From Stronger Girls Together to Respite Play™

How Curriculum Grows as We Do

Creating curriculum has always been one of my favorite ways to serve.

Years ago, I created a heart-centered program called Stronger Girls Together for girls ages 8–14. The intention was simple and profound: when we invest in girls emotionally and spiritually, we strengthen families and communities as a whole.

Through yoga, mindfulness, wellness education, gardening, music, outdoor exploration, service projects, and community connection, we taught girls how to listen inward, regulate their emotions, move their bodies with care, and trust their voices. For six years, through Happy Sunshine Yoga, we held space for young girls and teens to grow rooted, resilient, and connected.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was also writing a curriculum for the women those girls would one day become.

At its core, Stronger Girls Together was never just about childhood. It was about belonging, embodiment, emotional literacy, creativity, and nervous system safety. It taught girls how to rest without guilt, play without performance, express without apology, and belong without comparison.

Decades later, these same longings are rising again — now voiced by women 50 and over.

What began as growing together didn’t end there.

As the years passed, I watched those same needs — for belonging, emotional safety, creativity, and rest — reappear in women at every stage of life, especially in midlife and beyond. The work didn’t disappear; it simply matured.

Respite Play™ is how that original intention now lives in the bodies and lives of women 50 and over — honoring the same principles, with deeper permission to slow down, soften, and integrate. It’s not a departure from Stronger Girls Together; it’s the next season of the same work.

Before we called it curriculum, we called it growing together.

Respite Play™ is designed for women who have spent decades caring, leading, producing, mothering, and holding space for others — women who don’t need to be taught how to be strong, but who are finally ready to soften without losing their power.

The practices remain familiar, but they deepen.

Mindfulness becomes nervous system repair.

Movement becomes restoration rather than output.

Creativity becomes medicine.

Community becomes chosen and reciprocal.

Play becomes essential, not optional.

This work matters now because women are telling the truth.

The truth that being strong for decades comes at a cost.

The truth that productivity without restoration is not sustainable.

The truth that wisdom without space to integrate becomes exhaustion.

Women are not looking to be fixed.

They are looking to exhale.

This work also belongs in community. I’m grateful to land monthly with The Human Array where pause, integration, and embodied wisdom are not extras — they are essential. These shared moments of reflection are the soil where real healing and recalibration take root.

In a world that continues to ask women to push harder, Respite Play™ offers something quietly radical:

A place to land.

A place to remember.

A place to be held — by yourself and by each other.

Perhaps most beautifully, it reminds us that the very skills we once tried to teach our daughters — presence, self-trust, emotional resilience, and joy — are the same ones we are now reclaiming for ourselves.

This isn’t a return to childhood.

It’s a return to wholeness.

May we soften the pace, trust the pause, and remember joy as a vital practice.