Somatic Psychology • Social Justice
Activism • Parenting • Yoga
I have been a student of life for as long as I can remember. Being forced to leave my birthplace of Lebanon at age 3 because of war has shaped me and embedded in me a deep commitment to healing trauma as a means to peace, both internal and external.
What I Believe:
I am hopeful about our future, and I stubbornly believe in our innate capacity to heal and build a loving community. I know that trauma can be transformed into meaningful growth, and that as we free ourselves up to be truly present with the fullness of our shared humanity, we can dream a new future together. I think this work needs to be done on a personal, interpersonal, and collective level; and it must be embodied. Our liberation is bound; acknowledging this and working towards caring for each other is the most important work we can do!
My Education:
I earned my B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University and my M.A. in Counseling Psychology and then another M.A. in Community Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. I’m trained in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy that helps resolve trauma and its symptoms. I am also a certified yoga teacher.
What I Do:
After 15 years as a clinician and 25 years teaching yoga and movement, my current focus is on training facilitators and working with organizations to help them build resilient, trauma-informed cultures using the Collective Resilience Model, which I’ve developed over my decades of experience and as a result of many generative collaborations with others (see below for the story of the evolution of this work).
I am on faculty at the Ignite Institute where I teach the somatics portion of their Trauma-Informed Yoga & Social Justice Certification. I am also a trainer with A Thousand Joys and an adjunct professor at Pitzer College where I’ve taught a Critical Community Engagement course.
I love to facilitate spaces of transformative learning.
I also have a beautiful and intimate online community program called Radical Wellbeing where you can practice with me and connect with others wanting to heal in community. I’m the author of Peace from Anxiety: Get Grounded, Build Resilience and Stay Connected Amidst the Chaos and co-editor/contributor of Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change.
I was a co-founder of Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM), a training organization that bridges yoga and activism within a social justice framework. I started OTM in 2010 with Seane Corn and Suzanne Sterling. This was a labor of love, and we have seen thousands of people get sparked to get engaged as a result of our programs.
I live in Venice, California with my two sons.
I am optimistic about the future, and I truly believe in our innate capacity to heal and build a loving community. As we move through our past traumas and challenges, we free ourselves up to be truly present rather than unconsciously repeating our past. The more resilient we get, the more creative we can be and the more joyful and meaningful our life becomes. I think this work needs to be done on a personal level as well as a collective one. Our liberation is bound; acknowledging our shared humanity and working towards caring for each other is the most important work we can do!
I have been teaching yoga and movement for over 25 years (I was a fitness instructor at age 16!) and I’ve been doing clinical work with people struggling with trauma, depression, anxiety or life transitions for 15 years. I also train clinicians and yoga teachers as well as educators and non-profits to be trauma informed. My work is shaped by these experiences and the stories that are shared with me by the thousands of people I’ve had the privilege to be in contact with.
A bit about my education and training…Even though I question education and the ways in which it perpetuates the status quo, I love to learn and I have found teachers and programs that have taught me to think critically and push back when necessary. I earned my B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University and an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and then another M.A. in Community Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. I’m currently working on a doctorate in Community Psychology with an emphasis on Liberation Studies and Eco Psychology. I’m also trained in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy that helps resolve trauma and its symptoms.
I am a co-founder of Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM) a training organization that bridges yoga and activism within a social justice framework. I started OTM in 2010 with Seane Corn and Suzanne Sterling. This is a labor of love and we have seen hundreds of people get sparked to get engaged as a result of our programs. We have an amazing faculty and we are constantly growing and evolving.
I lead trauma informed yoga trainings nationally and have developed a certification pathway to offer trauma informed work that recognizes inequality and injustice as a trauma that must be included in any healing framework. I also work with A Thousand Joys training direct service providers and educators to be trauma informed and culturally responsive.
I live in Venice, CA with my husband and two sons where I also teach public yoga classes weekly
The Story of the Collective Resilience Model and the evolution of my work so far
I’ll be honest… when I got the suggestion to name my work, I was very resistant. It felt arrogant to say that I had ‘created’ anything because everything I do I learned from someone else. And then one of my friends said to me, “Hala, people resonate with your interpretation and expression of all that you’ve learned,” and that helped me reframe why I might give a name to the work I’m doing.
How this work evolved says a lot about it, so I want to share the story with you… the brief version, I promise!
