My work is grounded in a feminine, feminist material poetics— a way of sensing, naming, and reshaping the body not as something to be optimized or managed, but as a living, relational terrain through which meaning, insight, and transformation emerge. I hold space for bodies not as objects, but as liminal sites of knowing — containers where breath, structure, sensation, and story converge.

For me, Joy Yoga is a project of embodied refusal: a slow and attentive decathecting from the capitalist, individualist logics that tell us to fix ourselves, to master our discomfort, to become better. Instead, I invite what Donna Haraway calls staying with the trouble— remaining in complexity, cultivating inner volume, and becoming with the body rather than attempting to dominate or transcend it.

Influenced by the phenomenological depth of Elizabeth Behnke and the pattern-based intelligence of Katonah Yoga, I understand postural practice as a dialogue between psyche and soma, between narrative and fascia, between angles and internal space. When form and flow work together, the body becomes not only more stable, but more spacious, more relational, more available to life.

Katie has a PhD in Integrative Medicine and Health Science and has been teaching yoga since 1998. She founded the Spokane Yoga Shala in 2003 and ran that until handing the reins over to Ara Lyman in 2016. Katie is a board-certified health coach and a faculty member at Saybrook University.