Interested in booking a workshop or class tailored to your group, activity or interests? Please email lyra@atpdx.org.

Join us to explore specific yin practices for our bodies, minds, and spirits where somatics and justice meet.

This session is designed to offer rest in real-time breathwork, access to resource, and tangible accessible practices for finding more ease and resilience in your body. This online offering is led by Lyra Butler-Denman, an artist, somatic practitioner and Contemporary Alexander teacher, moderated by Sonali Sangeeta Balajee founder and co-director of the Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA), and hosted by SSoMA’s House of Yin. Lyra's work lives where somatics and justice overlap, centering functional anatomy, living systems, and the neurobiology of change. She partners with social change organizations as well as individuals to develop new ways of thinking, new levels of individual and community care, and alternatives to extractive and oppressive practices. Sonali works at the intersection of spirit, politics, belonging, equity, and deep transformative change. She is the founder of Our Bodhi Project, a spiritual and political project that supports healthy movement-building and organizing through deepening our critical analyses, centering the health of all living systems, and enlivening the connection between social and collectively spiritual wellness.

The suggested donation for this session is $60 (which contributes to our two speakers’ costs) or $75 (which helps us cover the costs of administration and technical support). We are grateful for any support. If you are not in a position to do so, just register - everyone is welcome.

Speakers

past offerings

Bodies are amazing systems designed for ease, strength, and longevity but we don't get blueprints. Explore structures and relationships, learn common misconceptions that lead to injury, and tap into your innately brilliant and capable body.

Come examine the movement and mechanics of your body, and how to be easeful in it. We’ll also explore the relative tension or ease of the larger social body and your relationship with and inside of it.

We are shaped by our conditions, our experiences, and our belief systems (chosen and inherited). We are both deeply interconnected and diverse. Our bodies are changed by our environment and the way we are embodied changes the spaces we’re in. This class will focus on finding ease, pleasure, and belonging in your individual body and as you relate to the world.

There will also be plenty of play and time for your specific needs and desires.

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. 

This workshop will explore mask studies and the Alexander Technique to:

• Recognize physical imbalance and interference patterns

• Access new choices that support a performer’s body and craft

• Discover ease, versatility, and capacity

Mask play provides a platform for exploring certain movement fundamentals and the essentials for depicting the imaginative world of the stage. Mask, in particular Jacques Lecoq’s concept of neutral mask, examines the way movement serves the actor and how tension creates character, space, and story. It uses movements to really “come to grips” with how habits interfere with movement and expression. As the work on the neutral mask helps us begin to identify habits and patterns, the Alexander Work creates alternatives in our bodies and minds, helping us rediscover ease, capacity, and versatility. By creating more choice and capacity, the Alexander work supports our range, skill, and artistry as performers. 

During the winter, our roots and branches still, the cold and dark nights signaling time for renewal, reflection, and remembering.   Light is nurtured through life-giving spaces and activities, reminding us of the green wicks in our trees and the interconnectedness of all phases of life.

We will explore what is most sacred to us in the work, getting clearer on what we believe, and exploring what it means to become/embody the work from a liberatory perspective. Together we will delve into a deeper experiential understanding of the interplay between what we love, our beliefs, our actions, and our bodies. Our time together will be more about depth than breadth, and we intend to create a restorative, gentle, and caring space, a space for loving critical inquiry.   This will be led by Sonali Sangeeta Balajee and Lyra Butler-Denman, a multiracial, multi-positioned team, and is intended for a multi-positioned group of participants.