Maybe you've heard of coworking spaces. Maybe you've even worked in one. But what exactly is a creative coworking space? At its simplest, a creative coworking space is a shared workplace designed not just for getting work done, but for making room for creativity, connection, and a different way of working. It's a place where you can bring your laptop, your sketchbook, your small business, your half-finished idea, or your Monday-morning brain, and work alongside other people d

In his book Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, Paulo Freire writes, “The earliest language was body language...” Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher whose work centered on education, power, oppression, and liberation. He challenged the idea that knowledge is something only handed down by experts, arguing instead that we create knowledge through lived experience, dialogue, reflection, and questioning. Freire was interested in what happens when we

A special message from Liz & Steph We’ve been sitting with a question lately: Should we still visit Puerto Rico? A few weeks ago, Puerto Rico made its way into our news cycle because parts of the island began rationing water. As two white folks from the United States who have had the privilege of traveling to different regions of Puerto Rico multiple times, and who are planning to bring a group there for a retreat, we felt it was important to pause and ask some uncomfortable

Why Retreats? Retreats might seem like a departure from what we do at Electric Cottage Collective, but we actually see them as an extension of the same experiment. ECC exists because we're curious about different ways of living together—ways that make room for creativity, rest, embodiment, pleasure, connection, and meaningful work without reproducing the grind and isolation of everyday life. Our retreats simply give us more time and space to practice that. Something really sp

First things first: what even is Trauma-Informed Yoga (TIY)? I've been teaching yoga for about 15 years, and about five years into that journey I was introduced to trauma-informed teaching principles. Once I understood them, I couldn't teach any other way. Here's the deal: in a lot of mainstream yoga spaces—especially gyms and fitness studios—the teacher is placed on a pedestal (sometimes literally 🙄). They're expected to walk around the room giving commands, correcting stu

As I'm sure many of you have heard by now, ICE killed a man in Biddeford last week in front of his child. It wasn't even the person they were targeting. Nothing about this makes sense. Johan Sebastián should still be here with his family. I am heartbroken. Again. There's no single right response to something like this. But I do know that fascism is the wrong response to life. It only moves us toward death. Migration is natural. We see it throughout the animal world, and human

The way we answer it has a lot to do with our upbringing, our epigenetics, and maybe...

There’s a question I kept returning to long before Electric Cottage Collective existed: What would it look like to build spaces whe At Electric Cottage Collective, yoga isn’t a performance, a fitness trend, or a mood you can curate. It’s a way of returning to the body in a culture that constantly rewards leaving it. What we practice, teach, and gather around is less about “doing yoga” and more about noticing what becomes possible when you stop trying to optimize your experi

Connecting pleasure to the work I’m doing at Electric Cottage Collective feels especially important right now. Here’s why. At Electric Cottage Collective, yoga isn’t a performance, a fitness trend, or a mood you can curate. It’s a way of returning to the body in a culture that constantly rewards leaving it. What we practice, teach, and gather around is less about “doing yoga” and more about noticing what becomes possible when you stop trying to optimize your experience of b

Yoga is not something you perform. At Electric Cottage Collective, yoga isn’t a performance, a fitness trend, or a mood you can curate. It’s a way of returning to the body in a culture that constantly rewards leaving it. What we practice, teach, and gather around is less about “doing yoga” and more about noticing what becomes possible when you stop trying to optimize your experience of being alive.

But there was something else about obsession. Something contained and liquid — like a warm bath after a long day, the feeling of water enveloping every inch of skin. The way it blocks out the world.

Why Community Acupuncture

fashion norms aren’t neutral

Reimagining creativity and wellness

Reimagining creativity and wellness

Reimagining creativity and wellness

Reimagining creativity and wellness

I trained in heated power yoga in 2011 at Prana Power Yoga in Boston. I went on to teach in that style for about four years, until doubts and questions began to surface. Why does a practice that is deeply internal, transformational, spiritual, and collectivist have such an unspoken focus on the external? Up to that point, I had rarely encountered teachers who didn’t wear Lululemon, weren’t thin, white, able-bodied, or native English speakers. I also rarely heard honest conver

What we see on the surface of modern Western “wellness culture” are things like fad diets, dream catchers, the idealization of thinness, whiteness, and wealth—manifesting as $25 yoga classes, Lululemon pants and “namaslay” merch. This is not wellness. It’s a cultural illness: cultural appropriation, spiritual bypassing, individualism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and the commodification of entire cultures. And I say this as someone who used to go to hot yoga almost every day.

The propaganda has already begun. As the new year approaches, the Wellness Industrial Complex is thriving—feeding on our insecurities and convincing us we haven’t done enough, achieved enough “success,” worked out hard enough, eaten “clean” enough, or made enough money. The message is simple: whatever we are, it’s not enough. And therefore, we must do more. This is a lie. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having goals. But there must also be space for satisfaction. For re