Empowered Spaces

✨New Series with Laurie starting in July✨

Finding Ground is A Yoga & Meditation Series for Nervous System Healing in Community.

This 4-week yoga and meditation series is to help you reconnect with yourself, calm your nervous system, and find steadiness—both within and around you—during uncertain and challenging times.

If you’re feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or in need of a gentle retreat, this series is here to support you—whether you’re new to yoga and meditation or already have a practice.

The practices and teachings of yoga offer a path of slowing down, tuning into the wisdom of the body, and releasing stuck energy and emotions.

Practicing in a shared space adds to these already-powerful benefits by fostering community, connection, and support.

Each session will include an intentionally-sequenced practice of:

✨gentle yoga asana (movement/ physical shapes)
✨yin yoga (a slow, meditative practice that involves holding seated or reclining shapes for longer durations)
✨breath work, meditation, mudra (symbolic hand gestures)
✨opportunities for reflection (with optional sharing).

You’ll also receive encouragement and guidance for building a simple home practice, including audio recordings to support you between sessions.

Over our four weeks together, we’ll explore what it means to feel grounded—physically, emotionally, and in community.

This series is based on the teachings of The Trauma-Conscious Yoga Method.

Laurie teaches in a trauma-informed way: offering choices throughout the practice, inviting each participant to move at a pace that feels physically and emotionally safe, and guiding with verbal cues and demonstration (no physical touch).

Sign up for the whole series or drop in.

🗓️ Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00pm
July 7-28, 2026

The body doesn’t heal in isolation.

Your nervous system learned what it knows in relationship — with people, with places, with the conditions you were handed.

Healing therefore asks the same of us: connection, context, community. This is the foundation of everything we do at Empowered Spaces. Healing isn’t a solo project.

Healing isn't asking you to be calm right now.

It's asking you to stop overriding yourself.

Because here's what calm can look like when it IS NOT actually healing:

shutting down. Going quiet. Being good at the expense of being alive. Numbing the sensation, skipping past the feeling, intellectualizing everything until the body is somewhere far away and manageable.

We are so well-trained in this.

Don't feel. Don't make it a big deal. Keep it together.

And we call that coping. Sometimes we even call it healing.

But presence — real presence — asks you to stay in contact with what's actually moving through you.

The grief. The tenderness. The rage. All of it.

Without abandoning any part of yourself.

Presence isn't calm. It's contact.

And contact — with yourself, with each other, with this world we're living in — is where healing actually begins.

my dear friend, your feelings are not the problem. They are the guide.

with love and solidarity,
Kelly

Your body has been holding something.

Maybe you don’t have words for it yet. Maybe it shows up as tightness, as fatigue, as that low hum of too much. Your nervous system knows, even when your mind doesn’t.

This is an invitation to let it move.

Beginning this month, Gayla Downey, RYT-500 is offering a monthly somatic movement + sound healing experience series.

Each session weaves somatic yoga, intuitive movement, breath, and live sound — Himalayan bowls, gongs, and chimes — to support the unwinding of what your body has been carrying.

This isn’t about fixing or forcing. It’s about returning, at your own rhythm, in your own way.

✦ Release & Reconnect: A Somatic Movement + Sound Healing Experience
Saturday, June 6 · 9:00–10:45 AM

This offering is especially supportive for those feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected, and for anyone seeking a safe space to soften and rest.

Pride Month is a call to action.

Not just to celebrate, but to deepen our understanding of what justice-rooted, trauma-informed care actually requires.

Trauma-informed care that isn’t justice-rooted IS NOT trauma-informed. This is not a values add-on. It is the work itself.

If we are doing body-based work, we have to understand what has been done to bodies politically.

Q***r and trans bodies have been — and continue to be — policed, pathologized, and legislated against.

That history doesn’t stay outside the therapy room, outside the yoga studio, or off the meditation cushion.

It lives in the nervous system. In chronic vigilance. In the breath that never fully releases. In the parts of the self that learned to go quiet just to survive.

To work with the body is to work with all of this.

