Berkshire Yoga Festival 2026

Garth Stevenson is a double bassist and composer known for creating music in direct communion with the natural world. On a 2010 expedition to Antarctica with biologist Dr. Roger Payne, Garth imitated whale calls on his double bass, attracting a dozen sei whales to their icebreaker. In 2025, he traveled to Baja, Mexico, to play for humpback whales. Standing on a small fishing boat, Stevenson played his bass live through underwater speakers while listening to the underwater sound of humpbacks through hydrophones, creating an environment where they could hear and respond to each other. These interactions were captured by National Geographic director Andy Mann for an installation at the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City.

Join Garth for an evening of music, storytelling, and film at the Berkshire Yoga Festival. He will be playing along with footage and underwater recordings of his interactions with whales in Mexico, telling stories about his time in Antarctica playing music for penguins, seals, icebergs, and premiering music from his new album.

As the sun sets and the land holds us, we gather in community for a sacred, embodied ceremony — a living prayer of movement, music, story, and collective remembrance.

Rooted in Afro-Indigenous wisdom, this ceremonial flow weaves the 500-year Indigenous prophecy with African diasporic and ancestral healing technologies — music, dance, call and response, somatic awareness, and collective ritual. Together, we move from separation to connection, from contraction to liberation, from forgetting to remembering.

We will:
• Awaken awareness of our shared humanity
• Heal the waters within — emotional, ancestral, and energetic
• Offer prayer and movement for the healing of our collective sacred waters
• Release what no longer serves, individually and collectively
• Call in love, harmony, and responsibility for future generations

Guided by Afro Flow Yoga® co-founders Leslie Salmon Jones and Jeff W. Jones, participants will be led through an immersive journey of embodied storytelling, tracing the arc of human evolution, our shared ancestry, and our inseparable relationship with the natural world. Through rhythm, breath, voice, and movement, we remember what has been forgotten: that we belong to one another and to the Earth.

Supported by live music, sonic soundscapes, voice, rhythm, visuals, and call-and-response, this multi-sensory experience invites hundreds of bodies to move as one living organism — raising the vibration of love through intentional, prayerful, collective motion.

This is a ceremony of remembrance and reclamation.

A bridge between past, present, and future.

A call to the here and now.

Together, we dissolve the illusion of separation — between self and other, human and nature — and answer our sacred instructions: to care for ourselves, for one another, and for the planet.

All are welcome. No experience necessary. Come as you are.

Leave renewed, connected, and committed to co-creating the world we want to live in — for now and for generations to come.

Girish, an accomplished musician of many genres, former monk infused in spiritual practice, loving wordsmith linking lyrics and rhythm in a blissful musical event, sings traditional Sanskrit mantras with a modern, funky, yet deeply devotional twist. Accompanied by his amazing band, Girish invites his audience at his kirtan concert to participate by singing along, call and response chanting, and dancing.  Girish has been recommended and featured in "O, The Oprah Magazine", "Yoga Journal" "Spirituality and Health Magazine", "LA Yoga Magazine", "Common Ground" and "Yogi Times." Girish's original music catalog of seven albums is popular in yoga studios and music festivals all over the world, and his "Mantras and Music" book will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2016.

Night of music featuring DJ Drez and Marti Nikko

The whole Festival will come together for an epic evening of song, dance and celebration!