Embodying Resilience

Do you need support in your justice efforts and antiracist practices, personally or professionally? Does your body, nervous system, and heart need care? Are you interested in learning ways to tap into resilience, resource, and rest? 

Us too.

Sonali Sangeeta Balajee and Lyra Butler-Denman have co-created this series to access belonging and resources in our bodies as we face fear, stress, and isolation. It will include practical somatic exercises to bring directly into your life, unscripted creative dialogue between the facilitators, and guidance for the time in between sessions.  We have been exploring the parallels of working with justice and co-liberation in the individual body and the social body together for over five years. We are excited to bring all we’ve learned to this present moment of deep need through this four session series. We hope you’ll join us. 

about the series

This series centers on our collective well-being and endurance in justice efforts and personal antiracist practice. We will draw from the fields of belonging, organizing, social justice, Alexander Technique, mindfulness, and artistic practice. Each session will be focused on part of Sonali’s Embodying Belonging and Co-liberation frame (Beloved, Bestill, Behold, Believe, Become, Belong). We will weave together conversation, creativity, and straightforward body practices that can be applied directly to your daily life. 

We ask that you participate by reflecting, writing, and being with yourself and your experiences. Please come ready to absorb and be with, as opposed to be "on" and perform. We're setting it up this way to create a space that is restorative. We acknowledge that participants will be at a variety of places on the journey of social justice and racial equity. We are aware that there can be much harm done in bringing people together with varying capacities, especially to BIPOC folks. It is our intention to create a space that is loving, life-giving, and useful. We will send out a brief intake form to help us ground the course in your experiences.

More about us

We believe that attending to who we are, and the quality of our beings in relationship to others and the world, is critical to contributing to the health and well-being of the planet, and ourselves. We believe that health, ease, efficiency, interconnectedness, love, and belonging are inherent to our nature as individuals and a collective.

We are interested in actively confronting the usual practice of separating body, mind, and spirit from one another. We challenge the belief that caring for our own beings is separate from our daily lives and our work for the greater good. 

We focus on promoting life-sustaining forces and structures. We focus on deconstructing what gets in the way of our innate belonging. We focus on shifting our perception and consciousness to assist us on the journey. 

Sonali Sangeeta Balajee is an activist, meditation and yoga facilitator, mother, artist, and deep learner. She is the founder of Our Bodhi Project and creator of the Embodying Belonging and Co-liberation frame. She served as a Senior Fellow with the Othering and Belonging Institute (UC Berkeley), focusing on how spirituality, belonging, healing, equity, and decolonizing ground improves our social and individual well-being. She also independently consults in a variety of sectors around these areas.  Sonali is a queer woman of color, who identifies as an Indian Sri Lankan born in the States. She is cis-gender, and uses the pronouns she, her, and hers. 

Lyra Butler-Denman is an artist, movement teacher, and Alexander Technique teacher with a history of activism. She is the founder of Alexander Technique Portland and a faculty member of the Contemporary Alexander School and the Alexander Alliance International. She believes that it is our nature to be free, and her work facilitates returning to our nature. She provides tools to access innate coordination, movement, and ease in the actions of daily life. She works with trauma and belief systems and the way they act on and affect our bodies and our physical experience. She is specifically interested in how these realms affect and create equity/inequity. Lyra is a heterosexual, white-identified, cis-gender woman and uses the pronouns she, her, and hers.

While the sessions will be recorded, the recording will only include Sonali and Lyra and will not include the chat, comments, or responses of the participants to ensure we create a confidential, reflective place.