Yoga Outreach

Yoga Outreach has been providing volunteer-based yoga programming to community organizations, social service agencies, and prisons in BC since 1996. Yoga Outreach yoga programs serve adults and youth facing multiple challenges, including mental health, addictions, poverty, violence, trauma, and imprisonment.

Yoga Outreach volunteers are trained by Yoga Outreach on how to deliver programs that are strengths-based and trauma-sensitive. In addition, we provide training, ongoing mentorship, and community building opportunities to yoga teachers and community support professionals to enhance the delivery of yoga in these settings.

Sarah Holmes de Castro - Director of Programs, MA, ERYT200, RYT 500, PYT.
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Sarah Holmes de Castro is the Director of Programs for Yoga Outreach, working with volunteer yoga teachers and facility staff to deliver trauma-informed yoga programs and facilitating trainings for yoga teachers and health professionals. Sarah has been teaching yoga for more than 12 years and began volunteering with Yoga Outreach in 2004. Since then she has taught within a variety of settings including transition houses, addiction recovery centres, mental health programs, and correctional facilities. She is a yoga therapist offering classes, workshops and and teacher trainings with Fine Balance Yoga and teaching at Onsite and the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health & Addictions.

In 2010 Sarah completed teachers' training in Trauma Sensitive Yoga at the Boston Trauma Center, a facility under the directorship of Bessel Van der Kolk. She is a certified Professional Yoga Therapist with Integrative Yoga Therapy and continues to deepen her understanding of yoga as a practice to support healing, most recently studying Functional Yoga Therapy and Pain Care Yoga for chronic pain. She is particularly interested in yoga as a path towards post traumatic growth and committed to sharing the gifts of yoga that have been such a profound tool for healing in her own life. She is proud mother of 2 and delighted to be offering workshops for mothers to support wellness and balance.

Nicole Marcia - Yoga Outreach Core TrainingTM Facilitator, MA, ERYT 500.
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Since 2004, Nicole has taught therapeutic yoga classes and offered individual sessions to trauma survivors struggling with addiction, depression and anxiety, teaching them healthy self-regulation strategies to empower them to live connected and embodied lives. Nicole also trains yoga teachers and clinicians in the trauma-sensitive yoga theory, and techniques required to support trauma survivors in their healing, long-term stability and recovery. In 2009, she was awarded a master’s degree with a specialization in yoga therapy from Lesley University in Boston, MA. Since then, Nicole has been employed by the Provincial Health Services Association at their Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addictions, where she developed a comprehensive yoga therapy program for in-patient clients in various stages of recovery from mental health and addiction.

In 2010, Nicole completed the Trauma Sensitive Yoga Training with Dave Emerson at the Trauma Center in Boston, MA, as well as a course on teaching yoga in military communities with Warriors at Ease in Silver Spring, MD. As a faculty member at Ajna Yoga, she designed and delivers the Therapeutic Relationship and the Trauma Sensitive Yoga for Mental Health and Addictions Courses. Nicole is a curriculum developer and instructor at Langara College Continuing Studies Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma, Resilience and Emotional Well-being Certificate Course, and the yoga programming coordinator at Onsite, the treatment arm of North America’s first safe injection site.

Nicole is registered with the Yoga Alliance (E-RYT 500) and the International Association of Yoga Therapists. She is also a member of Bridge for Health and the Breathe Network which connects survivors of sexual violence with healing arts practitioners.