Kristie Dahlia Home
If you like, I’ll whisper in your ear for a while, encouraging you to be with yourself in curious, compassionate, loving awareness.
Love In Action
The 2024 Autumn Course October 12 – November 23
Our autumn course is going to be juicy, exploring what it looks like to put love into action: how shifting from a conditional to an unconditional model of love empowers us to approach life with friendly curiosity, identify core needs for ourselves and others, and express needs and boundaries.
Kristie Dahlia Home has been teaching mindfulness, instinctive meditation, and yogic movement for nearly 30 years.
About DahliaWe Are Beloved
A free weekly newsletter & meditation gathering
Meditation is like a temple consisting of welcome and willingness and curiosity and love. Let's be together in that temple for a little while now.
Private sessions
Remote by Zoom or phone, or in person at The Side Door, my home studio.
Morning Series
Mondays and Wednesdays at 7am Pacific
Six week subscription yoga series with a strengthening aim on Zoom
The Soft Animal
Saturdays at 9:15am Pacific
Drop-in yoga, self-massage & deep relaxation on Zoom
Teachings
When teaching a course, I provide my students a combination of written teaching and audio recordings. I make fresh recordings for each one, even for practices that I teach over many years. Sometimes you may hear a crackly poppy sound in the background; those are brine shrimp, snapping away on the hull of Rejoice, the sailboat in which I lived when I recorded some of these. I might clear my throat or take a moment to find my way through an idea in speaking spontaneously. I accept these small imperfections and cherish them in the service of presenting a practice that feels real, intimate, lived-in, and accessible.
Tiny lift: prayersong and mantra
Introduction to meditation
Lovingkindness practice
Some very embodied practices
Go deep and spend an hour together
These recordings are free to enjoy. Your choice to donate supports my ability to share teaching in widely-accessible formats. Thank you!
Courses & classes
These events offer opportunities to share powerful experience with Dahlia in community, often over time. There is deliberate breadth here: drop-in and long-term timing, smaller and larger groups, fully donation-based and sliding scale pricing. Everything aims to be love-drenched and carefully boundaried.
Current offerings
Love In Action
The 2024 Autumn Course October 12 – November 23
Our autumn course is going to be juicy, exploring what it looks like to put love into action: how shifting from a conditional to an unconditional model of love empowers us to approach life with friendly curiosity, identify core needs for ourselves and others, and express needs and boundaries.
Morning Series
Mondays and Wednesdays at 7am Pacific
Six week subscription yoga series with a strengthening aim on Zoom
The Soft Animal
Saturdays at 9:15am Pacific
Drop-in yoga, self-massage & deep relaxation on Zoom
Recent offerings
Lovingkindness
The 2024 Summer Course: June 8 – August 17
An exploration of what it can look like to live in the practice of lovingkindness. Initially, it helps us ground into curiosity and compassion. When well-established, it can become a profound, radical source of peace, understanding, clarity, and a strength which is both gentle and ferocious.
Lovingkindness
A course on meditation & living
I have, as the decades of my teaching have passed, honed my experience and my offerings ever more toward love, and this is what I wish to share here with you this spring: the cultivation of lovingkindness.
Reclaiming Your Attention
A course about adjusting the flow of energy and time
Support for adjusting the flow of energy and time through your life, particularly in reclaiming your attention from screens.
Reading Circle
Tuesdays at 7pm Pacific
Drop-in reading circle on Zoom
Chrysalis
A Gentle Heart Container for the Autumn Season
A refuge, a respite, a daydream. Renewal and relaxation. An introduction or re-introduction to meditation for new and seasoned practitioners.
Personal practice & counsel
Private sessions are a versatile space in which I cherish the opportunity to understand and serve you in this precious moment of your human experience. Our work can range from the profoundly sacred to the resolutely practical. It’s okay – and quite common – to book time with me without being sure exactly how we will use it; during the session we can discuss what is afoot for you and how to best meet your needs.
Sessions for individuals, couples, and small groups can happen anywhere on video or phone, or in person at my home studio near Port Townsend, Washington. I have occasional availability in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Our time together might include —
- Custom therapeutic yoga to support you in healing and growing. Practice may be mat or chair-based, and can range from strength-building to gently nourishing. I have worked with people in all stages of life, from birthing to dying. People with high-pressure jobs often commit to an ongoing once or twice weekly session to make a clear structure for supporting physical and emotional wellbeing. Smaller arcs serve well at times of intensive change or healing: pre and post-natal practice, preparing for and recovering from surgical procedures or cancer treatment, during divorce, while grieving, etc. A handful of sessions can create a sequence for your own use. A single session can explore how to work with a particular issue for yourself.
