Denver Yoga Summit

Exploring the Divine Mirror in Every Connection

Join symbolic mythologist and teacher Manoj Chalam for a transformative talk on the Yoga of Relationships—a journey into how our human connections serve as sacred mirrors for awakening and growth.

Manoj will bring in statues of Hindu and Buddhist deities to illustrate the ancient wisdom for modern times. Drawing from Vedantic philosophy, Hindu mythology, and practical wisdom, Manoj weaves humor, storytelling, and insight to reveal how every relationship—whether romantic, familial, or communal—is an opportunity to deepen our self-awareness and align with higher consciousness.

In this engaging and accessible session, participants will explore:

• How relationships reflect the unresolved or enlightened aspects of the self
• Archetypes of divine love and union through the lens of deities and symbolism
• Tools for turning friction into fuel for evolution
• The path of devotion (bhakti) in human connection

With warmth and wit, Manoj invites us to see love not just as emotion, but as a spiritual practice—a yoga. Come ready to laugh, reflect, and leave with your heart a little more open and your relationships a little more sacred.

Manoj will help you find your personal deity Goddess archetype

(This workshop is 80% lecture, 10% meditation, 5% Mantras and 5% light spiritual stretches.)

At the sacred crossroads of Ayurveda and the chakra system lies a map of your elemental nature and deeper gifts. These sister sciences illuminate the subtle and physical dimensions of who we are — revealing the intelligence woven through body, energy, and spirit.

Rooted in the wisdom of the five elements, Ayurveda expresses itself through the doshas — Vata, Pitta, and Kapha — the energetic blueprint through which we live our embodied lives. Each dosha holds profound strengths: Vata’s visionary creativity and intuition, Pitta’s radiant courage and transformative clarity, Kapha’s steady devotion and deep compassion.

When these elemental forces are explored alongside the chakras — the energetic centers of consciousness within the subtle body — we awaken a powerful understanding of ourselves. We begin to experience our constitution as a pathway toward healing, integration, and the ignition of our most radiant self.

Our time together will begin with a gentle, accessible overview of both systems, then unfold into slow, intentional movement, meditation, and reflection to embody your innate strengths. Open to all levels, bodies, and beings. Come ready to move slowly, listen deeply, and reconnect with your inner brilliance.

What if your yoga mat was a clinical tool for cellular healing? Join functional medicine practitioner and immunological specialist Dr. Mitchell Rasmussen for a groundbreaking keynote that explores how yoga influences the nervous system, immune response, and cellular signaling. As the co-founder of The Facility Denver, Mitchell specializes in guiding care for individuals with complex, chronic conditions who have often "tried everything" without lasting results.

Moving far beyond traditional chiropractic care, Mitchell bridges cutting-edge biochemistry with timeless embodied practice. In this illuminating talk, he invites us to stop viewing yoga as a reactionary fitness routine for when we get sick, and instead recognize it as a foundational primary care practice for long-term health. Grounded in his three core pillars: Empowerment, Education, and Empathy, this session strips away the medical jargon to help you understand your own unique physiology. Walk away with a personalized, science-backed perspective on your practice and the actionable tools needed to work with your body instead of against it.

Modern yoga and wellness environments often extract from Indigenous cultures without fully understanding the histories, systemic harms, and deep ethical responsibilities that come with those practices. This vital workshop invites educators into a grounded, human conversation about cultural reverence—exploring how to move, speak, and teach in ways that honor Indigenous peoples while actively reducing harm.

Led by Sequoia Garza-Keith, a mixed Indigenous practitioner and educator, this session unpacks how Indigenous traditions have been historically criminalized and appropriated, and how those realities echo in today's studios. Rather than centering shame, this workshop emphasizes curiosity, humility, and practical toolkits for navigating nuance with genuine care.

Core Curriculum Competencies:

• Land Acknowledgments: Learn precisely when, why, and how to deliver a meaningful land acknowledgment that moves beyond corporate performance.
• Inclusive Space-Holding: Understand how to respectfully engage with Indigenous traditions under the assumption that Indigenous people are actively present in your class.
• Accountability Over Paralysis: Master specific tools to navigate linguistic or cultural mistakes with transparent accountability rather than defensiveness or shutting down.
• Lineage Ethics: Connect Western yoga ethics back to a living lineage of responsibility, relationship, and respect, rather than extraction.

Being rich isn’t about how much you have; it’s about how fully you live. Join elite corporate leader turned spiritual guide, author, and FEROZ founder AJ Bishop-Andrews for a powerful, paradigm-shifting keynote presentation that completely flips the script on female wealth.

For more than two decades, AJ climbed the highest rungs of senior banking leadership at JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Key Private Bank. From the outside, her life looked flawlessly successful, stable, and secure. On the inside, she carried a quiet, persistent truth that many high-achieving women secretly hold: this version of success no longer fits.

Drawing directly from the core themes of her bestselling book, Rich Like Her, AJ maps out the essential seasons that shape a woman’s sense of worth: the exhausting season of performance, the disruptive season of reckoning, and the triumphant season of reclaiming your inner authority. Merging her executive finance acumen with her 25+ years as an E-RYT 500 yoga teacher, AJ delivers a masterclass in embodied leadership and life transitions. This talk will give you the practical frameworks and radical self-trust needed to stop performing a life that looks good on paper, and start living one that feels profoundly true to your soul.

