Radha Rose & Josh

Kirtan: An Hour of Sacred Chant

An hour of devotional music, mantra, and collective singing. It’s an invitation to open the heart, raise our voices, and experience the joy of chanting together.

Radha Rose is a chant musician, ceremonial guide, and retreat leader from Alpharetta, Georgia. Since 2019, she has hosted hundreds of community events and retreats throughout Atlanta and the Southeast, including cacao ceremonies, kirtans, and sound baths.

Radha is the founder of Chant Southeast and teaches voice and harmonium to students around the world. Her work centers on creating intentional community spaces that encourage transformation, expression, connection, and collective healing.

She is joined by her husband, Josh, who supports their offerings with his musical gifts.

Kirtan is a devotional practice of call-and-response chanting in which simple sacred mantras and melodies are sung together. You don’t need to know the words, consider yourself a singer, or have any previous experience.

Through voice, harmonium, rhythm, and repetition, Radha and Josh will guide us from individual voices into a shared experience of devotion and connection.

Sing loudly or softly, move, sit in stillness, close your eyes, or simply listen.

Cody Maria / Magi Music

Ambient Sound Journey

A 60-minute all-original ambient sound journey created for deep listening, rest, meditation, and inner exploration.

Magi Music is the sonic expression of producer, DJ, and sound artist Cody Maria. His work moves between psychedelic bass, organic rhythms, world instrumentation, cinematic soundscapes, downtempo, and ecstatic rhythms and has brought him onto stages alongside artists including Desert Dwellers and Random Rab.

For Forest Fest, Cody will create an immersive original soundscape incorporating electronic textures alongside gong, crystal singing bowls, flute, didgeridoo, chimes, percussion, and field recordings from the natural world.

Participants are invited to lie down, soften, close their eyes, and allow vibration, texture, melody, nature, and silence to become the experience.

LUNCH AT THE OUTDOOR KITCHEN

A communal pause for food, conversation, rest, and connection before the afternoon workshops begin.

Stephy Joy Johnson

MURMURR

Move. Understand. Relate. Moving United in Rhythm We Rise.

Stephy Joy Johnson is a multidisciplinary movement artist, educator, wellness leader, and community catalyst with more than 20 years of experience exploring movement, holistic health, resilience, and reconnection. She is co-founder of Whole, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to partnership culture, compassionate communication, and ecological sustainability.

Inspired by the extraordinary way starlings move together in murmuration, MURMURR is a collective, playful moving prayer exploring what happens when individuals begin listening and responding as part of something larger.

We’ll move through grounding, embodied play, relating, following, flowing in small groups, rhythm, voice, sound, and shared harmony.

The experience gradually expands from individual awareness toward collective movement through community, forest, and Gaia.

All ages and abilities are welcome.

Heather Cape

Mindful Nature Art

A mindful nature-art experience for reconnecting with creativity, curiosity, and the natural world.

Heather is a mindful art guide and nature enthusiast who combines art and the forest as pathways into wellness and creativity. As a mother balancing homeschooling, music, art, family life, three dogs, and a tortoise named Sheldon, she understands both the joy of creativity and how easily adults can lose touch with it.

We’ll begin by exploring our relationship with art and some of the barriers that keep us from creating.

Using treasures and inspiration gathered from the forest, Heather will introduce approachable watercolor techniques that can be recreated at home, while traveling, or anywhere we find ourselves wanting to slow down and make something.

This isn’t about producing perfect art. It’s an invitation to reconnect with curiosity, play, attention, and the creative part of ourselves that may have been waiting for permission to come back outside.

Kevin Mobbs & Dawn Lemke

Love Ferments

A hands-on exploration of microbial alchemy, the science of fermentation, and our relationship with the tiny living organisms that transform and preserve our food.

Kevin is a former teacher and instructional designer who now lives on his family’s 82-year-old farm, where curiosity, tinkering, and learning have drawn him into the world of fermentation. Dawn is a gardener, ecology professor, and fellow fermentation enthusiast whose interests connect gardening, health, whole foods, ecology, and natural processes.

Together, they’ll introduce us to the living world of fermentation and the ancient relationship between humans and microbes.

We’ll explore both kombucha/SCOBY fermentation and salt-brine vegetable fermentation while learning practical techniques that can be continued at home.

Participants will leave with three active ferments, a fermentation kit, and hopefully an entirely new appreciation for the invisible communities of organisms living all around—and within—us.

Mitchell Lessmann

From Breath to Bliss

A journey through the limbs of yoga designed to quiet the mind, reset the nervous system, and open into states of joy, peace, expansion, and bliss.

Mitchell facilitates Hatha and Kundalini yoga, sound baths, and yogic experiences throughout Atlanta. A former corporate statistician, he brings an unusual combination of scientific practicality and poetic, heart-centered exploration to his practice.

From Breath to Bliss moves through mindful movement, expansive breathwork, and restorative sound.

Together, these practices create space to cleanse, balance, and reinvigorate body, mind, and spirit while allowing participants to experience the radiant energy that can emerge when we become fully present.

Tatiana Mark & Nick Portolese

Embodied Chiropractic Attunements

One-on-one chiropractic attunements in the forest designed to help you feel more at home in your body, move with greater ease, and deepen your awareness of yourself.

