A Yoga Festival, Hamptons YogaFest, Takes Place In Bridgehampton

When two local yoga teachers decided that they wanted to give back to their community, they figured there was no better way to do so than to create a yoga festival on the East End.

Hamptons YogaFest, set to take place next weekend, September 18-20, at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, aims to unite the community through movement, according to its founders.

“Our intention is to bring our community together and to create an awareness and prosperity,” said festival co-founder Jenna Walter. “When we all come together and share our art, we all rise up.”

Ms. Walter, who organized the event along with Alex Grant, a native New Yorker who spent his summers on the East End, explained that yoga is all about “giving back to the land” and is a way of saying thank you for all that it provides, including food, clothing and shelter. “When we do yoga, we give back,” she said.

The festival is intertwined with five different themes: celebration, unity, balance, beauty and truth. They surface when festival-goers start to celebrate life, which is one of the goals of Hamptons YogaFest, Ms. Walter said.

The festival next weekend includes workshops that are 108 minutes long, which is a mystical number from yoga and Buddhism, Ms. Walter explained. There will also be a healing village, community village and peaceful planet kids village.

Mr. Grant studied the ancient medicine of the Chinese and created the different villages for the festival—he had experience founding a yoga festival in Australia in 2011. The healing village includes different forms of massage, aromatherapy and acupuncture and a kids village includes yoga classes, art classes and cooking classes.

Many local yoga studios have signed up to be “presenters,” or teachers, for the different yoga classes. Ms. Walter explained that local studios from Montauk to Hampton Bays decided to participate almost immediately, making it a really local and home-grown festival. “I started to feel the love coming from all the other studios,” she said.

The festival will open at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 18. Workshops throughout the weekend will start at 8 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and all levels are welcome.

A day pass to enter the grounds costs $20, but does not include the 108-minute specific workshops and music; there are 30-minute yoga classes that festival-goers can try with the pass. Fresh and local food will also be provided by Fresh Hamptons throughout the weekend.

A full-weekend pass to the festival costs $260 and includes all of the different workshops and villages.

The vision is for Hamptons YogaFest to continue for 64 years, Ms. Walter explained, because there are 64 hexagrams in the “I Ching,” or the “Book of Changes.” The “I Ching” is one of the most revered texts in Chinese literature and each hexagram holds a different meaning, such as “humbling” and “persevering.”

Ms. Walter hopes that 600 to 900 people will attend Hamptons YogaFest, which she says will create an awareness of the event. “It activates the land and activates the intention of what we are holding the space for.”