Arise October Weekend with Sala
Practice, inquiry and community in Hiriketiya
There is something powerful about coming together around practice.
Not simply arriving for a yoga class, moving for an hour and leaving again, but creating spaces where we can stay curious a little longer. Where movement can become inquiry, philosophy can enter the body, stories can become practice, and community can form naturally around the experience.
This October, I’m beginning a new collaboration with Arise in Hiriketiya, bringing a weekend of yoga, mythology, Ayurveda and embodied inquiry into their beautiful south-coast community.
Arise Weekends with Sala will continue throughout the season, with new practices and workshops unfolding each month.
Pancha Mahabhuta
The Five Great Elements: A Yoga Practice
Saturday 10 October · 3:30 PM
LKR 3,500
Guided through storytelling, movement, breath, mantra and meditation, we explore earth, water, fire, air and space as more than philosophical concepts.
The five elements become mirrors through which we can encounter the body, our inner landscape and the deeper practice of meeting ourselves.
Samudra Manthan Sadhana
The Churning of the Cosmic Ocean
Sunday 11 October · 8:00 AM
LKR 3,500
This morning sadhana enters one of the great stories of yogic mythology: Samudra Manthan, the churning of the cosmic ocean.
Through twists, spirals, opposing forces, breath and stillness, we explore the movement of churning within ourselves.
What rises when the waters are disturbed?
What is poison?
What is nectar?
What asks to be transformed?
Rather than treating mythology as something distant or ancient, the practice asks what happens when we allow the story to move through the body. We explore the story through movement, breath and the physical experience of churning, resistance and release.
Ayubhowan Ayurveda: workshop
An Introduction to Ayurveda
Sunday 11 October · 12:00–2:00 PM
LKR 6,000
A two-hour introduction to Ayurveda, its origins, foundational principles and relationship with yoga.
We’ll explore the Pancha Mahabhuta, the doshas, prakriti, daily rhythm and the wider ecosystem of yogic living.
Ayurveda becomes less about memorising a type or fixing something that is wrong with us, and more about beginning to understand our relationship with nature, rhythm, balance and the life we are actually living.
Who This Is For
This weekend is for anyone curious about traditional yoga beyond asana.
For those interested in yoga as practice, philosophy, devotion and art form. For anyone wanting to understand Ayurveda not as a trend, but as part of a wider ecosystem of yogic living. For those curious about mythology and how its themes can be explored through movement, breath and embodied practice.
It is also for anyone drawn to self-inquiry. To slowing down enough to notice what is happening within. To meeting yourself with more attention.
You do not need an advanced yoga practice or previous knowledge of Ayurveda or mythology.
Curiosity is enough.
Why Arise?
One of the things I care about increasingly is community infrastructure.
Beautiful work needs places to live.
Teachers need spaces where their work can develop. Spaces need practitioners and communities who bring them alive. And people need places where they can encounter one another beyond transactions, screens and the usual social choreography.
That is part of why this collaboration matters to me.
Hiriketiya is already a meeting point for people from many different places. Arise gives us a physical space in which those encounters can deepen through practice.
And my hope is that these weekends can become part of a wider rhythm: not simply events we attend, but recurring moments where the south-coast community can gather, explore and grow together.
I’m Sala, founder of Salasbananas, an artist, yogi and facilitator based on Sri Lanka’s south coast.
My work brings together traditional yoga, storytelling, mythology, mantra, ritual, embodied inquiry and creative practice.
I approach yoga not as performance, but as a living art form. A space where philosophy can enter the body, where stories can become practice, and where devotion and inquiry can sit beside one another.
Much of my work asks a simple question:
How do we meet ourselves more fully?
Sometimes that happens through movement. Sometimes through breath, story, mantra, stillness, art or community. The form can change, but the inquiry remains.
Through Salasbananas, I create practices, workshops, retreats and community spaces that invite people into this meeting, while staying connected to the roots, philosophy and living traditions that continue to shape my own practice.
For me, this collaboration is also about what becomes possible when spaces, teachers and communities come together rather than working in isolation.
Arise already holds a gathering place in Hiriketiya. I bring my own evolving body of work through Salasbananas. We meet somewhere in between.
Not to make everything the same, but to create something together.
A place to move.
A place to learn.
A place to meet each other.
And, underneath all of it, a place to meet ourselves.