Tati and Nick are the founders of Be One Collective, where their work centers around chiropractic care and creating spaces for people to reconnect with their bodies, their innate wisdom, and one another.

Their approach brings together movement, breath, touch, and awareness through intuitive chiropractic care.

At Forest Fest, rather than facilitating a conventional group workshop, Tati and Nick will offer individual chiropractic attunements outdoors.

Their practice of what they sometimes call “jungle adjusting” moves chiropractic care out of the traditional treatment room and into relationship with the rhythms and sensory environment of nature.

Drop in during the offering window for an individual experience.

Benny Silva

Resonate Yoga

A 90-minute accessible journey through yoga movement, breathwork, and live sound designed to help us let go, reset, and return to ourselves.

Benny Silva is an Atlanta-based movement, breath, and sound facilitator whose offerings weave yoga and breath practices with live acoustic instruments including handpan, didgeridoo, flutes, and gongs.

We’ll begin with intentional breath to activate, ground, and quiet some of the mental clutter we carry with us.

From there, Benny will guide an accessible yoga asana practice designed to move energy and release tension from the body.

The experience will conclude by transitioning from movement into stillness for a live sound journey and meditation.

All levels are welcome. Bring a yoga mat, blanket, and comfortable clothing.

REST & PERSONAL TIME

An open hour to return to your tent, wander the forest, shower, rest, integrate the day, or simply do nothing.

DINNER

Dinner together followed by time to rest, connect, and prepare for the evening dance

Tami Howe & Ed

Community Dancing: Fiddle, Feet, Forest

Community dancing to joyful traditional fiddle tunes with a caller guiding the way. No experience and no partner needed.

Ed and Tami share a love of traditional music and community dance. Ed is a solar engineer, longtime fiddler, and sound engineer who grew up in rural Maine. Tami is a native Georgian, career coach, artist, and dancer who believes deeply that movement is medicine.

Together, they’ll bring live traditional fiddle music into the forest and invite us into the kinds of dances that have brought communities together for generations.

A caller will guide everyone through circles, lines, and community folk dances step by step.

Come alone or with someone. Come experienced or completely new. The point isn’t getting the steps perfect—it’s moving, laughing, listening, and making something together.

CALAGNA

Saturday Night Ecstatic Dance

Three hours of organic house, deep tribal rhythm, world-influenced grooves, and global bass woven into a movement-driven journey through the forest night.

CALAGNA is an organic house and ecstatic dance artist creating hypnotic, tribal, and melodic journeys designed for movement, embodiment, and collective flow. Rooted in deep rhythmic percussion and immersive textures, their sound bridges conscious dance culture with the global dancefloor.

With releases on Desert Trax, High Vibe Records, Resueño, Sol Creation, Sol Selectas, and Buddha Bar, CALAGNA moves between underground credibility and global reach. Their catalog includes remixes for artists such as Liquid Bloom, Poranguí, Janax Pacha, Onanya, Cuervo Cuervo, Bloomurian, and Mose.

CALAGNA has performed internationally across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, bringing a grounded, seasoned presence to dancefloors around the world. In recent years, their work has moved increasingly toward intentional spaces, with a growing focus on ecstatic dance and conscious festival environments.

On Saturday night, CALAGNA will guide Forest Fest through a three-hour ecstatic dance journey shaped by rhythm, flow, and the energy of the gathering itself.

Moving through organic house, deep tribal, world, and global bass influences, the set will weave earthy percussion, hypnotic rhythms, immersive textures, and melodic lift into a living arc that invites dancers out of their heads and more fully into their bodies.

The experience will move naturally between spacious, grounded moments and expansive peaks, creating room for release, connection, play, and collective movement.

At its heart, this is music meant to be felt. Come ready to move freely, listen deeply, and let the forest, the rhythm, and the dance carry you.

Brett Solomano

Active Mindfulness: Meditation for People Who Can't

Meditation for people who have tried sitting still, closing their eyes, and quieting their minds—and decided meditation simply wasn’t for them.

Brett Solomano spent 15 years as a professional stunt performer working with fire, motorcycles, film, and television and even holds a Guinness World Record for the longest distance driving a semi truck in reverse.

That work taught him something unexpected about mindfulness: presence doesn’t always happen in stillness. Sometimes we discover it while moving, responding, and staying aware in the middle of activity.

Now a mental health coach, Brett brings that experience into a practical approach to mindfulness designed for real life.

Instead of asking you to stop, sit down, and close your eyes, we’ll explore eyes-open meditation while standing and walking.

You’ll leave with practical tools for finding presence even in the middle of a chaotic day.

No meditation experience is required.

Dennis Lutz

Source Essence

Our vision, mission, and purpose in life can be distilled into two things: give love and receive love.

For Dennis, the forest is a magical portal for connection—a place where nature, healing, community, and love meet.

His experiences at Just Love Forest and his practice of Shinrin-yoku, or forest therapy, have deepened his appreciation for being immersed in nature’s healing embrace and inspired this Forest Fest conversation.

Source Essence is less a lecture than a participatory conversation in the forest.

Participants are invited to bring questions, comments, observations, experiences, or whatever happens to be alive in the moment.

Together, we’ll follow the conversation wherever it naturally wants to go, continually exploring how the things we encounter might ultimately return us to something very simple: our capacity to give love and receive love.