Yoga Retreat for Women of Color

The Yoga Retreat for Women of Color is a three-day yoga retreat at the Art of Living Retreat Center in North Carolina, led by guest teachers Maya Breuer and Kiesha Battles. It is held for women of color and centers on healing, sisterhood and new perspectives. Kiesha Battles, a yoga and breathwork teacher based in Charlotte, guides this retreat as part of her wider work in community yoga.

What to Expect

The retreat runs for three days and is framed around three ideas: healing, sisterhood and fresh ways of seeing. It is a gathering where women of color practice yoga together, in the company of teachers who hold this space as a regular part of their work. Kiesha Battles' own teaching draws on yoga philosophy, Yin Yoga, meditation, prānāyāma (breathwork), Āyurveda and accessible yoga, which gives a sense of the practices she brings into her teaching more broadly.

About Kiesha Battles

Kiesha Battles is the founder of iamyoga, a yoga community based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She teaches in person and online. iamyoga describes its mission as bringing together people who support and uplift one another through yoga, and its teachers now reach across the United States and to Senegal.

She is lead faculty for iamyoga's 200-hour and 300-hour yoga teacher trainings and co-leads the 300-hour program with Candace Jennings. Her areas of teaching include yogic lifestyle, yoga philosophy, Yin Yoga, meditation, prānāyāma, Āyurveda, accessible yoga and community building.

Her work centers on making yoga available to the community. She teaches within SAFE Yoga, a free, movement- and music-based program built around safe, accessible, free-flowing energy. She also guides the Yoga Retreat for Women of Color, including a Black History Month gathering at Kripalu.

The Setting

The Art of Living Retreat Center sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a quiet landscape that the Center itself describes as a place to step away from daily chaos. Its programs bring together meditation, yoga, Ayurveda treatments and therapies, and both indoor and outdoor activities. Throughout the year it hosts a mix of its own signature retreats and programs led by guest teachers, and this yoga retreat is one of the guest-led gatherings.

For anyone looking for a women of color yoga retreat in North Carolina, this weekend-length program pairs experienced teachers with a mountain setting built for rest and reflection.