Welcome to JoySchool
We’re so glad you’re here.
about joyschoolWe started JoySchool because we believe healing is one of the most important things a person can do — and the path there doesn't have to be heavy. We've seen it happen in moments of laughter just as much as moments of tears. In a deep breath. In a room full of people finally feeling safe enough to be themselves.
We're Donna and Maddi Farchione, mother-daughter duo and fellow travelers who take the inner work seriously — just not ourselves! We bring our whole hearts into everything we do, and we created this space for you to do the same. Because coming alive? It's allowed to feel really, really good.
For Donna and Maddi, it started with co-leading 200-hour yoga teacher trainings — a mother and daughter finding a natural synergy that was impossible to ignore. That collaboration grew into a calling, and JoySchool is where that calling lives.
Here, yoga and Internal Family Systems come together in community experiences designed to help people turn inward and discover their own inner healer. Nothing brings us more joy than witnessing the moment when someone recognizes — perhaps for the first time — that the wisdom they were searching for was within them all along.
Together, we step back into the world a little more whole, a little more loving, and a little more ourselves.
Some things begin as joy and reveal themselves as purpose.
Our story
Our missionAt JoySchool, we believe that when we stop overriding the body and start listening to it, we unlock one of our most powerful healing resources. The sensations and signals it carries are clues that, when met with curiosity and compassion, can open the door to deeper understanding and wholeness.
By bringing together the Internal Family Systems framework with the power of movement, we offer people a direct, lived experience of the healing wisdom that already lives within them — fostering self-compassion, inner clarity, and the confidence to live with intention and joy.
The healing wisdom you’re looking for already lives within you.
Donna and Maddi share a deep commitment to the IFS model. Together they return each summer to study with IFS founder Richard Schwartz at the Cape Cod Institute.
The Foundations of JoySchool
Healing
Healing isn't a destination — it's a commitment to connecting with inner and outer resources in order to embody wholeness. Through Internal Family Systems in action, we help you find your way to your own inner healing wisdom. And the thing is, it works.
Movement
The body knows things. In the busyness of life, we lose touch with that. We offer opportunities to move and sense into that wisdom — so you can work in partnership with your own system, all of it, on your path to wholeness. Our retreats and circles weave together yoga, somatic work, and breathing practices to help you come home to that body wisdom.
Community
You're not meant to go it alone. The most profound shifts often happen in community. Through retreats, healing circles, and group experiences rooted in IFS, we create space to connect, learn, and yes, have fun!
Join us at Menla this September! Through IFS-guided inquiry, group healing circles and yoga you’ll experience real, intimate connection to the parts of you waiting to be heard — and healed.