Hala Khouri (she/her)

Los Angeles, CA

Hala Khouri lives in Venice, California with her two sons, a dog, a frog, and a small snake. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and another M.A. in Community Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is also trained in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based psychotherapy that helps resolve trauma and its symptoms. Hala  has been teaching yoga and movement for over 25 years, and has been doing healing work with people living with trauma, depression, anxiety, or in life transitions for over 15 years. She loves to facilitate spaces of transformative learning, and frequently trains clinicians, yoga teachers, educators, and non-profit staff to be trauma-informed as well as healing- and justice-centered in their work through Collective Resilience(a training program she co-founded) and A Thousand Joys. She is also co-founder of Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM), a training organization that bridges yoga and activism within a social justice framework and works as an adjunct professor at Pitzer College where she teaches a course in Critical Community Engagement.

“If we say we are for social justice, the work has to be embodied. We have to detox injustice, bias and oppression from our own nervous systems. So that we can know how to live into liberation. And liberation is something we practice together, in community.”