Healing Arts With The Watermill Center

The Watermill Center has an upcoming schedule of wellness workshops and guided meditations as part of its Healing Arts program that launched last year. The series, previewed in January with a Slow Art workshop led by artist Stephanie Joyce, features a roster of East End artists and wellness practitioners guiding participants through a variety of exercises and experiences amid The Watermill Center’s collection of ancient and contemporary art.

The next in the Healing Arts series is an open-level flow class with East End yoga instructor and artist Sylvia Channing on Saturday, February 25. Channing will guide participants through the five yogic self-care principles to enliven the breath and relax the body. The series continues on April 1, with shamanic healer Mikki Baloy leading a guided meditation to tap into one’s inner creative muse, and concludes on May 6, with a moving meditation and sensory journey led by artist and healer Angela Stephan.

“Healing Arts is one of our newer programs, and we are excited to share this approach to art and wellness with the community,” says The Watermill Center Director, Elka Rifkin. “Our Artists-in-Residence come from across the globe to experience the peace and tranquility of creating art amid the natural setting the East End offers, and it is a pleasure to be able to invite our neighbors to experience the transformative power of art firsthand.”

Healing Arts @ The Watermill Center is a series of workshops and guided meditations offering the public the chance to explore the intersection of art and wellness. Through hands-on activities with a rotating roster of artists, the local community is invited to explore the healing power of art in a communal and experimental setting. In the tradition of “Slow Art,” Healing Arts encourages participants to take a meditative approach to engaging with art, cultivating an intentional state of mind, and gaining new insights and perspectives through a shared experience.

Sylvia Channing is a yoga instructor and artist from the South Fork, currently based in the Hudson Valley. Her training is primarily in Iyengar, Jivamukti, and Ashtanga vinyasa methods, and she has trained with teachers Colleen Saidman Yee and Rodney Yee for 20 years in Sag Harbor. Sylvia has taught at numerous studios on the East End, in New York City , and in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay, and she is soon to open her multidisciplinary studio in Beacon, New York. While her approach is rooted in traditional asana practices, Sylvia’s classes are dynamic, easy to follow, and fun, and her cues are equal parts physical alignment and metaphor. Sylvia draws from nature, personal experience, and inspiration from mentors and friends to design her classes, and she’ll rarely teach the same sequence twice. Her goal is to make her class a container for each student’s unique exploration of their body and breath.

Mikki Baloy has been practicing shamanic healing for over a decade and has studied with shamans, ritual keepers, and mystics worldwide. Mikki offers private healing sessions, rites of passage, weddings, retreats, and workshop experiences. Her approach fuses ancestral traditions with yoga, Buddhism, and almost four decades of creative training as a performer, writer, and musician. She is the author of two books, an ordained minister of animism, and a certified practitioner of ancestral lineage healing.

Angela Stephan is a healing artist who creates space for inspiring, transformational experiences to honor life as sacred artistry: a journey of being and becoming the sole architects of our unique personal and collective inter-being evolution. Drawing from a palette of many yogic lineages, healing traditions, movement, and sound therapies, she composes creative, poetically meditative offerings to amplify communion with mind, body, spirit, soul and environment. Her work is infused with over two decades of explorations in a spectrum of holistic modalities, medicinal wisdom, 1000-plus hours of yogic studies with master teachers, and participation in Indigenous ceremonies around the world, inspiring her mission for bridging ancient and modern healing in contributing to the rising consciousness and wellbeing of the planet.

Healing Arts @ The Watermill Center takes place on select Saturday mornings throughout the year. To register and for more information visit watermillcenter.org. The Watermill Center is at 39 Watermill-Towd Road in Water Mill.