a winter offering
january 5th - march 9th
the
descent
The Descent is a two month program that offers weekly, in person and virtual group experiences, to fully support a fruitful descent into the medicine of winter here in Portland, Oregon.
This healing series is for women desiring to enrich their winter experience, refine rituals, and be immersed in modalities that support deep restoration and self-study this season. Emerge from winter refreshed, connected and ready to greet the fullness of spring.
We’ll dive into the healing modalities of Breathwork, Meditation, Yoga Nidra, Yin Yoga and a Restorative Sound Bath + Sauna Experience - while touching upon the themes of stillness, the unseen, dormancy, “the womb” and the season of death.
Let community and connection be the foundation of your winter this year.
Be warmed by communal gatherings and ceremony, as we explore the life-giving nature of darkness, and nurture the innermost layers of our being this winter.
A group container to fan the ember of your heart's aspiration, deepen devotional practices, and refine your rituals.
Reclaim winter as a season for gathering inner resources, descending inward, and honoring the sacred pause that this season offers.
What's included ?
IN PERSON
4 Group Breathwork ceremonies
1 community yoga nidra
1 restorative Harp sound bath
1 yin yoga class
1 sauna event
VIRTUAL
9 live meditations (recordings available)
9 weekly newsletters
THE DESCENT
SCHEDULE
Our sessions will be held in two different places: All Heart Yoga, a beautiful yoga studio in NW Portland and at a cozy Yurt with a fireplace, tucked into the trees in Vancouver, WA.
In person classes will be on Sundays at 1:30 pm.
Weekly Virtual Meditations will be held every Monday Morning. (time tbd when our lovely group forms)
Jan 5th - Opening Breathwork Ceremony (Vancouver)
Jan 12 - Yin Yoga Class (All Heart)
Jan 26 - Breathwork Ceremony (Vancouver)
Feb 2 - Sound Bath (All Heart)
February 16 - Breathwork Ceremony (Vancouver)
February 23 - Yoga Nidra (All Heart) This one starts at 2:30 pm.
March 9th - Closing Breathwork Ceremony (Vancouver)
We will be renting out Connect Wellness for a community sauna event as well. Date TBA.
Transformative Breathwork
with Natasha Stewart
Natasha is a Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator, a Somatic Coach and Breathwork Facilitator. Her academic foundation is in Public Health, receiving a Bachelors of Science with a focus in Health Promotion and Health Behavior at Oregon State University. She studied under Gabor Mate’s program Compassionate Inquiry and is currently continuing her education with Somatic Experiencing by Peter Levine.
Natasha is passionate about fostering nurturing and transformational spaces, for both individuals and groups, to tap into their innate healing capacity and unearth material blocking their most authentic expression and connection to life. She is trauma-informed, and provides a compassionate, judgement-free and gentle presence for clients to dive into the full spectrum of their human-ness and comfortably journey into the body and beyond this material world. She specializes in guiding clients into altered states of consciousness, facilitating over thousands of transformational Breathwork sessions, a specific type of breathwork that provides deep experiences of altered states and connects you with your Inner Healer.
A PATH TO EMBODIMENT & CONNECTION
Transformational breathwork uses a circular conscious connected breath as a bottom up approach to healing, helping you move beyond your thinking mind and into the waters of the body, encouraging emotional processing and often a deeper understanding of our true wants, needs and desires.
This technique is supportive for releasing heaviness and stress, aids in regulating the nervous system and often tapping into altered states of consciousness.
Breathwork helps access parts of the subconscious that are usually hidden or suppressed, gifting the opportunity for newfound clarity and a fresh perspective on life.
Breathwork can be both a life-changing experience and a dependable tool for personal growth, inspiring creativity and life direction, and improving mental, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.
kind words from clients
"Throughout our breathwork sessions, Natasha allows for spaciousness to dive within and has a keen sense of timing as she offers thoughtful questions, phrases, and nudges that allow for a cascade of meaningful realizations & visions. With Natasha as a soothing, humble witness to my cycles of falling apart and piecing myself back together, I feel a powerful sense of rewiring the nervous system and stepping into new ways of being. I feel at home in her presence and it’s a blessing to have a loving space where I don’t feel the need to hide my wounds or feelings. The fear of surrendering to my subconscious realms is alleviated by her calm, sweet presence. She holds you in so much love, whether you’re with her in person or over Zoom. The clarity and vibrational shifts I feel after our sessions are priceless. One of the most transformative therapeutic practices I’ve ever experienced. I found breathwork serendipitously through part of a meditation course and it has become the golden key to unlocking so much within myself! I’m also grateful for the intentional musical choices that always seem to flow perfectly with tides of my process. Thank you, Tasha, for sharing your gifts with this world..”
— Kya Bliss
"This might sound like hyperbole, but working with Natasha has truly changed my life! I’ve always found traditional therapy to be a helpful support and guide, and that’s been a consistent part of my life for over twenty years. But what I didn’t realize before entering into this work with Natasha was that it was only a part of the picture of healing for me.
Breathwork has been such an incredible complement to the work I’ve been doing on myself. In the past I’ve tended to intellectualize my feelings, thinking that was all it took to process them. But this has been the missing link to process them on a deeper level that was so needed! I’ve experienced how breathwork can change your relationship with your interior landscape, and how it can be a tool to access emotions trapped in the body that I didn’t even know needed to come out. It’s been so therapeutic, like cleaning a house of unresolved clutter (feelings, experiences) inside me - and it’s given me a pathway to safety and FREEDOM within myself that I didn’t know was even possible."