When we understand this, our work changes. We stop treating the body as separate from the systems it moves through.

We recognize that a nervous system shaped by chronic harm needs more than skillful technique, it needs to know it is seen and safe.

That the space it has entered is honest about the world it came from.

That is when something deeper becomes possible.

Justice-rooted care asks something of us as practitioners.

It asks us to hold a politicized lens because healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in systems that are still causing harm.

It asks us to design our spaces, our policies, and our practices around the practice of co-creating real safety, not just welcoming language.

It asks us to keep learning, to be willing to be uncomfortable, and to understand that our own growth is part of the work.

To my fellow practitioners — this is not just a question for June. It is who we are committed to being in every room, every session, every space we tend.

To the q***r and trans community — you deserve care that sees your whole body, your whole history, and the world you are navigating. Care that is not neutral.

With love and solidarity,
Kelly

It was a cherry kind-a-day 🍒

There is so much abundance in this sweet little garden and orchard.

The Empowered Spaces Community Garden is entering its 7th season, and it remains one of the most alive things we do at Empowered Spaces.

Because it’s the most literal expression of what we believe — that healing happens in relationship. With each other. With the earth. With our community.

We grow here cooperatively. No individual plots, just shared hands and shared harvest.

Most of what we grow leaves this land and feeds neighbors across St. Louis. That’s not a side project. That’s the whole point.

And what I’ve learned over seven seasons is that the garden tends us right back. Something happens when we put our hands in the soil together. Something settles. Something opens.

If you are looking for community, we would love for you to join us. We are here to take care of one another.

Deep gratitude for volunteers from joining us today as well!

Staying present right now takes something.

It takes having places to be held, people who understand, and practices that help you return to yourself when the weight gets heavy.

Empowered Spaces exists to be that for anyone doing the work of healing and the harder work of staying awake and engaged while the world asks so much of us.

We are a trauma-informed, anti-racist, gender-affirming, equity-rooted community.

We believe healing is collective.

We believe the inner work and the outer work are inseparable.

We tend to ourselves so we can tend to the world.

We resource ourselves so we can be in right relationship with our bodies, with each other, with the land, and with what this moment is asking of us.

If you’ve been looking for a community that holds both the personal and the political — both the somatic and the systemic — this community is for you. There’s a place for you here.

Share with us in the comments what helps you return to presence when things get heavy?

Your grief is NOT a disorder. Your hypervigilance is NOT a flaw. Your body’s response to an unsafe world is NOT something to be fixed.

Dominant culture has spent a long time teaching us to mistrust ourselves, to see our reactions as problems, our pain as weakness, our emotions as disorders, our nervous systems as broken.

That’s not an accident. Pathologizing human responses to harm keeps people focused inward, on what’s “wrong” with them, rather than outward, on the conditions that caused the harm.

It’s easier to prescribe a diagnosis than to reckon with the world that made the wound.

And so many of us have internalized that story.

We’ve sat with the shame of not being able to “just get over it.”

We’ve tried to manage, suppress, push through, wondering why we can’t seem to function the way we’re “supposed to”.

We’ve been handed frameworks that locate the problem inside our bodies, inside our minds, inside us, as if we arrived broken, rather than having been broken down.

But your bodymind has been doing exactly what it needed to do.

The flinch, the freeze, the way you go somewhere else when things get too loud, these are not failures. They are intelligence.

They are the evidence of a nervous system that has worked extraordinarily hard to protect you in conditions that were never designed to help you thrive.

At Empowered Spaces, we don’t start from the assumption that something is wrong with you.

We don’t position ourselves as the experts on your inner life.

We walk alongside you, as you begin to turn back toward yourself and remember what your body, what you, have known all along.

Healing here isn’t about reaching some fixed endpoint or learning to function better within systems that were never built for you.

It’s about reclaiming your own internal authority. Trusting yourself again. Finding your way back to the wisdom that was always yours.

You don’t need to be fixed, my dear friend. You need space to remember.

With love and care,
Kelly