Brooke Smokelin is a yogi, yoga teacher, musician, songwriter, sound healer, environmental artist, environmental educator, and visionary/ creator of events.
She is the founder and director of Chakra Activation Yoga and the creator of the Chakra Activation Deck. Chakra Activation Yoga is a unique fusion style of classic static hatha asanas and dynamic kundalini kriyas sequenced to awaken, explore, and balance each of the 7 chakra- energy centers. The Chakra Activation Deck is a fun and useful tool (70+ beautiful, densely informative, color-coded flash cards) for inspiring and designing a home-based chakra-themed yoga practice.
Brooke has 25 years of yoga teaching and study in the Kundalini, Sivananda, Kriya and Ashtanga traditions and is currently an E-RYT/ YACEP offering advanced trainings to yoga teachers and students all over the world. Her Chakra Activation Yoga provides students and teachers with a wealth of yogic tools and techniques to IGNITE THE LIGHT and positively embody their full spectrum selves.
Brooke is a musician/ songwriter/ sound healer as well and she brings all kinds of musical medicine to yoga studios, festivals and communities all around the country. It might be the ecstatic “mantra trance-chanting" from her self-released album Vox Lumina’s Music is Medicine (2006) or the deeply relaxing and restorative Crystal Bowl Sound Bath. Sometimes she will combine them both (chanting and sound bath) with a high-vibe/ body grooving trance- dance set as a Musical Medicine Experience.
On very special occasions Brooke transforms into Vox Lumina, the mystical, musical, mythical Queen of Orga, i.e. the natural world, and sings the Song of Light, the ancient Orga’n tale of the Original Ones- Sky Earth, Sun, Moon, and River- and how they dreamed themselves to be. The album-story Song of Light was released in 2012 and is now a multi-media performance montage that uses the creative mediums of myth, music, and image to raise awareness about the relationship we all have with nature. Since 1996 each Vox Lumina performance-ritual produces a “vibrationally enhanced alchemical elixir” that is offered to the local bodies of water as musical medicine to raise the vibration of all bodies of water.
Brooke earned a degree in Environmental Education from Cornell University and for over 20 years has been developing “creative” environmental education, combining both artistic and scientific inspirations to foster a deeper and more conscious connection with the natural world. She has been the creative force behind the Parade of All Beings celebrations and programming (in both NY and PA) as well as traveling to river communities all over the country and performing water healing rituals that raise the energy of people and place through vibration, education, and celebration with The River Alchemy Project. In 2014 Brooke created Vox Lumina’s Green Scene as a pop-up performance venue to promote local environmentally friendly businesses and organizations and she continues to offer WILD WALKS in local parks to educate people about the wild edible and medicinal plants growing right underfoot.
Everything I do is to turn the eye toward Nature, it’s beauty, it’s intelligence, it’s fantastic organization, it’s rhythm, and especially it’s healing, and it’s gifts.
Brooke Smokelin of Chakra Yoga Healing, the founder and director of Chakra Activation Yoga and creator of the Chakra Activation Deck, is an experienced Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT) and YACEP (Continuing Education Provider), IKYTA certified Kundalini Yoga Teacher, Sound Healer, and Musician. For over 25 years she has studied with teachers in the Kundalini, Sivananda, Ashtanga, and Kriya Yoga traditions, as well as the American Sanskrit Institute.
She has a private sound therapy and chakra balancing practice in Pittsburgh, PA in which she uses specific yoga practices and sonic techniques to address specific physical and emotional conditions. In addition, Brooke offers her Chakra Activation Yoga as a creative and experiential medium to inform others with a knowledge of and techniques to embody their “full-spectrum” selves and IGNITE THE LIGHT within!
Over the years Brooke has worked with doctors and leaders in the Integrative Health arena. While living in NY she developed the "Embodiment Program” with Dr. Munoz-Silva, a mind-body protocol specifically for anxiety, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Spectrum, ADHD, and PTSD in adolescents. She is currently providing her Stress Management programming at the Washington Hospital/ Washington Health System and is a registered alternative care Provider with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Integrative Oncology.
