Free. All Welcome.
We need places for purposeful, collective practice. We need places to be together, to remember, to be reminded, to lift each other up, and to be lifted up.
The SomaSJ Practice Community is a place to do just that. Through the intense and changing conditions within our communities and the world, we can learn together, grow together, and be on a path of embodying our visions and declarations. Here we can share embodied practice space with others committed to social and climate justice, to healing, to Land, and to a life-affirming future.
The SomaSJ Practice Community will gather monthly, for 90 minutes of practice. Each month we’ll explore a theme - from longing, to holding complexity, from polarization and trauma, to boundaries and love - and include collective practice and a somatic demo.
We’ll meet on a roving Tuesday each month - 2024 dates are below!
The SomaSJ practice community is a place for you to drop back into yourself with people who are doing the same. To reconnect with what matters to you, to our personal and collective yearnings, even amidst how hard this world can be. It is a place to strengthen your super powers, love your struggles and practice the small joys. Whether you are new to politicized somatics, or have been in practice for a decade, please join us.
Please bring your friends, your crew, your team and community. Join us for a practice space of joy, embodiment, healing, and collective action.
SomaSJ is a free and online accessible place to gather, deepen somatic practice in this Living Lineage, and build support, community and social action.
By opting in we’ll send you information about the monthly SomaSJ Practice Community sessions, the recording of last month's session, and information about other somatics and social justice opportunities throughout the year.
Staci Haines, Brandon Sturdivant, Erika Lyla and other guest teachers will rotate holding practice space monthly.
Staci Haines
Erika Lyla
Brandon Sturdivant
About the Somatic Facilitators/ Teachers
Staci K. Haines
Staci has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Staci is the author of "The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice" (North Atlantic Books 2019) and "Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma" (Cleis 1999, 2007).
Staci is a leader in the field of Somatics, focusing on how it can bring transformative capacity to social and climate justice movements, and help to heal the impacts of trauma and oppression. She leads online and in-person programs and partners with social justice organizations, recently teaming up with Healing Justice London, Equality Lab, and Crenshaw Dairy Mart. She is the co-founder and prior executive director of generative somatics, a senior teacher at Strozzi Institute, and a core contributor to the Strozzi methodology. In 1999 Staci founded generationFIVE, a non-profit whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations using transformative justice approaches.
Erika Lyla
Erika Lyla is a somatics coach + bodyworker + trainer + therapist + facilitator + activist + mother. Erika works with people to reveal their power, potential, and purpose. She guides with love and laughter towards life grounded in authenticity and shaped by dreams. She practices in unceded Ohlone land known as Oakland, CA and leads programs through generative somatics and Strozzi Institute. Erika is also a member of The Embodiment Institute’s Black Practitioner Cohort, an international group of Black transformational leaders.
Erika has been facilitating collective and personal transformation processes for over 15 years and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. She specializes in working with people facing psychiatric crises, survivors of sexual violence, and individuals healing from complex trauma. Prior to expanding her private practice, Erika supported individuals in navigating the medical industrial complex as a social worker, and also worked as a youth organizer and with school age children as an after school teacher and program director.
Brandon Sturdivant
Brandon Sturdivant helped build the capacity of East Bay organizations through co-founding the Justice Reinvestment Coalition, which secured half of state realignment funds in support of reducing probation terms and policies that expand opportunities for employment and access for community services for formerly incarcerated people. As co-founders of Mass Liberation Project, an abolitionist organization that works to train, coach, and develop black organizers who are directly impacted by incarceration, Brandon along with Alex Muhammad helped to seed the creation of four new femme-led abolitionist organizations: Mass Lib Arizona, Michigan Liberation, Mass Lib Nevada, and Life After Release (DMV).
In addition, working on the principle that transforming systems requires transforming ourselves, Mass Liberation Project has instituted “Return & Reclaim,” taking black formerly incarcerated organizers to Ghana to reclaim their ancestral heritage as an act of generational resistance. Lastly, Brandon has been studying and teaching somatics for 7 years through generative somatics, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Strozzi Institute, and in programs and courses with Staci Haines.
Our SomaSJ Practice Community will gather on roving Tuesdays each month, from 9 -10:30am PT/ 12-1:30pm ET/ 6-7:30pm CET (Central European time)
Here is a complete listing
of 2024 dates:
March: Longing- our own and our collective desires
Tuesday, March 12thApril: Boundaries. Saying yes and nope- to protect, care for, explore, connect and separate.
April 9thMay: Polarization and Trauma
Tuesday May 7thJune: Tuesday, June 4th
July: Tuesday, July 9th
August: Tuesday, Aug 6th
Sept: Tuesday, Sept 3rd
Oct: Tuesday, Oct 1st
Nov: Tuesday, Nov 19th
Dec: Winter Break- we’ll see you again in January
Free. All Welcome.
By opting in we’ll send you information about the monthly SomaSJ Practice Community sessions, the recording of last month's session, and information about other somatics and social justice opportunities throughout the year.