Justloveforest

Justloveforest A 716-acre nature sanctuary in Poetry, GA to roam free and be. Come - remember you are nature. 🩵🌲

Just Love Forest offers certified forest therapy, retreats, and sacred gatherings rooted in love, presence, and community.

08/26/2026

We’re getting excited. 🌲🧡

After a couple of years of rest since hosting our last festival, it feels really good to be gathering the community for something like this again.

We made this little reel from a collection of photos from our first festival, Steward’s Carnival, which we gathered for over several beautiful years. Looking back through them brought up so many memories. There are familiar faces, big smiles, music, movement, creativity, and that particular kind of magic that happens when a bunch of people come together simply to celebrate being alive.

And one of the sweetest parts is that many of the people in these old photos are still here, now helping us dream, shape, and co-create what comes next.

This October, we get to come back together in the forest.

To sing together.
Make art together.
Learn and share with one another.
Move our bodies.
Dance under the stars.
Eat good food.
Spend time outside.
And remember how good it feels to be in community.

Just Love Forest Fest is a little over a month away, and the good vibes are starting to build.

October 2–4, 2026
Poetry, Georgia

www.justloveforest.com/forestfest

08/20/2026

Walking through the forest today, I spotted the first purple beautyberries of the season. 💜

And just like that, we’re back to this time of year again.

There are these small markers the forest gives us - not dates on a calendar, but colors, sounds, ripenings, and returns. The first beautyberries always feel like one of them. A little flash of impossible purple along the trail, quietly announcing that summer is beginning its long turn toward fall.

Year after year, the forest keeps time in its own way.

And if we’re paying attention, we get to keep time with it.

We are nature.

08/18/2026

Applications are now open for our Fall Sevak Program at Just Love Forest. 🌲

Sofia, a wonderful sevak here, created this little reel about her time so far to give you a view into the life of service with us. She’ll be departing the forest this fall and is exploring new opportunities. If you or someone you know would like to reach out, her email is [email protected].

We’re inviting a small number of people to come live in residence with us for one to three months, entering into the rhythms of spiritual practice, community life, tending the land, and sacred service.

Seva is the practice of selfless service - offering our time, energy, and presence to something larger than ourselves. The Sevak Program is an opportunity to explore that practice not simply as an idea, but as a way of living.

Days at the forest weave together spiritual practice, time in nature, shared meals, community, solitude, and hands-on service in support of the ashram and the land.

If you feel called to step outside the rhythms of ordinary life for a time and explore what it means to live a life of sacred service, we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about the program and submit an application so we can connect:

www.justloveforest.com/sevak

Love Everyone · Serve Everyone · Remember God. 🧡

08/17/2026

Sacred community is part of the practice. 🧡

This weekend, we had the joy of gathering for the Sacred Community Projects Retreat at the beautiful Salt Spring Centre of Yoga in British Columbia. It’s a place with deep roots in devotional practice and community life, founded through the teachings and inspiration of Baba Hari Dass and nurtured by generations of practitioners.

As Just Love Forest continues to grow, we feel how important it is to prioritize time with satsang globally - spiritual community whose hearts, practices, and ways of being in the world resonate deeply with our own.

It has been such a joy witnessing everything Sitaram Das continues to create through Sacred Community Project and everything that emerges when a community begins creating together. No one person makes a sacred community. We build it through relationship, practice, service, trust, and the willingness to keep showing up for one another.

In so many ways, it feels like we’re walking parallel paths: tending devotional practices, experimenting with what spiritual community can look like in our time, and deepening the spiritual friendships that sustain the whole journey.

And perhaps the sweetest part has been the reunion - embracing so many friends who traveled to Just Love Forest for the Sacred Community Summit this spring, meeting new ones here, and watching the circle continue to widen.

Deep thanks to entire there for hosting us with us generously beautiful hearts.

One satsang leads to another.
One friendship leads to another.
One act of devotion inspires another.

And somehow, the family just keeps growing. 🕉️🌲❤️

Grateful for this beautiful web of sacred friendship and for everyone tending their little corner of it.

Sacred Community Project Sitaram Dass Salt Spring Centre of Yoga

08/14/2026

One of the things we love most about Just Love Forest is that the forest doesn’t really end at our boundaries.

The Pinhoti Trail runs right alongside our land l, meaning we can walk out our front door, step onto the trail, and just… keep going.

Head north on the Pinhoti and eventually it meets the Benton MacKaye Trail, which carries you to Springer Mountain, the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. From there, you could keep walking all the way to Maine.

Turn the other direction and the Pinhoti becomes part of the larger Eastern Continental Trail route, eventually connecting toward the Florida Trail and all the way down to the Florida Keys.

It’s kind of wild to think about.

The trail outside our door is part of something so much bigger - an ancient mountain landscape connected by thousands of miles of footpath.

This reel is from the Simms Mountain section of the Pinhoti, just down the way from Just Love Forest, looking up at one of the beautiful old railroad trusses that still remains along the trail.

Sometimes we walk a few miles.

And sometimes it’s enough just knowing we could keep walking. 🌲🥾

08/13/2026

🌲 FOREST FEST REGISTRATION IS OPEN! 🌲

www.justloveforest.com/forestfest

October 2–4, we’re gathering at Just Love Forest for a wholesome weekend rooted in community, nature, creativity, movement, music, and the sacred.

