about Kaila June Keliikuli
Hi I am Kaila June Keliikuli! I am a movement teacher of 30 years. In my early 20’s, I began developing the movement system Somatic Groundwork (or they began developing me). My approach has emerged through a systems science, co-creative, relational way. With a background as a performance artist, professional fitness trainer and somatic movement educator, I am skilled to offer therapuetic support as well as movement training for performance enhancement. Somatic Groundwork is the foundation for my whole person approach to moving and feeling better.
I grew up in my mom’s dance studio studying creative movement, ballet and jazz. I learned both the social and the technical skills to teach children, teens and adults. My mom was passionate about students of all ages finding their inner creative voice and encouraged us to be dance-artists and dance-makers. In the first 12 years of my movement career, I specialized in children’s dance and creative movement. Once I left home at 18, I found contemporary dance, improvisation and somatics. Barefoot dancing in layered clothes was for me.
Over the years I have taught and designed curriculum for collegiate, vocational and studio programs for fitness professionals, yoga teachers and dance educators. Some of these include adjunt faculty for the University of Montana and Metro State University and online and lab instructor for LifeTime Academy. I have worked as a 1:1 practitioner since 2008 helping people repair from injury and under-recovery, improve general function and high-level performance. Creative dance and movement projects that I have been a part of include La Caravana Por La Paz (USA, Venezuela, Brazil), Headwaters Dance Company (Missoula, Montana), Open Field Artists (Missoula, Montana), Daughter Cells Dance (Denver/Boulder, CO) and Soul Tribe Adventures (Mexico, Costa Rica).
In 2005 I earned a BFA in Dance and Choreography (took me nearly 8 years and along the way I had 2 kids) from the University of Montana in Missoula. In 2014 I received a MS in Rehabilitative Science (won a scholarship – the National Academy of Sports Medicine Pursuit of Excellence Award) at PennWest University. My collegiate studies were focused on pedagogy, developmental movement, kinesiology, somatic repatterning, stress reduction, injury prevention, periodization and exercise science. In 2008 I attended the National Personal Training Institute in Golden , CO for a 500-hr vocational program to become an NSCA certified personal trainer. Shortly after I became an approved instructor through Kettlebell Concepts.
I am a Registered Somatic Movement Educator with ISMETA; a Certified Personal Trainer, Corrective Exercise and Performance Enhancement Specialist with NASM, Nutrition Coach with Precision Nutrition and a Fascial Fitness Trainer with the Fascial Training Academy. I am in continuous study and research in the areas of trauma, stress and pain, behavior change, fascia and biotensegrity, movement and performance, and decoloniality.
More essentially, I am remembering how to be a human being in relationality with all things. I am a daughter, mother, sister, spouse and auntie. I identify as queer, cisgender and white-bodied with German, Irish, Scottish and English ancestry. My last name is Hawaiian and is gifted through my wife and her lineage. Since 2017, I have lived on Shoshone/ Bannock territory, Turtle Island in Boise, Idaho, USA.
I follow a calling to help people move and feel better. With my own history of SI joint dysfunction and low back pain, memory loss from early developmental trauma, and following a path of both personal and collective healing, I find myself advocating for a movement movement. I teach movement as a way to participate with changing times.
development of Somatic Groundwork
The bones for Somatic Groundwork were formed through dance research (training, choreography, improvisation, somatics) and healing through injury and trauma. Floor-based contemporary dance, creative movement, Contact Improvisation, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Bodymind Centering, Authentic Movement and general yoga asana contributed to the early framing of the Somatic Groundwork movement system. As well, personal experiences with developmental trauma, chronic low back pain and sacroiliac joint dysfunction, birthing two children, psychosomatic illnesses, loss, despair and lineage repair have called for alternative healing solutions. Somatic Groundwork has both developed from and been an abiding container for these events.
More than 2 decades ago, Somatic Groundwork began as a body-based creative exploration with a small group of dancers and artists. Next I started teaching Somatic Groundwork classes and workshops in studios and gyms. Then I honed the basic patterning methods of Somatic Groundwork when I started my 1:1 client practice in 2009. Since 2018, I have taught Somatic Groundwork online to an international community of teaching professionals, movement enthusiasts and private clients.
The movement system continues to develop and evolve as people participate with the work. Somatic Groundwork is a dynamic system whose form appears in response to somatic and social interactions. As mentioned previously, my inquiries and embodied research continue to revolve around movement patterns, human development, healing (or not) cumulative injury and trauma, Indigenous worldview, ancestral lineage repair, decoloniality, creative expression and movement science. Always the student who enjoys learning through collaborative discussion and practice.
embodied decoloniality
In 2020, my somatic experience was erupted. The combination of the global pandemic along with the justifiable social unrest, my role as an online somatic educator facilitating circles with other teachers and therapists from around the globe, family loss and rupture, parenting older teens and an abrupt reckoning with my ancestral lineage revealed many dimensions of human behavior at once. These events initiated my decolonial path. As the program director of Interdisciplinary Movement & Somatics and with a committment to emergent curriculum, the program and membership has supported my way. I am grateful to the IMS members for traveling with me and trusting in the container of Somatic Groundwork.
Emergent Liberation Collective
Another generative container for my learning/unlearning that arose out of the Spring of 2020 is the Emergent Liberation Collective podcast. Dreamed into existence by myself and three others – T. Aisha Edwards, Magdalena Weinstein and Chris Clancy, Emergent Liberation Collective is a seeding space for somatics and spirituality as vehicles for regenerative belonging. After Aisha and I completed Season 3, we decided to take a break and digest and embody our committment to slow podcasting. You can to the podcast on your favorite player.
ELC acknowledges personal and ancestral trauma as embedded in the oppressive socio historical context of EMPIRE (body hierarchy, colonization, totalitarian agricultural economic systems) that privileges some living beings over others and privileges the visible over the invisible. We desire to participate in a relational web that acknowledges spirit and community as sources of wisdom.
ELC co-creates an open ended praxis to disentangle the embodied beliefs and imprints of colonized civilization in order to plant new seeds and remember our base relationship with earth and life. By offering vulnerable conversations, inspired readings and somatic practices, ELC desires to awaken curiosity, insight and hunger for deeper shared wisdom and radical renewal. Like a murmuration of starlings, we thread a somatic way, a participatory field toward listening and learning together.
