From outside the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo by Sarah Hentges
More About Sarah
At times Sarah has held a formal ACE certification, but she finds the world of fitness certification to be problematic—being much more of a money-making machine than a space for growth and professional development. When she trained to be a fitness instructor, she learned the building blocks to teach any kind of group fitness class—an art and skill that is practically non-existent in today’s world of “manufactured fitness” and high-intensity training.
Today, Sarah dares to describe herself as a cultural critic, movement artist/activist, curator, and choreographer, facilitator, author, professor, mentor, feminist fitness dance instructor, trauma-informed yoga instructor, and visionary. Her classes and workshops provide the opportunity for structure and freedom (choreography and free dance), introspection and connection (within and beyond the self), embodied movements (dance and yoga and more), myofascial release techniques and self-care tools and practices (tapping into self-healing), and new ideas, inspirations, and prisms for seeing ourselves and our worlds in new ways
Sarah is an introvert, an empath, an over-thinker, and a recovering over-achiever. She loves to read, write, move, create, and cuddle and watch TV and movies. In the fall of 2022 she began a new phase in her professional journey as a professor of transdisciplinary cultural studies (promoted from associate professor of American studies) and as the owner and founder of The Spiral Goddess Collective, a Center for Mind/Body Movement.
Sarah’s academic work includes mentoring students as they create unique, self-designed interdisciplinary majors and teaching a wide variety of courses including: Girls on Fire: Feminism, Activism, and the Future; Hip-Hop: Culture, Consciousness, and Movement; American Fitness: Culture, Community, and Transformation; Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; and Cultural Criticism and Theory: The Arts of Social Change. In the summer of 2021, she began teaching an integrative healing yoga class for UMA’s Nursing program and designed a class in Embodied Social Justice: Racialized Trauma and Cultural Transformation. From here she collaborated with colleagues to design an Embodied Social Justice minor and certificate program and another new class, Feminist Praxis for Self and Community Care.
There was a time when Sarah cringed away from anything spiritual and stayed very comfortable within a rigid box of fitness and linear movement. But she began to break out of this box through yoga and belly dancing and now she sees her life’s work as helping other people break out of the boxes that contain them, to heal, and grow, and to live the best version of their most authentic lives. Sarah invites participants to do what feels good to them in the moment, to let go of perfectionism and judgment and embrace pleasure, power, and conscious embodied movement. She wants participants to lose themselves and find themselves, and to move and be moved.
In addition to drawing inspiration from fitness forms, conscious dance, yoga, healing modalities, and inspirational music, Sarah is inspired by intersectional Black Feminism and ideas like Radical Self-Love (Sonya Renee Taylor), Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism (adrienne maree brown), individual and collective healing, and embodied social justice.
Today, Sarah dares to describe herself as a cultural critic, movement artist/activist, curator, and choreographer, facilitator, author, professor, mentor, feminist fitness dance instructor, trauma-informed yoga instructor, and visionary. Her classes and workshops provide the opportunity for structure and freedom (choreography and free dance), introspection and connection (within and beyond the self), embodied movements (dance and yoga and more), myofascial release techniques and self-care tools and practices (tapping into self-healing), and new ideas, inspirations, and prisms for seeing ourselves and our worlds in new ways
Sarah is an introvert, an empath, an over-thinker, and a recovering over-achiever. She loves to read, write, move, create, and cuddle and watch TV and movies. In the fall of 2022 she began a new phase in her professional journey as a professor of transdisciplinary cultural studies (promoted from associate professor of American studies) and as the owner and founder of The Spiral Goddess Collective, a Center for Mind/Body Movement.
Sarah’s academic work includes mentoring students as they create unique, self-designed interdisciplinary majors and teaching a wide variety of courses including: Girls on Fire: Feminism, Activism, and the Future; Hip-Hop: Culture, Consciousness, and Movement; American Fitness: Culture, Community, and Transformation; Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; and Cultural Criticism and Theory: The Arts of Social Change. In the summer of 2021, she began teaching an integrative healing yoga class for UMA’s Nursing program and designed a class in Embodied Social Justice: Racialized Trauma and Cultural Transformation. From here she collaborated with colleagues to design an Embodied Social Justice minor and certificate program and another new class, Feminist Praxis for Self and Community Care.
There was a time when Sarah cringed away from anything spiritual and stayed very comfortable within a rigid box of fitness and linear movement. But she began to break out of this box through yoga and belly dancing and now she sees her life’s work as helping other people break out of the boxes that contain them, to heal, and grow, and to live the best version of their most authentic lives. Sarah invites participants to do what feels good to them in the moment, to let go of perfectionism and judgment and embrace pleasure, power, and conscious embodied movement. She wants participants to lose themselves and find themselves, and to move and be moved.
In addition to drawing inspiration from fitness forms, conscious dance, yoga, healing modalities, and inspirational music, Sarah is inspired by intersectional Black Feminism and ideas like Radical Self-Love (Sonya Renee Taylor), Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism (adrienne maree brown), individual and collective healing, and embodied social justice.