—Katie Blount
“Natasha's expertise in breathwork has changed my life. I have been searching for an in-person breathwork teacher for several years and am grateful to have found her website. I have done in-person private and group sessions with her now. I have also participated in a number of events and packages that she has organized, which include other professionals who specialize in various life-calming modalities. These packages are carefully crafted for all walks of life. I am an older person and she has accommodated my hearing loss and other needs graciously. In addition to her skill in guiding and teaching breathwork, Nathasha takes careful consideration to be ethical in her practice. I am forever indebted to her.”
—Josey Cooper
"Natasha is the first person I have ever had a breathwork experience with. I am blown away by how much has shifted in my life and how much clarity and truth has come from our breathwork sessions. I started seeing Natasha in June 2022 after finding her through a Google search. I had been called for a while to dive into the realm of breath, not knowing just how powerful this tool really is... Natasha curates an individual experience for each session beginning each session with intention; from the way she prepares tea for us to sip, to the way she holds space while I am releasing all different kinds of emotions that want to come through. Without fail, I always leave a session with Natasha feeling at peace, having total clarity around any situation, and totally connected to my power. Sometimes it truly feels like I had taken a psychedelic leaving her home! :-)
—Lauren Guarrasi
Meditation
with Olivia Ashton
Olivia's style of guidance is compassionate, loving, direct and clear - deeply informed by nature, the ancient teachings of Zen Buddhism, and her personal devotion to Sacred Self Love.
Meditation uncovers the innate clarity of our Awareness and creates space for our internal wisdom to arise. Through practice, trust is born, insight arises, and we deepen into ourselves. We cultivate the ability to quiet our minds, and widen our capacity to FEEL and artfully dance with the full spectrum of our human experience. From anguish to ecstasy — it’s all included. Through stillness, we come home to ourselves + into deeper intimacy with all things.
She guides from a wide variety of meditation styles including concentration practice, resting in open awareness, loving kindness, body scans, visualization and intuitive journeying. She is delighted and honored to share this life-giving practice with you.
TESTIMONIAL
“The space that Olivia creates as a meditation guide is truly magical. It is warm, inviting, loving, supportive, healing and overall wonderful. Olivia is a true light and I feel so lucky to have gotten to experience her teachings over the past several months. Having this space has allowed me to consistently practice in a way that I wasn’t able to before. Meditation was something that I had always wanted to incorporate into my life but was challenging for me so I tended to avoid practicing consistently. Olivia’s way of guiding is so welcoming and gentle. She helped me to see that there isn’t one correct way of meditating. This gentle way of guiding allowed me to just be, rather than focus on what I may have thought I was doing incorrectly. Olivia’s guided meditations were something that I would always look forward to in my day and I couldn’t recommend them more. She radiates pure love and you will see this in the space she creates for meditation.”
- Emily S.
Yoga Nidra
with Emily Wright
Yoga Nidra is a systematic process of deliberate relaxation that combines breath, body-scan and imagery-based techniques to serve as a powerful antidote to overstimulation, burnout and exhaustion.
Yoga Nidra is an accessible go-to practice in any wellness toolkit for sharpening cognition, bolstering creativity and promoting a healthy response to stress. Through a 20-minute practice, studies have shown that it improves neuroplasticity, resets dopamine levels and supports healthy central nervous system regulation.
Additionally, its ancient wisdom undeniably invites in a deeper knowing of the soul. This more spiritual angle empowers a release of fear and unwanted habits and enables new alignment to authenticity, freedom and heart.
Emily's greatest guides are creativity, honesty and heart, and she strives to bring each to every space she holds for healing. Her classes are set with a soothing tone that holds softness and compassion, balanced with activation of the physical and energetic bodies to empower a connection to wholeness. The practices she offers are the same ones that have guided her to finding steadfast peace in the most trying moments, and her guidance is rooted in trusting the wisdom of life's unfolding. She has been teaching yoga and exploring the intersections of healing and creativity for 10 years.
Restorative Sound Bath
with Dasha Shleyeva
Dasha Shleyeva is a somatic educator and a therapeutic musician. She is a neurodivergent and queer Russian immigrant who is currently in a program studying therapeutic harp playing in clinical settings. Dasha has been playing music for over 20 years, harp being the most recent addition to her repertoire. Utilizing the therapeutic harp approach, they offer amplified harp sound baths, ethereal loops, gentle field recordings, sound wave dynamics, and relaxing vocals.
They love to offer embodiment education within physical-therapy based yoga classes woven with a grounding sound bath experience afterwards. Dasha’s deepest joy in life is through reciprocally sharing embodiment, autonomy, and joy for & between all beings.
Yin Yoga
with Xochilt Hoover
Xochilt is a Nike Global yoga instructor and teaches on platforms like Nike Training Club and Netflix. Her teaching style is meant for everybody and is always evolving.
Xochilt has 500 hours of training in yoga covering subjects ranging from anatomy, the subtle body, yin, intelligent sequencing, and trauma informed yoga and mindfulness.
She's completed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction(MBSR) Foundations course through Brown University, a 75 hour teacher training studying the intersection of social justice & yoga taught by Michelle C. Johnson, as well as a 70 hour training in Mobility & Sequencing led by Matt Phippen & Kate Gillepsie of Movement Method, Co.
Xochilt's classes emphasize using more than just the physical practice to connect with oneself. She believes journaling, meditation, breath-work and movement are each equally important and vital to a holistic yoga practice. She prioritizes accessibility, simplicity, and mindfulness in each style of class that she offers.
gather this winter
The Descent welcomes you!
Enjoy the warmth of community as we journey deep into winter together <3
Please reach out with any questions!
$750
early bird until 12/1
full price $850
Payment plans available and welcomed <3
2 partial scholarship available
Send an email to inquire about options