From outside the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo by Sarah Hentges
More About Sarah
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 begins 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 path in fitness has unfolded alongside her trek in academia as she took a fitness instructor training course her senior year of college at Humboldt State University and then taught a variety of dance, fitness, and yoga classes while she pursued her Master’s in Literature and Culture at Oregon State and her Ph.D. in American Studies at Washington State. Sarah’s work draws on a vast and varied set of experiences in and out of academia and the world of fitness including her Ph.D. in American studies, RYT-200 certification in yoga, 100+ hours of trauma-informed yoga teacher training, a 50-hour certificate in Embodied Social Justice from The Embody Lab, and her recent JourneyDance apprenticeship training, as well as over 25 years as a fitness instructor, 20+ years teaching college classes, and 15 + years as a yoga instructor.
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 she is teaching for the first time this spring—Embodied Social Justice: Racialized Trauma and Cultural Transformation. In the fall of 2023, she is teaching a 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.
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.
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.
Sarah’s path in fitness has unfolded alongside her trek in academia as she took a fitness instructor training course her senior year of college at Humboldt State University and then taught a variety of dance, fitness, and yoga classes while she pursued her Master’s in Literature and Culture at Oregon State and her Ph.D. in American Studies at Washington State. Sarah’s work draws on a vast and varied set of experiences in and out of academia and the world of fitness including her Ph.D. in American studies, RYT-200 certification in yoga, 100+ hours of trauma-informed yoga teacher training, a 50-hour certificate in Embodied Social Justice from The Embody Lab, and her recent JourneyDance apprenticeship training, as well as over 25 years as a fitness instructor, 20+ years teaching college classes, and 15 + years as a yoga instructor.
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 she is teaching for the first time this spring—Embodied Social Justice: Racialized Trauma and Cultural Transformation. In the fall of 2023, she is teaching a 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.
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.
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.