Throughout the weekend, 20+ workshops and experiences will be offered by members of our extended community - yoga, poetry writing, Indigenous wisdom, shamanic journeying, meditation, breathwork, movement, nature connection, somatic healing, sound baths, wellbeing workshops, nature art, spiritual exploration, permaculture, green burial & native plant education, ecstatic dance, acoustic music, kirtan and more.

As the sun goes down, we’ll move from learning into celebration with acoustic & devotional music Friday night, a three-hour ecstatic dance journey under the stars with CALAGNA on Saturday, and a 5Rhythms Dance Experience with Marissa Skolky as part of our Sunday closing.

In times of change and uncertainty, gathering matters. This is an invitation to slow down, reconnect, learn from one another, celebrate, and remember that we are part of something beautiful and alive.

Together, we heal.
Together, we grow.
Together, we thrive.

Registration opens TODAY. ❤️

October 2–4, 2026
Just Love Forest · Poetry, Georgia

www.justloveforest.com/forestfest

Just Love, always, 🩵

08/07/2026

Three weeks from today, we’ll gather again in the forest for our 4th annual Ram Dass Summer Camp. 🌿🙏🏼

One of the great joys of this gathering is simply getting to share the Bhakti path- the path of love and devotion.

A path that asks: what if unconditional love doesn’t have to remain a beautiful idea? What if it can become something we actually experience through chanting, service, stillness, nature, community, and opening the heart?

You don’t need to know the chants. You don’t need to call yourself spiritual. You don’t need to believe anything in particular.

Just bring your curiosity 💛

This year is especially meaningful as we’ll consecrate Just Love Forest Ashram, culminating in an all-night Hanuman fire vigil on Bhakti Mountain sharing chanting, readings, sacred fire and quiet reflection from sunset to sunrise.

RAM DASS SUMMER CAMP
🌲 August 28–30, 2026
📍 Just Love Forest · Poetry, Georgia
🕉️ Kirtan · Aarti · Meditation · Breathwork · Movement · Forest Therapy · Satsang
🔥 Ashram Consecration + All-Night Hanuman Jagran
🥗 Plant-based meals included
⛺ Self-camping: $150+ suggested contribution
🏕️ Hosted tent options available
🌙 Optional Thursday early arrival + Sunday night stay
💛 Volunteer support available if cost is a barrier.

Come experience it for yourself.

justloveforest.com/ramdass

07/29/2026

Today is Guru Purnima.

For many in the yogic traditions, this is a day of honoring the guru - the one who helps remove darkness and reveal what has always been true.

The word guru is often translated as “teacher,” but it points to something deeper. Not someone who asks us to follow them, but someone who helps us remember ourselves.

Historically, Guru Purnima has been celebrated in India for thousands of years. It falls on the first full moon after the summer solstice and has long been a day to express gratitude to the teachers, sages, mentors, elders, and lineages that have carried wisdom from one generation to the next.

Whether or not you belong to this tradition, I think the invitation is universal.

Who has helped you become more yourself?

Who challenged you when it would’ve been easier to let you stay comfortable?

Who embodied a way of living that quietly changed your own?

And perhaps just as importantly…

What books, forests, animals, hardships, or moments of grace have become your teachers?

Today I’m especially holding Neem Karoli Baba and Anandamayi Ma in my heart.

This little devotional space sits above where I purify my drinking water each day. Almost every morning, as I fill my glass, I find myself looking up at them with gratitude before taking in that life-giving water. It’s become one of those quiet rituals that gently reminds me of the blessings they’ve brought into my life, my sadhana, and ultimately into this forest.

Today, I simply want to say thank you to them, and to all the teachers, seen and unseen, whose love continues to guide us.

🌕 Happy Guru Purnima.

07/29/2026

Our very first Just Love Forest pumpkin. 🍂🎃

You may still be deep in the heat of summer… but the garden is already whispering that we’re heading somewhere else.

The light is changing. The mornings are a little quieter.
And nature, as always, knows before we do.

In just 55 days, we’ll reach the Fall Equinox. Until then, we’ll keep watching, tending, and letting the forest remind us that every season arrives in its own time.

07/27/2026

Standing here overlooking this valley, it’s impossible not to wonder…

How many stories once lived here that have simply been forgotten?

So much of the history of this place was lost or scattered as the Cherokee people were displaced. Ancient place names faded. Oral traditions were interrupted. Villages that were once known to everyone became little more than faint echoes on old maps and in a handful of journals.

One of those places is Chatuga Town—also recorded in historic sources with spellings like Chatuga, Chattooga, Chatooga, and Chattugaville. The name itself is generally understood to come from a Cherokee word associated with “rock,” a fitting description for this beautiful river valley.

Just a mile or so from Just Love Forest stood what historians believe was one of the Cherokee’s most important cultural centers in the Southeast. Yet today, remarkably little is widely known about it.

We’ve been spending countless hours reading the journals and writings of the missionary Rev. Daniel Sabin Butrick, along with the remarkable Payne–Butrick Papers, trying to piece together what life looked like here before removal. They offer rare glimpses into a world that has largely disappeared.

Every old map, every journal entry, every forgotten trail adds another small piece to the story.

To me, this is part of what it means to be a steward—not just caring for the forests, rivers, and wildlife, but also honoring the people who loved this land long before we arrived and helping preserve the stories that still remain.

We’ll keep searching. We’ll keep learning.
And we’ll keep sharing the beautiful mysteries of this extraordinary place.

Just Love, always, 💚

Address

Just Love Forest
Poetry, GA
30730

Telephone

+16784878055

Website

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