Through Dahlia's generous spirit, I have learned how to let life bring me it's gifts rather than forcing them to come to me. I believe this is the reason I have not had an episode of MS since I started my practice with her.
— Carol
I just wanted to thank you so much, Dahlia, In multiple ways for being a guide for what was a very powerful transformative experience for me. I could just feel it in everything! I’m so happy to be at my job today, and I’m even super-tolerant and happy to be in traffic. I just wanted to tell you I’m a believer.
- Spiritual and personal counsel. Support for living — growth, change, crisis, relationship, and grief. Personal sessions can consist entirely of conversation or weave in movement, energy work, meditation, or healing touch.
A phone session with Dahlia was the catalyst to finding answers to questions I didn’t want to ask myself. She is compassionate and tender, and she offers such wonderful and professional options. Anyone facing difficult life situations can always find excellent tools and resources by having meaningful conversation with this wise friend who is so well-connected to the universe.
— Mary Wells
Dahlia’s voice has been a beacon to me for over a decade. When we have a session, I feel so supported and held by her. The gifts she brings in the form of intuition, empathic listening, resourcing and encouragement are a testament to her deep knowledge of spirituality, meditation, mind/body medicine and relationships. I consider my time with Dahlia to be a vital piece of my integrative healthcare. Our work together reminds me of who I am and how I want my life to be.
— Meghan Elliott
- Exploration of a personal meditation practice. Together we can create a practice that invokes your own natural doorways to the meditative experience, deepen them, and if you wish, create personalized recordings for ongoing guidance and support to use anytime you wish.
- Bedtime stories for children and adults. Personalized recordings which I create with your collaboration can weave as you wish from these elements: guided relaxation practice, gentle breathing, and treasured, comforting experiences to soothe the nervous system and let the mind drift from story to dream.
Just a little while ago we all listened to this recording for the first time while the kids were going to sleep and it is sooooo lovely! The care and precision you took to make it accessible for kids who are newer to these practices came through in a beautifully subtle way, while it was also deep and full and rich for someone like me who has practiced some of them a long time. The suggestions you gave were so inviting. The options give such space to do it over and over in different ways, or the favorite way.
— Jessie Raeder
- Energy work. For healing and integration, personally or interpersonally. We can attend to ourselves in the past, present, and future. To refine the
energetics of relationships, uncording sessions are useful; commonly requested for romantic breakups and difficult family relationships, they are useful anywhere boundaries want recalibration. Energy work is something that we often yearn for and also feel a little odd about. It’s right there on the edges of both the familiar and the mysterious. Two stories from folks I’ve worked with illustrate this beautifully.
Someone was doing a weekly reiki session with me while taking deliberate time without work to recover from burnout and make a career shift. One day she excused herself from a lunch companion to head to our session. When her friend expressed surprise that she was doing this kind of work, she simply said, “I know; I don’t believe in it either – and it works really great for me!”
An elderly woman receiving treatment for a serious cancer tried reiki for the first time. When I asked what her experience had been like, she laid a hand over her heart, looked with great directness into my eyes, and said, “I just felt — I am so precious.”
- Healing touch. My yoga therapy includes elements of Thai Yoga Therapy, Chi Nei Tsang, assisted stretching, intuitive healing, and Reiki. Bodywork is performed fully clothed.
- Guided self-massage. This is lovely as a private group event in person or online and great 1:1 online.
- Co-creation of personal ritual and ceremony. Someone moving cross-country planned a session with me in advance, just before the move, and another a little while after. We discussed her feelings at each stage and used them to brainstorm simple, meaningful ritual actions which helped her to feel connected to her emotions through the process and smooth the way.
Retreats, trainings & rituals
Retreats
I’m over the moon about the prospect of bringing my life-shifting retreats, trainings, and ceremonies to you from our home on 5 forested acres near Port Townsend, Washington. We’re about 2 hours from the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport and an hour from the Olympic National Park.
Feel welcome to reach out to discuss personal retreats or private reiki training now — I’d love to begin this with folks who know my work well. You might schedule a day, a weekend, or more to luxuriate in private instruction and personal counsel, bodywork, and home-cooked meals. Our guest accommodations are a private one bedroom apartment that comfortably sleeps two couples and features its own entrance, kitchen, bathroom, and patio. Nip over to Port Townsend, a 20 minute drive, for a fine meal at Finistère, an exquisite cocktail at The In Between, or a stroll along the Victorian waterfront. If you’re an oyster lover, Hama Hama Oyster Company’s farm and saloon is just an hour’s drive. There is beautiful hiking, great bird-watching, and oh, the sea!
