Alex Mazerolle, also known as Ally Maz, has been leading a retreat for girls and non-binary youth for over a decade. In that time, she witnessed the generational change in teens from millennials to Gen Z.
The pandemic forced her Girlvana retreat to be paused, but Mazerolle decided that this year, it was "time to bring it back.”
While some things remain a universal experience, like coming of age and transitioning from childhood to adulthood, social media has played a major role in the differences between the teens that Mazerolle has met in the last 12 years.
After seeing everything teens were going through during and after the pandemic, "I couldn’t not do it,” she tells V.I.A. over the phone. “Teens have been through so much and we're starting to see the effects of it.”
Social media was crucial to teens during the pandemic, which Mazerolle says has only compounded issues they were already facing.
When Mazerolle first started the retreat, social media was new. Millennials were still posting pictures of their food and little else. Sure, they had Cosmo magazine teaching them how to lose five pounds in five days but Gen Z experiences that same pressure plus the pressure of politics and climate change.
Social media has meant that teens suffer from the information overload of groundbreaking life-changing stuff.
"It's not conversations their parents are having, they are having political conversations," she says. "They are bombarded with the weight of the world."
When the pandemic hit, teens were suddenly spending so much time online without any real interactions at a formative age when friends are everything, community is everything, she expands.
How the retreat is meant to help
The retreat aims to offer "impactful and authentic experiences” by getting out in nature, off of phones, and having real-life community interactions and conversations that are multi-generational, explains Mazerolle.
It facilitates raw conversations and helps young girls feel connected to their bodies, and remember their worth through yoga, meditation, mentorship, and community.
Mazerolle was 24 when she first started the Girlvana retreat, which initially aimed to create space for youth to learn yoga and mindfulness.
As a teen, Mazerolle suffered from disordered eating, depression, and anxiety. When studying to be a yoga teacher she realized the skills she was acquiring, like breathwork, grounding techniques, and meditation would have been useful tools to help her through panic attacks and self-hatred. She says that if she had found yoga at 14 she may have felt less at war with her body.
She started the retreat to help impart that knowledge to teens who may be in need of the same tools. She'd done yoga retreats with adults before and thought that with teens the results would be similar.
What she didn't anticipate was how real the conversations in between yoga sessions would get.
"They were so powerful,” she says.
This year, Girlvana will take place from August 14 to 18 on Vancouver Island for girls and non-binary youth ages 14-19.
