Alumnae Spotlight: Sarah Austen Holzgrefe OHMS '09

Sarah Austen Holzgrefe OHS ‘09 made her way back to Orchard House this year as a component of the school’s incorporation of mindfulness into its programs. As an independent yoga teacher in the greater Richmond area, Sarah Austen’s path started with a wish to explore mindfulness and self-inquiry. She had often incorporated yoga into pre-activity stretching, but coupling the two practices shifted her perspective. “It changes the game when you try to pay attention to what you're doing, which is just like life. Everything changes when you pay attention to what you're doing.” The next turn in her path is one that is familiar now: “COVID happened, which is everybody's story. We started working from home, and I was able to spend a lot more time doing yoga. I got my 200-hour teaching certification over COVID and was able to really build up my business and teach more classes.”

Sarah Austen has been leading weekly afternoon yoga classes and dropping in for yoga sessions with our PE students this year. She’s found that while she plans fast-paced classes to match young students’ desire to move quickly, she is still able to talk in-depth about mindfulness and tools for stress relief throughout the classes to make sure that the girls are picking up on the larger goal of the practice. “Mindfulness was never really explained to me when I started yoga. The point is to move, of course, but to pay attention to the moving and the breathing and, ‘Oh, how is my mind reacting to this one pose we're in, or what do I start thinking about when I'm in this uncomfortable shape, or when I'm comfortable and bored?’” She encourages students to notice some of the patterns their bodies and minds slip into—wandering minds around lunchtime or restlessness—and links the techniques in class to the ability to bring yourself back to the moment. With anxiety on the rise in middle schoolers, Sarah Austen is especially interested in teaching students that there are many ways to try to keep it at bay. “It's important to know how to self-regulate. That is gold to learn at a young age.”

For middle schoolers in 2009, mindfulness wasn’t yet a large part of the conversation about adolescent girls’ mental health. Sarah Austen says, however, that the emphasis on the arts at Orchard House had a similar effect for her. “There was dedicated time for a whole quarter for dance. My body needed that movement, and Ms. Arthur was just one of my favorites.” With each grade focusing on a different arts discipline per quarter, that outlet is available throughout their middle school experience. She likens the time to work on creativity to a regular meditative practice. “I think it's very similar because you get into the flow of just doing it. I loved the art classes, and music and theater! I think those in themselves can be such great mindfulness tools.” Many of the Orchard House customs contain creative components—thrones, quilt squares, masks, sanctuary boxes, and murals—that allow for students to reach that flow state of creation while participating in community traditions.

This integration of the arts is a core tenet of the Orchard House experience. On any given day of school, each student will be engaged in a creative project for one of her academic subjects. Painter’s tape is a highly valued resource as science students build themed obstacle courses for their robots to navigate through code. A history class builds a metaphorical representation of the Five Pillars of Islam and compose songs about journeys along the Silk Road. Dreams bloom as one English class constructs flower boxes that represent their hopes and goals during their study of A Raisin in the Sun, while another writes dream poems based on the work of Langston Hughes, transforming each poem into a quilt square. One group of math students hang posters around the Great Room promoting interesting facts about the number 7, while others create artistic works building on the spiral of the Fibonacci sequence. Spanish students illustrate and label houses and village squares as they study descriptive and directional vocabulary. By injecting the arts into all subjects, teachers are able to allow students to display their knowledge while encouraging them to tap into the calm industriousness of creativity. The designated arts classes provide a further opportunity for middle school girls, who are deep in the developmental process of identity formation, to discover and express themselves creatively.

When asked what advice she would give to her middle school self, Sarah Austen’s focus was on self-compassion and treating yourself as a best friend. For her, yoga is one path to exploring and strengthening this connection with the self—getting to know yourself as you move through different poses, knowing how your body reacts in poses based on what kind of day you’re having, and learning how to be kind to all versions of yourself. Her advice to 2009 Sarah Austen and all middle school girls? “Do everything that you can to keep the relationship you have with yourself. Try your very hardest to be compassionate with yourself through these tough, tough years. Middle school and high school are hard and stressful. Keep yourself really close, like a bud that you can really count on and be with through hard things. I'm still learning—and this work never ends—so to start young is such a gift, because this is some of the most important work you can do, the work with yourself.”