In the blink of an eye, Abigail went from teaching yoga to relearning how to walk. After a cerebellar stroke in 2012, she discovered that the relationship you have with your body shapes the entire quality of your life. That season redefined her understanding of resilience. It’s not about pushing harder or chasing perfection. It’s choosing to adapt to challenges without giving up on yourself. Yoga became her way to practice resilience by transforming physical loss into whole-body living. In this keynote, Abigail shares a framework for rebuilding body trust after physical trauma, plus practical ways teachers and students can make yoga more accessible across abilities.

Key Takeaways

Redefine resilience as a practice of effort + recovery

Build body trust through simple, repeatable tools you can use immediately

Shift the way you see accessibility so inclusion becomes part of your yoga practice

This class is suitable for men and women. Manoj will bring statues of yogic Goddesses and relate them to your personal archetypes.  The pinnacle of the Goddess archetype is the Wisdom Goddess with side archetypes of the Mother and the luminous Devi. Discover the archetypes of the slumbering Goddesses or Shakti within us as Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kali, Durga, Tara and Kwan Yin. Unleash this Shakti, within you as the creative power of the One. This Shakti archetype guides us through all aspects of life transitions such as adulthood, relationships, marriage, parenting, profession, mentoring and finally enlightenment. With Shakti's guidance, we are able to fully express the heroine’s journey to Self Actualization.

Manoj will help you find your personal deity Goddess archetype

Hindu gods and goddesses are not just distant mythological characters—they are precise, symbolic expressions of the psychological and elemental forces that move through our everyday lives.

Join celebrated Vedic astrologer, cultural bridge-builder, and Tibet Imports co-founder Sarita Shrestha for a grounded, culturally rooted masterclass. Drawing from her roots in Nepal and over three decades of spiritual counseling, Sarita strips away the superficial, Westernized romanticism of Eastern deities. Instead, she introduces them as living intelligypes of intelligence that can actively support protection, courage, discernment, and renewal in your real, daily life.

Rather than approaching these forms as abstract mythology, this interactive workshop teaches you how to map specific deities to your own emotional and karmic patterns. Learn how to work with the energies of Ganesh, Lakshmi, Durga, Shiva, and Saraswati to navigate common adulthood challenges, make high-stakes decisions, and deepen your self-reflection.

Who it is for: Designed explicitly for yoga practitioners, teachers, and seekers who want to move beyond surface-level studio symbolism into something deeply meaningful, respectful, and usable.

True resilience isn’t about the absence of adversity; it’s about choosing exactly how we rise to meet it. Join combat veteran, global motivational speaker, and internationally celebrated yoga teacher Dan Nevins for a powerhouse keynote presentation that will completely redefine your understanding of human potential.

In 2004, Dan survived an IED explosion in Iraq that resulted in the loss of both of his legs and a traumatic brain injury. From the depths of a grueling physical and psychological rehabilitation, he discovered the life-saving, transformational power of yoga—a practice that taught him to stop fighting his reality and start mastering his inner landscape. Through raw, vulnerable storytelling and the wisdom of his lived experience, Dan invites us to radically rethink our self-imposed limitations, dismantle fear, and reconnect with our innate capacity for massive growth. Leave this session with an unshakeable perspective shift and a concrete framework to meet your own personal and professional obstacles with fierce, grounded courage.

We are in a pivotal moment where the old paradigms of recovery are no longer enough. Human Recovery asks us to widen the lens; to recognize that recovery is part of the human experience. We are all recovering from something: grief, trauma, substances, conditioning, loss, or disconnection.

This keynote introduces an emerging ecosystem of whole-person recovery through the partnership of Serenity For Life and Human Recovery, LLC. Collaboratively they have created an integrative model that weaves together psychotherapy, medication-assisted treatment (MAT), trauma intensives, Human Recovery coaching, and community to support the full spectrum of healing. We are creating a continuum of care that honors the complexity of the human experience. Through yoga, somatic practices, mindfulness, nervous system regulation, and lifestyle medicine, we create spaces where healing is relational, sustainable, and deeply transformative.

Healing without feeling isn’t possible, recovery is not about fixing what is broken, it is about returning to wholeness.

Life doesn't feel busy by accident. Between being a parent, a sibling, a friend, and an employee, we are often switching corporate and social roles so fast we completely lose track of who we are underneath them all.

Join mind-body storyteller, actor, and veteran corporate consultant Sravanthi Prattipati for an eye-opening keynote that explores the steep emotional cost of constantly performing success. Drawing from her high-intensity finance and consulting career at PwC, alongside her professional training on the theatrical stage, Sravanthi knows this tension intimately: how to convincingly become someone else, and what it costs your nervous system to keep doing that off-stage too.

This keynote strips away the external noise to deliver a practical framework for noticing when you are acting out of protective habit rather than authentic choice. Combining modern behavioral mindset practices with accessible mindfulness, you will walk away with tangible tools to show up more honestly in the roles you already carry, and a renewed sense of permission to slow down and lead from your truest self. If you've ever wondered who you'd be without all the noise, this session is for you.