About Lauren

Hello, I’m Lauren, aka biomimic, the founder of Horsetail & Oak Soma School.

I am a writer, teacher, liberation midwife and mentor, somatic coach and curricula designer. A cisgendered, queer and neuroqueer, disabled and chronically ill outlier, who came to recognize my neurodivergence late in life (in the last few years). My pronouns are she/her.

In my work I focus on supporting and guiding people through practices of unlearning and repatterning — unwinding those aspects of our core conditioning that lock us into patterns of suffering and establishing new awareness and habits.

I believe that the very foundation and essence of the dominant culture is rooted in violence and exploitative relations, and my sense of meaning is rooted in the desire to break generational cycles that sustain the dominion of these pathological systems, and to help others do the same, so we have a fighting chance of creating emergent cultures rooted in well-relations and getting off the inconceivably catastrophic, dystopian trajectory we’re on.

I teach practices that help people root into a deepening sense of connection to the body’s subtle and ancestral insight, knowledge and perception and train people in the practices of developing somatic awareness and attunement.

I taught yoga and experimented with my own intuitive somatic practice for 15 years, until 2010 when I became too ill to work more than a few hours a week. For the first 15 years of chronic illness, before I was too ill to work regularly, I was focused on chasing a cure. I wasn’t aware of my internalized ableism or of how it fundamentally distorted my relationship with my body.

I had to learn the territory of disability and PEM, slowly and painfully, over years, until I understood how dangerous it was to expect myself to meet the expectation of a culture that reduces the value of human beings to their ability to “produce value” (as defined in very narrow terms designed to serve the interests of the profiteers). I learned that it is neither safe nor wise for me to exert myself past a very limited envelope of tolerance. It has required an ongoing reckoning with internalized ableism and colonial, capitalist values, and the willingness to free myself from those constructs and impositions. The somatics exploration I had been practicing on my own in the before times became my greatest teacher.

I feel that as humans our sense of possibility has been unnaturally confined, and that we've come to experience ourselves and our potentials in extremely limited ways. I believe the hyperindividualism of the dominant culture is corrosive, disastrous, and rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding about who we are at the core and how humanity must live and organize their societies and economies.

I believe we have the capacity to collectively liberate ourselves progressively from these profoundly limiting and violent exploitative systems, relations and structures of consciousness.

I believe the time we are living offers heightened and emergent potentials for cultural/societal re-invention, the deep rebuilding of healthy social ecologies and right relationship and the co-creation of just and brilliant futures.

It's my mission to create experiences that speak to your heart and answer your true needs, experiences that awaken deep insight, generate connection with your body’s rhythms and sense, and support you in ending generational cycles of suffering.

I currently live and work on Chinook, Clackamas, Cowlitz and Siletz lands in Portland, Oregon, US.

Please play and explore this portal. I invite you to subscribe to my newsletters The Liberation Library and The Synthesis, join one of my programs, or work with me 1:1.

In liberation and love,
Lauren