First Friday Restorative Yoga

An Evening of restoration for Your Mind, Body and Soul

First Fridays at 7:30 PM

Beginning February 7, 2025

The evening begins at 7:30 PM with a 75-minute restorative yoga session. This gentle style of yoga uses props—such as blankets, bolsters, and blocks—to support the body in a series of gentle and passive poses. Restorative yoga helps move you from an activity-based, possibly stressful day, into a state of deep relaxation, which can aid in improving physical, emotional and mental well-being.

Spiritual restoration continues in the main Sanctuary at 9:00 PM with Compline: Ancient Music and Prayers for the Modern Soul. The service of Compline is based on the closing time of prayer in the Daily Office and is said in monasteries around the world at 9:00 PM when darkness has fallen and bedtime is near. At Saint James, the Compline choir sings Gregorian chant and plainsong in our acoustically rich, candle-lit sanctuary. The service is meditative and lends itself to restoring the mind, body and soul.

The yoga studio is located in the lower level of the Parish House (119 North Duke Street) Please plan to arrive at 7:00 PM so we can begin promptly at 7:30. Please thank your teacher with a suggested gratuity of $10-15.

About Roberta Strickler

Roberta has been teaching yoga as therapy, mindfulness meditation, and Ayurveda in central Pennsylvania since 1995. That same year, she earned her first certificate as a yoga teacher from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA. For the next 12 years, she continued her yoga studies to include Anusara Yoga, a Iyengar-based style of yoga known for its elegant language and therapeutic principles of alignment. She has also studied mindfulness meditation with Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Roberta sees the goal of modern yoga to be the relaxation of the body, so the mind can be stilled for the practice of meditation. She has taught yoga for mindfulness-based stress reduction and yoga for breast cancer survivors, other cancers and cardiac events.

Her approach to yoga and meditation integration along side of Ayurveda, balance, physical rehabilitation, and well being, have dominated her private teaching throughout the past ten years.