From outside the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo by Sarah Hentges
More About Sarah
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. 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.
Sarah has taught step and dance aerobics, cardio kickboxing, strength and tone, cardio pump, fitness yoga, slow flow yoga, Pilates, organic dance, mind/body dance fitness, cardio belly dancing, belly dance fitness, MOSSA’s Group Groove, and many other kinds of group fitness, yoga, and dance fitness classes. She has taught on college campuses, at non-profit community centers, the YMCA, and gyms.
In the winter and spring of 2022, Sarah took the first two modules of the JourneyDance teacher training and she fell in love. She completed the third module, becoming a JourneyDance facilitator in April of 2023. Her passion has always been in the world of mind/body movement more than the world of “fitness” and she has often felt like she taught group fitness in a box where she did not fit. (JD is not a workout or a fitness class, though it will certainly meet those goals!) JD has allowed Sarah to tap into her intuition and creativity, as well as her experience as a professor, in ways that no other fitness teaching has allowed before. JD is something special and she is beyond excited to bring this healing modality to Maine where few such opportunities exist.
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.
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.
In addition to drawing inspiration from fitness forms, conscious dance, yoga, healing modalities, and ecclectic 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 has taught step and dance aerobics, cardio kickboxing, strength and tone, cardio pump, fitness yoga, slow flow yoga, Pilates, organic dance, mind/body dance fitness, cardio belly dancing, belly dance fitness, MOSSA’s Group Groove, and many other kinds of group fitness, yoga, and dance fitness classes. She has taught on college campuses, at non-profit community centers, the YMCA, and gyms.
In the winter and spring of 2022, Sarah took the first two modules of the JourneyDance teacher training and she fell in love. She completed the third module, becoming a JourneyDance facilitator in April of 2023. Her passion has always been in the world of mind/body movement more than the world of “fitness” and she has often felt like she taught group fitness in a box where she did not fit. (JD is not a workout or a fitness class, though it will certainly meet those goals!) JD has allowed Sarah to tap into her intuition and creativity, as well as her experience as a professor, in ways that no other fitness teaching has allowed before. JD is something special and she is beyond excited to bring this healing modality to Maine where few such opportunities exist.
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.
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.
In addition to drawing inspiration from fitness forms, conscious dance, yoga, healing modalities, and ecclectic 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.