Our 2026 Festival Theme—Making Space for Joy
I’ve been thinking a lot about what feels most authentic right now — not just for me, but for the 2026 Bend Yoga Festival — and I keep coming back to this idea:
Making space for joy.
Not chasing it. Not performing it. Not demanding it from ourselves as another item on an already overwhelming list.
But making space for it.
That phrasing matters to me, because it names something real about the world we’re living in.
Most of us aren’t short on desire for joy. We’re short on the conditions that allow it to arise.
We’re living in a time of profound instability. Politically, economically, environmentally — and relationally. Democratic norms feel fragile. Power is increasingly concentrated. The logic of “more” dominates everything: more growth, more extraction, more efficiency, more profit, more speed, more productivity — even when it clearly isn’t making us safer, healthier, or happier.
At the same time, many of us are carrying quiet grief, chronic stress, nervous system exhaustion, and a sense that the ground beneath our feet is less stable than it used to be. Even when things are “fine” on the surface, there is a background hum of uncertainty that wasn’t there before — or at least not this loudly.
In that context, joy doesn’t disappear because we’re broken or failing or insufficiently positive. It disappears because it has no room.
It gets crowded out by urgency, by overstimulation, by financial pressure, by constant bad news, by social comparison, by systems that reward sociopathic greed and punish rest, care, slowness, and sufficiency.
So the work isn’t to force ourselves to be joyful.
The work is to create the conditions where joy is once again possible.
That’s what I mean by making space.
Space in our schedules.
Space in our nervous systems.
Space in our attention.
Space in our communities.
Space in our landscapes.
Space in our expectations of ourselves and each other.
When there is space, something else becomes possible: safety, curiosity, play, connection, creativity, grief, relief, presence, laughter — all the things that make a life feel like a life and not a survival project.
“The work is to create the conditions where joy is once again possible.”
Joy is not frivolous in hard times — and it’s not denial. It’s one of the few renewable resources we have.
It is what restores people so they can care, notice, choose wisely, and remain human inside systems that are increasingly inhumane.
So this year, that’s what the festival is oriented toward.
Not “high vibes.”
Not spiritual bypassing.
Not self-improvement as a form of self-surveillance.
But tending the conditions that allow joy to emerge naturally and honestly — in real bodies, in real lives, in a real world that is complex, beautiful, painful, and unfinished.
At the 2026 Bend Yoga Festival, let’s make space for joy, together.