Starting Friday, more than 1,000 yoga teachers, wellness professionals and curious first-timers will descend on Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms for the inaugural Denver Yoga Summit, a three-day festival packed with over 90 workshops, panels and movement sessions spread across six open-air practice spaces. The event runs from Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13 at the 700-acre working farm and native plant refuge at 8500 W. Deer Creek Canyon Road in Littleton, and organizers designed it to work for everyone from total beginners to studio owners chasing continuing education credits.
The summit was dreamed up by Brittany Hopkins Switlick, founder of Container Collective Yoga, after she closed her Lakewood studio in 2021 and started asking why a yoga-heavy city like Denver didn't already have its own festival, according to Westword. She brought the idea to Nicki Peace, Jamie Martinico, Elaine Donovan and Catherine Moede, and the five of them spent the five months before the event hosting free weekly yoga sessions to build buzz. Hopkins Switlick discovered a defunct 2016 Denver yoga festival website and, unable to snag the original domain, bought the next closest one available for the new event, denveryogasummit.com.
Six Practice Spaces, Eight Sessions At Once
Chatfield Farms was chosen specifically because its sprawling grounds allow up to eight simultaneous programs to run at once, Hopkins Switlick said, with session sizes ranging from intimate gatherings of 25 up to crowds of more than 100. According to SF Yoga Mag, the six open-air spaces let the summit run power flow, yin yoga, chair yoga and meditation tracks concurrently across the farm's native landscape. The most exclusive setting is the Secret Garden, which will host groups of up to 40 people for smaller discussion-style sessions.
The venue itself carries deep local history. Managed in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Chatfield Farms is a 700-acre native plant refuge and historic working farm in Jefferson County featuring structures like the 1874 Deer Creek Schoolhouse and a 1918 dairy barn, according to Denver Botanic Gardens. The property also includes 2.5 miles of nature trails and an active Community Supported Agriculture program, and Hoodline previously reported that Chatfield Farms opened a 1.2-megawatt agrivoltaic solar garden in 2024, whose 2,200 elevated panels shade vegetable crops while donating 80% of the energy savings to low-income Denver households.
According to Denver Botanic Gardens' signed final report and financial statements, the City entered into an agreement with the Army Corps on April 28, 1975, for 700 acres of land near Chatfield State Park. Denver Botanic Gardens' Land Line 2025 publication described Chatfield Farms as a 700-acre native plant refuge with an active farm in Jefferson County and noted that it was celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025.
Headliners, Adaptive Yoga And A DJ Set
Programming draws on teachers from six local boutique studios alongside national and international presenters. Adaptive yoga specialist Abigail Atkinson, who recovered from a cerebellar stroke, will lead a movement session, as will combat veteran, bilateral amputee and global inspirational speaker Dan Nevins, per the same Westword account. Swami Nischala Joy Devi is scheduled to lead classes on meditation and the Bhagavad Gita, and DJs Sol Rising and Mose will headline musical sets. A vendor market featuring local businesses will run throughout the weekend alongside breathwork classes and sound bath sessions.
“It's basically like a yoga retreat without having to go anywhere,” Hopkins Switlick told Westword. Organizers built three sample schedules — for beginners, intermediate participants and teachers seeking continuing education credits — with advance online registration available for each individual program, although Hopkins Switlick said, “You don’t have to sign up,” and some sessions may warrant registration. Full weekend passes run $555 for general attendees and $633 for teachers pursuing continuing education, while single day passes range from $111 to $249; a 15% discount is available with the code WESTWORD15.
Where The Ticket Money Goes
Five percent of ticket proceeds will be split among five nonprofits, a detail organizers built into the summit's mission from the start. Comeback Yoga provides free, trauma-informed yoga classes and teacher-training scholarships to Colorado veterans and service members, according to Comeback Yoga.
Urban Sanctuary is described as Denver's only Black female-owned yoga studio and focuses on inclusive space for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. Founded in 2016 by former police officer Ali Duncan, the studio employs about 20 teachers, as reported by 9News.
LoveYourBrain offers yoga and other services to people with traumatic brain injuries, per LoveYourBrain. The Ardent Grove Foundation, meanwhile, offers low-cost therapy, according to the Ardent Grove Foundation.
Rounding out the beneficiaries is Wellness4Every1, which provides after-school programming, according to Wellness4Every1.
According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the percentage of U.S. adults who practiced yoga increased from 5.0 percent in 2002 to 15.8 percent in 2022.
The summit lands in a city with a boutique yoga scene. This weekend's gathering aims to bring that scattered community together under one roof — or, in this case, one open sky.
