswithfaith.ca
Gabrielle Marquez
Hi, I’m Gabrielle.
From here and looking back, my work within the movement and mindfulness realm came from a desire to merge the needs of my community with my education in manual therapy, movement and mindfulness arts and embodied resilience.
In my youth my body carried a myriad of unsustainable movement patterns and athletic injuries due to mismanaged visible and non-visible traumas. On a biopsychosocial level we develop patterns of protection that separate us from the world we exist in. We rely on learned behavioural patterns to heal us when we do not have access to support systems that encourage us to regulate and pivot from our cultural conditioning and into an embodied and resilient self.
Over the past decade, I have had the unique experience of learning from Buddhist Dharma teachers, doctors and practitioners in human physiology, trauma resilience and rehabilitation sciences that have inspired the fostering of Subtle Shifts, a practice rooted in community, inquiry, accessibility and non-duality.
" We need each other. We belong to one another. We are made up of each other.There's no way out of that.” = Michael Stone
Class Description
Subtle Shifts is a self-paced Movement Therapeutics and Mindfulness Arts practice.
Designed to synthesize the interdependence between our kinetic and somatic body.
Subtle Shifts offers tools for joint mobility, embodied resilience, mindfulness meditation, movement coordinations and community.
“Sister, when you get, give. When you learn, teach. These are lessons to live by.” - Dr. Maya Angelou
