I'm Lilia Joy

I'm a queer neurodivergent artist, writer, somatic worker, and yoga teacher with chronic illness. I focus on accessible sustainable body-celebrating breathwork, meditation, and movement for liberatory embodiment.

My work is rooted in a deep belief in the connection we share and the hope that our hearts, songs, thoughts, breath, movements and art can change the world.

Soft Hearts Society is a project for community resourcing, collective healing, mining hope together & finding joy in this world within self and with each other.

All of the art and writing you see here is my own, made without generative AI. I’m hoping to build a site eventually without use of a platform that offers integrated AI - for now I opt out of using it.

Yoga & Movement

I approach yoga as a system for liberation, path for preparing body & mind for resistance, container for spiritual connection, re-indigenization practice, and political act of self preservation as Audre Lorde described self care. It is both personal and communal.

I believe that meeting ourselves where we’re at in all our nuance, messiness and beauty is a key part and point of the practice and of life.

I believe yoga should be accessible to all kinds of people with every type of body and that, to quote Susanna Barkataki, “if you can breathe you can do yoga”.

Individual and Group Support

Offering meditation, breathwork, yoga, somatic & mindfulness tools, coaching, and space-holding as a yoga teacher and chronic health survivalist. If you’re feeling stuck, alone, under resourced, numb, or burnt out, I’m available by video calls to listen, be leaned on, offer guidance, help with research, direct you to other modalities, remind you to breathe, and move through it with you.

Hire Lilia to speak virtually about

Disability & Access

Somatic Wellbeing

Anxiety Support

Trauma Awareness

Queer Competency

Creative Courage

Neurodivergence

Grief & Chronic Illness

No cost for youth LGBTQIA+ clubs or under-funded disability groups

Acknowledgements

With gratitude, reverence, and a commitment to equity I want to name that the city of Seattle where I live and practice are on stolen Coast Salish land, specifically the ancestral land of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People.

Thank you to the land protectors who have ensured we can continue to have clean air to breathe and a living Earth to hold us.

It’s equally important to me to acknowledge and offer gratitude to the early yogis of Asia, specifically modern India and China as well as those of Africa who developed, codified, preserved, and passed along the remarkable practice of yoga.

CW: harm from gurus and teachers

I stand against all past and current forms of manipulation, cult abuse, and control that have also been a part of yoga’s history. Anything powerful and of value has been used for harm as well as for good. I aim with my practice to do as much good as I can while taking a harm reduction approach, knowing I will not be perfect and continuing to seek out growth. As we learn better, we do better and it is our responsibility to keep learning.

Thank you to Susanne Hutchinson at The Yoga Tree for making the teacher training there the most accessible program I’ve found so far.

Thank you to those who have modeled moving with compassion, courage, awareness, and in community.