For many moons Pittsburgh native Brooke Smokelin (Big Blue Sun, House of Woo) has been moving crowds with her fully emotional blend of rhythmic, rootsy guitar and sophisticated, soulful vocals. Brooke’s “organically grown soul music” moves through a variety of musical landscapes- blues, jazz, folk, world- “a veritable celebration of sound that highlights depth and creativity and is accentuated by extremely mindful lyrics.”(First Degree) We might hear the influence of Ricki Lee Jones and Bjork or Haale and Mazzy Star as well as yoga inspired trance- chanting from her self-released album Vox Lumina’s Music is Medicine (2006) and her touring gigs as a kirtan wallah and sound healer. Brooke’s concerts are often punctuated with the sounds of quartz crystal bowls, a powerful and unusual instrument generating resonant overtones and harmonics that provide a perfect backdrop- mysterious, etheric, captivating, ritualistic- to her incantations and rhythmic voicings.
On very special occasions Brooke transforms into Vox Lumina, the mystical, musical, mythical Queen of Orga, i.e. the natural world, and sings the Song of Light, the ancient Orga’n tale of the Original Ones- Sky Earth, Sun, Moon, and River- and how they dreamed themselves to be. The album-story Song of Light (2012) is now a multi-media performance montage that uses the creative mediums of myth, music, and image to raise awareness about the relationship we all have with nature. Each Vox Lumina performance produces a “vibrationally enhanced alchemical elixir” that is offered to the local bodies of water as musical medicine.
For over 20 years Brooke Smokelin has worked in the field of environmental education, engaging participants of all ages in classrooms, after schools, summer camps, senior programs, and nature centers, developing classroom and enrichment curriculum for public and private schools, consulting educators, training teachers, and facilitating public programs for the environment and the arts. Her educational approach encourages questioning, discovery, and an ever-growing sense of wonder with the natural world. She often uses both scientific and artistic methodology and technologies- storytelling, ceremony, poetry, and puppet-making as well as observing, measuring, mapmaking, and documenting- either separately or combined in educational enrichment or cultural arts programs that are accessible and enjoyable for all kinds of learners of all different ages. A Pittsburgh native and graduate of Cornell University, she has offered her unique environmental education programs at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Green and Innovation Festival at Hartwood Acres, the Environmental Charter School, Green Schools Academy, Assemble, Boyd Community Center, Larimer Community Center, and the Pittsburgh Arts Festival.
Learn MoreI am a musician, poet, performance artist, storyteller, creator of events, and environmental artist and educator. I earned a degree in Environmental Education from Cornell University and I have been developing “creative” environmental education, combining my artistic life and my knowledge of the natural world for good ends.
Most of all, I am a listener and an observer. I listen to the landscape and observe the passionate play and interplay of the elements of nature and bring the stories I see to life through music and myth.
I am Vox Lumina, the exiled Queen of Orga, returning to my beloved homeland to find it almost completely overrun by Syntha, the synthetics and their un-natural rate of deterioration, their destructive accumulation in our Organ soil, water, and skin. Everything I do is to turn the eye toward Nature, it’s beauty, it’s intelligence, it’s rhythm, it’s healing, and it’s gifts.
I have a story I have to tell. It is the creation story of my people, passed onto me by my mother, as it was told to her by her mother, for generation upon generation in the Land of Orga. It is the story of the Original Ones- Sky, Earth, Sun, Moon, and River- and how they dreamed themselves to be. It is the Song of Light.
It is my mission to sing/perform/share the Song of Light whenever possible, to awaken people to the beauty and intelligence of Nature so that we are all inspired to do what we can to preserve our world.
I am Vox Lumina, the Queen of Orga, the Land of Organically Generated Sound, Time, and Form. My world is the lucid language of the trees, the magnificent music of the water, the rhapsodic rhythm of the moon, the divine dance of the bees.
