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 semi-professional dancer, 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) and in 2014 I received a MS in Rehabilitative Science (won a scholarship – the National Academy of Sports Medicine Pursuit of Excellence Award). My collegiate studies were focused on developmental movement, dance kinesiology, somatic repatterning, stress reduction, injury prevention, periodization and exercise science. I am currently a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, Corrective Exercise + Performance Enhancement Specialist (since 2009) and an ISMETA Registered Somatic Movement Educator (since 2018). Currently I am in the process of completing the Fascial Fitness Trainer Certification.
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. For the past five years 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.
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. Although I have been actively leaning in and applying decolonial processes since then, I am just now- 4 years later- finding the ability to reflect and give voice to how my worldview and embodiments have been influenced, or shape-shifted. 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.
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.
Emergent Liberation Collective
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.
image design created by Magdalena Weinstein