bio

Katy Hawkins PhD is a Philadelphia teacher of somatics (integration of the whole self, inclusive of body, soul, creativity, emotion, intuition, spirit). She is a lifelong Quaker 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. She holds sacred space for personal and collective change through somatic techniques from neurobiological research, yoga, modern dance, and mystical spelunking. In Katy's classes and workshops, poems function like spells, with transformative potential to shift our perception. This approach to poetry, which she calls "Moving Poetics," invites deep experiences of poetic language at the level of all three brains - head, heart, and gut. She is the author of, Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry,  a collection of essays and embodied practices for this whole-self experience of poetry. She offers workshops for schools, businesses, activist  collectives, and faith communities based on her training in Embodied Social Justice (like TEN, with Bayo Akomolafe, Transformative Change's Embodied Social Justice Certificate Program). This work teaches strategies for reckoning with how oppression continues to live in and through our bodies in order to do change work more consciously, authentically, responsively, and sustainably. She has just completed a 12-month training on deepening Quaker ministry with School of the Spirit, made possible by a grant from the Lyman Fund. In everything she does, Katy seeks to share and learn new ways that ritual, connection, inspiration, and play might heal our dissociation from feeling.