Empowered Spaces

06/01/2026

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!

05/31/2026

05/28/2026

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?

05/26/2026

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

05/19/2026

Welcome to Month 2 of The Heart of Healing - The Open Hand — Values for the Long Work, led by Tiger (they/he) .life on June 12.

Our values are expressions of our unique paths that manifest in our interactions with others and the world.

By making space for difference in values across the collective, we create space for shared authentic leadership that endures.

Justice work is inherently a practice of healing, yet this work can generate its own suffering when we grip too tightly, hoping others will share our precise values to reach our collective goals.

Through guided somatic practice and courageous dialogue, participants will explore what it feels like to hold their interior value system with open hands and to navigate where collective values are both shared and differ.

We’ll feel into the discomfort and tension in this open-handed practice, and explore the opportunity in the space between our individual values and collective values.

The Heart of Healing is For the people who
hold so much for others.

Twelve gatherings across a full year for helpers, healers, and changemakers
rooted in empodied practice, collective care & justice.

We would love for you to join us - only 5 spots remaining 💜

05/12/2026

Join Deanna (they/them) this Saturday for Nocturne - Revolutionary Somatics + Soundbath + Astrology.

Connect to your own star chart, body/mind/relational alignment and energetic sovereignty by working with the actual transits & cycles occurring in each new Lunar Month.

Astrology Is A System Of Metaphors And Patterns That Help Give Archetypal, Exploratory Practice For Somatic Human Life. 💫

The planets move, the Earth moves, we move. Astrology doesn’t “predict the future” but gives us a reflection to navigate our current path in the grand scheme & synchronicities of Earth’s path.

Through Revolutionary Astrology + Somatics, we can move through revolutionary choices & take revolutionary actions with more embodied perspective, wisdom & agency.

As a lifelong dancer turned somatic guide, Deanna knows that flexibility & adaptability are key ingredients to weathering periods of imbalance & instability.

And as a counter-oppressive somatic systems weaver, Deanna is fascinated with the ways we can pathfind through times of upheaval & transformation by returning to our body’s innate wisdom of sensation, emotion, narrative and contextual relationship.

We can do this through sensing, through sound, through movement, through our living natural world and through creative exploration betwixt it all, together. 🤝🏻

Nocturne includes a 25-minute crystal singing bowl sound bath, exploratory somatic movement, astro wisdom tuned to your natal chart & journal prompts to guide you through synergizing alignment with the New Moon + Sun Sign Astro Transits of the month.

05/11/2026

Yoga teachers 🧘‍♀️ -- There comes a time in your teaching when you realize group classes can only take your students so far.

Maybe you have already noticed the students who repeat the same struggles over and over:
🪷 Balance that never improves.
🪷 Shoulder that always hurts.
🪷 Hamstrings that never lengthen.

The student who is “doing yoga consistently”… but whose body is not actually changing.

Don't you start wondering why this is happening?
And how to work with the individual body in front of you?

This is where private client work becomes transformational. Not only for your students, but for you as a teacher.

Private sessions allow you to slow down and truly observe.
To assess movement patterns, identify compensation, understand asymmetries, and create corrective strategies that are specific to the individual.

Instead of giving generalized cues, you can finally begin making precise choices.
🪷 Your work becomes more effective.
🪷 Your confidence grows.
🪷 Your students trust you more deeply because they feel seen—not managed.

And practically speaking, private client work also allows you to expand your career in a sustainable way by offering higher-value services that set you apart from the average yoga teacher or movement professional.

This is one of the reasons MoveWise exists.
To help yoga and movement teachers truly understanding bodies.

✨ If you feel ready to deepen your skill set and begin working with clients at a higher level, MoveWise was designed for exactly that transition.

Go to the link in bio to register for our June start in St. Louis.

05/08/2026

Black mothers have held everything together.
Families. Communities. Systems.
And we have been expected to keep functioning,
no matter the cost.

Dr. Rachel Hardeman names something we don't say enough in public health: Survival has never been the goal.

When survival becomes the norm,
it doesn't stay contained.
It embeds.
It lives in the body.
It sits beneath joy
as a quiet vigilance that won't fully release.

Moving out of survival isn't a moment.
It's a practice.

A slow, relational reckoning with what the body has been asked to hold.
Black mothers deserve more than survival.

Read Dr. Hardeman's full piece in Essence. .rhardeman
https://www.essence.com/health-and-wellness/black-mothers-deserve-to-live/