Denise Casey
Denise Casey (she/her) is a writer, teacher, performing artist, and embodiment coach with deep roots in somatic practices. She's taught experience-based learning in schools K-12, universities, businesses, and treatment centers, facilitating workshops, retreats, and classes in mindfulness, movement, storytelling, and the creative process. As an educator and facilitator, she's interested in the tools that bring us into relationship with our bodies, with each other, and with the possibility of transformational change, personally and collectively. Her creative work and coaching invite people to step inside the stories we're afraid to tell with radical curiosity, compassion, and playfulness.
Her somatic foundation runs wide and deep: a two-year training in Voice Movement Therapy (VMT), a two-year practitioner study in Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy (Levels I, II, III), Classical Chinese Medicine, Amma therapeutic massage, two years of monastic training, improvisational dance, and myofascial and craniosacral practices. Embodiment runs through everything she does, whether she's leading a workshop, coaching one-on-one, or exploring the stage.
From a young age, Denise was fascinated by the connection between mind and body. Her own journey through injury, illness, and eating disorders deepened that curiosity and set her on a lifelong path of exploration and healing from the inside out. She was first introduced to Buddhism in Nepal, where she lived for two and a half years. After returning home, she trained full-time for two years at a Buddhist monastery, with weekly somatic immersions in dance and improvisation alongside choreographer and storyteller Lida Winfield. She went on to serve as Director of Mindfulness in Education at the monastery, bringing embodied practice into educational settings for youth. She then co-created a 5-month mindfulness training program through the Vermont Education Health Initiative (VEHI) for public school teachers statewide. Denise continued working with youth through Young Writers Project and as co-coach of the nationally recognized Burlington slam-poetry team, Muslim Girls Making Change (MGMC). She's also written, choreographed, and performed two original plays: Got This Voice and Playing the Game.
Denise sees coaching clients all over the world online and teaches workshops in mindfulness, embodiment, writing, and interdisciplinary arts.