The Elders Mini-Jam
The Elders Mini-Jam
October 9th, 2026 – 10am to 12pm PST
Register here for this free event
In a moment when the world can feel fast and wild, what contributions can we make as elders? What if we could come together and explore our individual and collective potential, following Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it? What possibilities and paths might emerge?
Please join us for our second two-hour Elders Mini Jam if you identify as an elder and are called to be in community with other elders, crones, matriarchs, patriarchs, parriarchs, seniors, and living ancestors. Bring your imagination, your experience, your joy, and your sorrow – all are welcome.
We’ll gather together online, inviting our tenderness and wisdom to co-create connections and ways forward, both individual and collective. Like our first YES! Elders Mini Jam, this jam will run for two hours. Over the course of our time together, we’ll engage in explorations of our journeys and purpose as elders, sharing with one another our wise, heartful, and imaginative visions forward, for ourselves, each other, and the world.
This second Elders Mini Jam will also continue to lay the foundation for a multi-day online Elders Jam planned in January 2027, and eventually (we hope!) for a similar in-person jam.
“The power of the elders is to confer blessings.”
~ Norman Fischer
What is a Jam?
YES! Jams are spaces where diverse changemakers bring together their passions, visions, experiences, and unique perspectives. In spontaneous connection, we weave layers of reflection, wisdom, heart, and spirit to create something none of us could create alone. Most Jams are multi-day events that happen both in person or online, while Mini-Jams, like this one, are shorter gatherings that can range from 2 hours to a full day.
A Jam is not a conference, a seminar, or a typical workshop. It is a co-created, immersive experience — part deep dialogue, part creative expression, part collective practice, part joyful play. Through facilitated circles, visioning exercises, art-making, storytelling, movement, quiet reflection, and generous amounts of hanging out, we build the kind of trust and friendship that transforms not only our individual lives, but also the ways we move through the world and create meaningful change together.
Organizer
Marla Durden is a facilitator, sacred embodiment practitioner, and Dance Chaplain working at the intersection of play, somatic healing, shamanic practice, and Nature Intelligence. A certified InterPlay leader and skilled transformational facilitator, she leads retreats, offers private embodiment sessions, and leads a weekly Dance Chapel along with her monthly Watering Wholeness Zoom Call.
Author of The Magical You Playbook & Embodied Self-Care Journal, Marla collaborates with creatives, leaders, and mystics to embody and share their innate power, vision, and gifts. Through her imprint, SoulShine Press, she served as book and cover designer for The Art of Ensoulment by Cynthia Winton-Henry and The Great Dance by Cynthia Winton-Henry, with artwork by Ruth Schowalter, amongst others.
Judi Cohen (she/her) is an attorney, law professor, 35-year student of mindfulness and yoga, and elder. She has taught mindfulness to lawyers and law students for nearly three decades. Currently, she teaches Mindfulness for the Legal Mind at Berkeley Law, to support students’ personal wellbeing and offer them tools to create a more just, equitable society and a more harmonious relationship with the planet. Judi is also the founder of Warrior One, which has been offering programs for legal professionals that integrate traditional mindfulness, contemplative neuroscience, and the psychology of the legal mind, and producing the weekly Wake Up Call podcast and biennial Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training, since 2011.
A founding board member and past co-president of the Mindfulness in Law Society (MILS), Judi currently serves as co-chair of the MILS Teachers Collective and as a member of its Faculty Circle. She is also a former facilitant for the Law and Social Change Jam and a current facilitant for the Elder Jam. Judi lives on the ancestral lands of the Pomo and Coast Miwok tribes, and on the lands of the Washoe tribe, with her partner, a physician and yoga teacher, and their mini-Bernedoodle, Oliver.
Nour Elkhattaby Strauch is a community organizer and facilitator from Casablanca, Morocco. Nour has been organizing and facilitating YES! Jams since 2012, including the Middle East Leadership Jam, the North America Leadership Jam, the Men Raised as Men Jam and others. He is currently serving as Executive Director of YES!, and hopes to continue growing the work of this organization which expands the impact of social and environmental leaders by equipping them with the tools to build community, navigate conflict, and create resiliency in their lives and projects.
Nour has also worked with many other notable non-profits in Morocco, the U.S., and beyond including Neighborhoods Association Idmaj, LifePath, Seeds of Peace, CorpsAfrica, Casablanca-Chicago Sister Cities, among others. He is a former member of the National Administrative Council of Amnesty International Morocco.
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