Other Ag News: Growing Together Project to Host Spring Farmer Wellness Sampler

Farmers, earth-workers and growers from across the Finger Lakes region are invited to gather together for an upcoming farmer wellness event, hosted by our Growing Together project. 

Join us to make new connections, invest in self-care, and expand your toolkit of wellness practices before launching into the growing season. The Farmer Wellness Sampler will take place at the Foundation of Light in Ithaca, NY, on Tuesday, April 29 from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. 

Our facilitation team of farmers and earth-workers will lead sessions featuring Qigong longevity exercises, instrumental sound healing, co-creating with cut flowers, and Kripalu-style yoga. 

This free event is hosted by Growing Together, a project of the Cornell Small Farms Program.  Space is limited, please register to ensure your spot below.  

After participants arrive and enjoy some appetizers and fellowship, the event will have an opening welcome before breaking into different wellness sessions.

These exercises have been used as a traditional method of rehabilitation and sports therapy; they are easy to learn and easy to practice. The 45 minute set combines breathing techniques, gentle stances, and coordinated movements to improve range of motion, flexibility, balance and circulation; every joint of the body is mobilized over the course of the set. The exercises can be practiced seated if standing is not possible. The reputed Doctor of Chinese Medicine, Wang Jiwu, created this series of exercises in the 1930s to serve as a front-line therapy at his busy clinic in Beijing. Distilled from the centuries old method of Xingyi Quan (“form mind boxing”), the Longevity Exercises artfully combine physical movement with intention to stretch and “clean” all the joints of the body while balancing the energetic system.

Facilitator:  Connor Youngerman, Cornell Small Farms Program

Participants are welcome to rest, sit or dance in whatever way you’re moved during this unique sound healing session with drums, flutes, stringed instruments, gongs and singing bowls. Damon and friends bring an improvisational approach to sound healing, tuning in to the energy of the music and the room to guide the musical sounds and vibrations. 

Facilitators: Damon Brangman, Scott Pardee and friends

There will be time to reconnect as a larger group, before again breaking into different wellness sessions.

This Kripalu-style yoga session is all about connecting with the energy of the Earth, rooting down and rising up. We’ll start with some breathwork, then some gentle exercises to warm the body and flow into a series of postures designed to exercise and invigorate the entire body before settling into a restful savasana. You’ll leave feeling centered and prepared to engage with your own Earth work with renewed joy and vigor.

Facilitator:  Himanee Gupta-Carlson

Those of us who sell cut flowers are skilled in quickly and efficiently constructing dazzling bouquets. But as we scramble to fill orders and make sales, we can sometimes overlook the beauty and magnificence of our flower companions. In this session, we’ll start by simply slowing down and becoming present.  We’ll bring our awareness to the beauty and energy of the cut flowers around us, taking time to really notice and appreciate their offerings. Then, we will create bouquets with the flowers that speak most to us, focusing on creativity rather than technique. Bring a bouquet home, and offer a second one as a gift to another participant in the closing circle.

Facilitator: Violet Stone, Cornell Small Farms Program

We will then come together for a closing circle before leaving this shared space and bringing our learnings with us back into our day to day lives.

Damon Brangman. Born and raised in the island of Bermuda, Damon Brangman a farmer/educator and musician founded Roots Rising Farm to offer hands on garden education through school and community gardens.  Damon started farming at a young age, and his inspiration to grow food was his grandmother’s love of fresh vegetables. Through the curiosity of other youth in the community, he felt inclined to share the knowledge he was gaining from gardening, and also give them the opportunity to connect to the land. Damon traveled to New York City to study music production in 1997, and while there he became sick, and decided to attend a body/mind retreat in Ithaca, NY during the summer. The experience of a raw food diet, meditation, and yoga, encouraged him to make changes in his lifestyle, and eventually move to Ithaca a few years later.  Having a strong background in music, and determined to continue healing from Crohn’s disease, he produces music with the intention of healing himself while also assisting others on their own personal healing journey.  The earth is healing itself, and we play an important role in allowing the process to heal us, if we can only stop for a moment and listen.

Himanee Gupta-Carlson is a farmer, writer, and professor who sows seeds to provide food, uses words to form ideas, and creates thoughts to help guide herself and others through learnings to sustain future generations. She also has written, spoken, taught, and pondered extensively on the relationships between land, food, and spirituality and has drawn on her own experiences as a farmer and daughter of immigrant Indian parents in reflecting on her place in North American settler-colonialist spaces. A desire to contribute to the healing of historic intergenerational violence and ongoing trauma led her in 2022 to the Cornell Small Farm’s Reconnecting With Purpose Retreat, from which she was motivated to rekindle prior work with Reiki and to fulfill a long-held desire to transform her practice of yoga into teaching it herself. Since becoming certified through the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, she has led yoga workshops at numerous academic conferences and in community classes in the Saratoga area, where she lives, farms, and teaches at SUNY Empire State University. Her hope is to meet students where they are at, and to guide them to find peace, grounding, rejuvenation, contentment, and hope.

Violet Stone leads a wide range of retreats and workshops for the agricultural community drawing on themes of connection, wellness, purpose, integrity and courage. She sees this work as contributing to a more inclusive ‘culture’ of agriculture where all voices are warmly welcomed, honored and celebrated, including the  voice of our intuition or inner teacher. In this highly technological age of automation and artificial intelligence, we have much to gain from the act of offering one another genuine listening, open-hearted attention, and wonder. Violet has led programs for the Cornell Small Farms Program since 2007 and has also served as the New York Northeast SARE Professional Development Coordinator since 2009. All of her programs are aligned with the principles of the Center for Courage and Renewal.

Connor Youngerman is a certified instructor of xingyi quan, bagua zhang, and qigong through the North American Tang Shou Tao Association and has been training and teaching traditional martial and medical arts for 17 years. Connor is the agroforestry and mushroom production specialist for the Cornell Small Farms Program, and grew up on a small family farm in Prince Edward Island,  Canada.

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