It is your nature to be free*

this work facilitates returning to your nature

Lyra believes that just as ease, wholeness, and balance are inherent to the human body, so equity**, justice, and liberation*** are inherent to the social body. Her work is devoted to bring awareness and choice to the habitual ways in which we interrupt our innate resources. This allows us to dismantle the habits and structures that interrupt our innate equity and liberation, giving us access to individual health and ease while working towards social liberation. While Lyra currently leads through the portal of the individual body, her work is also happening at the social level and explores the intersection of the two. Lyra is a heterosexual, white-identified, cis-gender woman, with a history of chronic pain and chronic illness, and uses the pronouns she/her/hers. She is engaged in ongoing personal anti-racist and liberatory education with mentors, peers, and students. It is critical to Lyra’s work and teaching.

Lyra is creatively collaborating with Sonali Sangeeta Balajee and her organization Our Bodhi Project to develop a curriculum of resilience, belonging, and sustainability for people who work in racial justice and other justice related fields. The curriculum is based in Alexander Technique and Sonali’s Embodying Belonging and Co-Liberation Frame. We offer trainings and workshops. Email lyra@atpdx.org for more information.

Alexander Technique Portland / Philadelphia hosts a bi-monthly clinic in order to make Alexander Technique accessible to lower income and minoritized communities and those with no previous experience of the work. Check upcoming dates and book a clinic session here.

 * Free - I use the word free or freedom to express a truth about our human nature. I do not intend to negate or ignore the reality of generational/historical trauma and the experience of oppression. Rather I argue that it is not in our innate nature to be oppressors or to be oppressed, that our nature is one of freedom. I know this is true within our individual physical bodies and I believe it to be true within the social body.

** Equity - I use the word equity to express a social condition as well as an individual condition. It is my personal experience that both equity and inequity manifest as physical/somatic experiences inside individuals. In other words, we "wear" them, our bodies change under conditions of equity and inequity.

*** Liberation - I use liberation to express a return to our nature of freedom through the dismantling of oppressive structures. It is my personal experience that just as these structures inhibit our social nature of wholeness, interconnectedness, and freedom, they also inhibit our personal, individual, and physical wholeness, interconnectedness, and freedom. So I use liberation both on the level of the social body as well as the individual body.