Upcoming Events + Teacher Trainings + Retreats
VETOGA Spring Teacher Training
Scheduled for May 2023
We are only a couple months away from our Spring VETOGA teacher training in May and we need your help! We still need to raise $10,000 in order to make this teacher training happen.
Please consider donating to VETOGA and share our story to help us reach our teacher training goal to sponsor 20 veterans to attend the upcoming training.
Help sponsor a veteran to attend a VETOGA Teacher Training program.
DONATE HERE & SUPPORT TEACHERS
VETOGA teacher training group at Ojas
Sunday, March 26th
If you live in Southern California, join us at Yoga on State in Carlsbad, CA for a special community yoga class led by VETOGA CEO, Justin Blazejewski and in partnership with LiboRisk.
FREE event to all service members, veterans, law enforcement, emergency responders, and their families. Suggested donation class for civilians who want to join and support VETOGA, active military, and veterans. All are welcome!!!
VETOGA’s mission is to provide yoga, meditation, and healing arts to military, veterans, their families, and communities. We seek to build a supportive community, of both veterans and non-veterans, and to provide an opportunity to experience a wide variety of the Healing Arts.
LiboRisk is a military colloquialism derived from the phrase “Liberty Risk” Used prevalently in the Marine Corps, troops who were coined as “LiboRisks” had to be watched more carefully and were punished more often for mishaps during liberty and leave. Because “LiboRisk” is used irreverently and is associated to a troops “free-time”, we believe this would be the best name for our community.
We will start with an all-levels yoga class available to everyone. We will stretch, breathe and cultivate our connection with body-heart-mind-spirit. The class concludes with Yoga Nidra, a deep relaxation that aims to release that which no longer serves us.
After the yoga class is complete, we will head over to Barrel Republic to get some food and drinks for some Community & Comradery.
Donations will go to VETOGA Incorporated, a healing arts program that services our veterans and their care providers. VETOGA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax-exempt.
Yoga on State, 2697 State Street, Carlsbad, CA 92008
More info: info@yogaonstate.com
VETogi of the Month
Claudia Cavazza
VETOGA Instructor
Claudia Cavazza is a certified Yoga Teacher (E-RYT 200 + E-RYT 500), Advanced Yoga Nidra Facilitator, Prison Yoga Project Certified, Certified Trauma Professional, and Certified Compassion Fatigue Professional. Claudia’s passion is to deliver yoga, meditation, breathing techniques and Yoga Nidra to populations such as veterans, first-responders, college students, and at-risk youth affected by high stress and PTSD through a carefully designed trauma-informed and polyvagal-informed embodied practice.
Committed to share the benefits of a trauma-informed yoga practice, as Director of Education and Training for New Millenium Employee Assistance Services, Claudia has been developing resilience focused trainings and practices for first responders in the DC metro area. In addition, for the past 7 seven years Claudia has been serving the veteran-owned organization Vetoga to provide yoga and meditation to veterans, first responders and their families.
In 2018, Claudia founded the corporate wellness company WRKwell, LLC to deliver stress management programs to local corporations as well as public entities. WRKwell combines the benefits of embodied practices with leadership and corporate responsibility training to provide tools for both organizations and corporate employees to thrive in a safe work environment.
Question: What originally motivated you to do this work and what continues to motivate you?
“Both my grandfathers served during World War II in the Italian Army. While one of my “nonni” adapted very well upon returning to civilian life, the other came home from the Russian front deeply scarred and became severely addicted to alcohol to cope with his experience of war, unleashing violence and abuse on my grandmother, my mother and her baby brother. At the time, no one talked about the effects of trauma and PTSD. Veterans and their families were left to deal with their unbearable burden alone.
Many years later, after connecting with veterans in my local community, I realized that their stories weren’t so different from the stories of my grandfather and grandmother, and their suffering was the same kind of suffering that had impacted my family across generations. I felt a sense of personal responsibility to break the cycle of suffering in my own family, but also to pay it forward to other veterans and their families. As a civilian, I was very fortunate to be accepted into the Vetoga Teacher Training and immediately felt included in a wonderful community of veterans. That’s when I truly felt in my body the power of yoga not only to bring a sense of wholeness within myself, but also to unite human beings from all sorts of backgrounds and lived experiences. I remember as it was yesterday, a young man – a giant Marine who looked so strong that he could move mountains – getting up and crying unstoppably at the end of one of our yoga nidra practices, as years of deeply hidden traumatic experiences were coming to the surface and were released by his body. I just walked over, and we hugged. No words, no explanations, but we’ve become best friends ever since. THAT, to me, is the power of yoga. The practice of yoga can peel back the layers of what we think makes us different from each other and unite us in wholeness as connected human beings.”
VETOGA Wellness Retreats
Location: Ojas Retreat Center
See our programs in action! Watch the video
SPONSOR A VETERAN
VETOGA’S partner: Ojas Retreat Center
Support All Our Programs!
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