This is also a way for me to uplift and name some of the people who have influenced me and shaped this work.
For me it all started in the 8th grade when I would skip school to go the bookstore down the street to read self-help books. I was always interested in psychology and trying to understand the underlying motivations and beliefs people held. Fast forward to college where I was a psychology major, but I found myself very disappointed in the classes in my major. I didn’t feel like they were telling me anything about actual humans. I discovered that I was learning a lot more about the human condition in studying religion and being a personal trainer at the local gym.
The religion classes taught me about how humans make sense of suffering and how that worldview is shaped by the sociopolitical landscape they are in. My work with folks one-on-one at the gym became a lesson in the mind/body connection for me. My clients tended to open up to me and, then, certain movements evoked emotions and helped
them process them. I ended up getting the education I needed in college, but not necessarily in psychology classes.
My curiosity in the mind/body connection led me to train and teach in yoga and other movement modalities for a decade. My explorations took me to Haitian dance, Samba, Capoeira, Continuum, NIA, Gyrotonics, energy healing, and, of course, all forms of yoga, and meditation.
After I earned my MA in Counseling Psychology, I trained in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based therapy that helps people release and heal from trauma. I was teaching yoga at the time and got asked to teach in Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles by one of my students, Leila Steinberg. She mentored me, and I spent years working with system-impacted youth and found a way to bring what I was learning about trauma into yoga with some of the most marginalized people in our community.
In 2007, Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM) was born. OTM was inspired by a group of organizers in the Bay Area (Marianne Manilov and Alissa Hauser) working to organize progressive voters more effectively. I trained with them in a model that was about getting folks to find purpose together and build strong social ties in small groups in order to build a network of solidarity. We focused on the yoga community and created a curriculum that supported this model of small group community-building. We also offered leadership trainings because we found that many yoga practitioners wanted to find a way to be of service. My co-founders, Seane Corn and Suzanne Sterling, and I developed a beautiful curriculum of embodied, inside-out transformation that had people examine their own motivations to serve and unpack any unconscious biases or traumas that may be limiting or influencing them. About two years into doing this work, we got called in by a few people who felt that we needed to be more explicit about the impact of power, privilege, and oppression. They were right, and we pivoted fairly quickly; we got more educated ourselves, and we brought in teachers from marginalized communities to teach and to help us make our curriculum better. Many of those people became faculty and part of the bedrock of OTM. OTM was a true collaboration of so many people with different lived experiences. I want to specifically name those who are now my inner circle of inspiration, support, and accountability: Teo Drake, Jacoby Ballard, Nikki Myers, Leslie Booker, and Kerri Kelly.
During that time, I was also training yoga and movement teachers to be trauma-informed. I met teachers who wanted to share yoga and somatic tools with trauma-impacted folks but they didn’t feel they were having a positive impact. I realized that they didn’t have training in understanding trauma and the nervous system. So, I developed a training in trauma-informed yoga, and, over the years, I trained hundreds of yoga teachers. In 2016, Kyra Haglund joined me and helped develop the curriculum. A few years after that, RW Alves joined us.
With the two of them, what used to be a 30-hour training evolved into a 108-hour certification that we call the Collective Resilience Yoga and Somatics Certification.
In 2013 I went back to Pacifica Graduate Institute and into their MA program in Community Psychology with an emphasis in Liberation Studies and Eco-Psychology. So many professors and classmates inspired me, and that program became a catalyst for expanding my work into the community in a more skillful and critical way.
I want to point to my work with Dr. Liza Auciello and, then, Hillary Johnson at A Thousand Joys (ATJ). At ATJ, I helped develop a foundational training series to bring into organizations to help them be resilience-focused and trauma-informed. Through ATJ I was able to work in dozens of organizations which allowed me to learn and grow in this work in a very powerful way.
Finally, there’s my best friend, my ride-or-die, Tessa Hicks Peterson. Our work has been evolving together since 2001 when we met in Capoeira class in Venice CA. Tessa’s work around social justice and decoloniality has shaped my work and worldview since the day we met. Our most recent project, Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, was born out of our years of working and teaching together and her commitment to supporting grassroots organizations through the community center she directs (CASA) at Pitzer College.
There are countless others who have shaped me, but I promised to try and keep this short. I am so grateful for my journey and all that got me here. I hope to continue to share this work and inspire others in their work.