Twyla Kowalenko, MSW PhD

Hi there! My name is Twyla Kowalenko. If you’re like me, you’ve come to this page to find about me and ask, “Who is the person behind this work/offerings? Can I trust her? What are her qualifications? Can she deliver what I want? Is she someone I’d want to work with?”

And this is the place where I get to list my credentials and experience for you to assess that. And while you read on and decide if I have the expertise you’re looking for, I’m here to tell you that YOU have the expertise you’re looking for. And what you’d be hiring me for is to reflect the embodied knowing, wisdom, intuition and expertise that is all within you.

So what’s my background to support you in that? you may be asking. Let me tell you a little bit about my journey, why I’m passionate about what I do, and what I’ve moved through to be able to support you…

Wanting to make a difference in others’ lives has directed me for much of my life in what I’ve studied and offered. I have an undergraduate in psychology from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), a Masters in social work from Columbia University (New York), and a PhD in Somatics from York University (Toronto). I am a voracious learner and am always studying and expanding my toolbox. I completed my yoga teacher training at Downward Dog in Toronto and at Yasodhara Ashram in British Columbia. My somatic training has included 5 Rhythms, Body-Mind Centering, contact improvisation, authentic movement, Dance Our Way Home, Open Floor, Kinetics, Bodysoul, Axis Syllabus, Butoh, and continuum as well as modern dance, ballet, belly dancing, jazz and salsa. Other personal growth and transformational studies include shamanic studies (with the Institute for Shamanic medicine), anti-racism work, singing, clowning, writing, non-violent communication, Presence Process, Landmark, and Thinking into Results.

I have worked in the areas of community organisation, facilitation/teaching, social work and human/women’s/children’s rights advocacy for over two decades in Canada, United States, Germany, Costa Rica and Israel. I have been facilitating and teaching embodied awareness, movement and dance at a community and university level for over ten years. I was part of running The Move Collective for six years and continue to DJ for the organisation. I founded Sunset Groove in 2020. I am passionate about community and have worked voluntarily in my housing community, my child’s daycare and school, in shelters, women and human rights organisations, and community gatherings. I love to create, especially things that support our bodies and communities, like nourishing food, body care products, and foraging creations.

Although I have always been drawn to service and to supporting others’ expression, I struggled for many years with my own. For decades, I was not at home in my body, struggling with insecurities, body image issues, and eating disorders. My mother was killed when I was 21 and I struggled feeling at home in the world. I stayed in relationships that were unhealthy and did not treat my body with kindness. The tension between my desire to make a difference for others and not caring for myself took a toll on me and I travelled to an Ashram (spiritual study centre) in British Columbia where I began to cultivate a spiritual orientation to something beyond myself. Although the deep work I did in my months of studies there were intense, the most difficult workshop was one that focused on self-image and where we were invited to dance. Here I was, with a lifetime of dance training (having started my dance training as a toddler) and a small intimate group of people I had gotten to know quite well in a rural spiritual community, and I just couldn’t dance. The embodied fear I experienced was so great I can still tap into its resonant strength now, 13 years later. Yet I knew the dance was calling me and something drove me to re-enter the room, find a corner and to begin dancing. In that moment, dancing to Deva Premal’s Gayatri Mantra , I turned inward and let myself dance as I had never danced before. The taste of expansion and freedom through that dance still brings tears to my eyes. I immediately began researching how I could continue to dance in supported freestyle and improvisational ways when I returned to Toronto.

When I discovered somatic practices and conscious and improvisational dance spaces, I felt like I had found what I’d been seeking my whole life. Spaces that honoured and invited my unique expression, exactly as it was, that guided me to a fuller awareness of my sensorial connection to life and provided me with tools to deepen that awareness, expand my repertoire of movement, be fully grounded in expressing myself, and to move in life expanding ways. Saying this discovery was life shattering is not an exaggeration.

It did not take me long to realise that my calling was to combine my background in social work and facilitation to explore ways of increasing accessibility to somatics and movement improvisation. I wanted others to have access to the sense of expansive and healing self-expression I had found, to be at home in their bodies, and celebrate their physical embodiment as their unique expression in life. I brought together my skills and began to facilitate a variety of movement opportunities and began my doctoral studies, where I expressly focused on the access to somatic practices. I spent a few years exploring barriers to dance and somatic practices, largely psychological. At some point a light bulb went off: my work wasn’t just about bringing people to somatics and movement improvisation, it was about bringing somatics and movement improvisation to people, to where they are and what matters to them.

And this is what has led me to soma’ing. Soma’ing is the movement, the practice, the ways that can work for all of us to weave the attention to our bodies in our lives, to honour and care for ourselves and be able to listen to the wisdom within. I fervently believe that cultivating more of this capacity through our lives can support any and everything that matters to us.

I’d love to hold space for you to honour and focus to your sensorial experience of being alive, how you can listen to your embodied knowing and more fully express your unique contribution in this brief time of being alive.