bio

Katy Hawkins PhD is a Philadelphia teacher of somatics (aka attention to the whole self, inclusive of body, soul, creativity, emotion, intuition, spirit). She is a lifelong Quaker, a sometime Queer Theorist, and a teacher for the last 30 years. In 2014 Katy opened Shiné, now a thriving community engaging fresh ways to repair the cultural disconnect between thinking, feeling, and intuitive knowing. Katy's classes and workshops hold sacred space for personal and collective transformation through somatic techniques from yoga, modern dance, neurobiological research, and mystical spelunking. Her training with Transformative Change's Embodied Social Justice Certificate Program shows up in workshops that teach strategies for healing our dissociation from feeling, implying both emotional and sense experience. She has recently returned to literature professoring to teach what she calls "Moving Poetics," inviting deep experiences of poetic language at the level of all three brains - head, heart, and gut. Her recently-published book, Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry, is a collection of essays and embodied practices for experiencing poems selected for each week of the calendar year. She still believes in magic, ritual, and the capacity for play and connection to grow us.