We can currently accommodate up to six guests.
Service in Professional Settings
I have taught meditation and yoga in a variety of professional settings to health care providers, technologists, scientists, educators, and activists. These programs have been oriented toward team building, stress management, personal wellbeing, and in support of the creative process.
Trainings
I lead Reiki trainings and mentor yoga teachers. Please drop me a line to enquire about these programs.
Ritual and Ceremony
Collaboration in the creation of rituals and ceremonies is among the greatest of honors. I write and officiate large, communal ceremonies such as baby blessings, memorial services, commitment ceremonies, and weddings; I also cherish the opportunity to create small, private rituals to mark personal thresholds and commitments, and co-create everyday rituals with symbolic value which add meaning to life. I hold loving space for staunch atheists, people of deep faith, and everyone in-between. I strive to understand the values and beliefs that you hold and how you wish them shared with those you choose to gather with, whether in joy or in mourning.
Dahlia offers a spirituality that is beautifully ethereal and yet you are afforded a sense of her person being grounded back to the origin of space and time. Our wedding ceremony was perfect and I am still receiving "oooo's" and "aaaah's" from family and friends.
Books & provisions
We are a community centered around curious, whole-hearted, ethical living. Books are powerful tools in this: seeds, portals, recipes, solace: what an encapsulation of life force energy we place and find in books, ready to blossom within each reader afresh. I’ve created a treasure chest on Bookshop which includes books from our Reading Circle, poetry I've read to you in classes over the years, and much more.
Bookshop.org is a B corp whose mission is to support local, independent booksellers, to whom they give over 80% of their profit margin. They will also send a small commission my way from purchases in my bookshop or links.
About Dahlia
My work is a varied thing. Simply put: I support living. This is too concise for many conversations, so sometimes I say that I am a yoga therapist, or a meditation teacher. Sometimes I say that I am a minister who specializes in working with agnostics and atheists; I have officiated weddings, supported divorces, attended people in birthing and healing and in dying. When I’m feeling bold, I call myself Priestess of the Mystery, because I am a spiritual teacher who does not practice any organized religion. All of these are true.
I have faith – in life, in love. I have devotion – to life, to honor. I am a devotional agnostic: I do not believe that my tiny human mind is capable of understanding what all-of-this is, and I am devoted, utterly, to the mystery. I adore the shared human endeavors of science and I sing to the sky. People tend to come to spiritual teachers seeking meaning or ease of suffering. These are things that I am often able to help with, though when it comes to meaning, I am more likely to support you in finding your own answers than to provide mine.
Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, “I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.”
Unconditional love and clear boundaries are the heart-blood of my work. In the spaces I hold, we practice awe, curiosity, and love. I invite people to ask, wonder, muse; to turn inside and outside, alone and together, to love the texture of the air against your breathing body in this moment, to love this body, to love this moment, to love. We seek meaning, and because we seek it, we find meaning. The answers are many and often different for each of us. I teach the asking and support you in finding your own answers. This process looks like the practice of yoga, healing touch, meditation, lighting candles, reading books, and song.
I have been teaching yoga, meditation, energy work, and Thai yoga massage since 1995. As a yoga therapist, I served as a clinician (the same role a physician has) at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, where I worked in group programs, the clinic, medical research, and with both patients and health care providers. I also taught for years at California Pacific Medical Center’s Institute for Health and Healing and Dr. Dean Ornish’s Preventive Medicine Research Institute. My book Yoga: Natural Fitness for Body and Spirit has been translated and published worldwide. At the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute I served on the board of directors, and was a member of the Teacher Training faculty for decades. I taught Thai yoga massage at San Francisco’s Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Reiki to holistic nursing students at California Pacific Medical Center. My stated specialty as a yoga therapist in medical settings was working with people with cancer. My true specialty is working with anyone who thinks they can’t do yoga, though of course I’ve taught thousands of people who knew they could. I have taught healing arts to people from birthing and through dying: in hospitals, schools, ashrams, offices, yoga studios, and living rooms.
I have and continue to study long and widely; as a yogini my primary influences are Saul David Raye, Angela Farmer, and Shiva Rea. I was trained as an Instinctive Meditation teacher by Lorin Roche and Camille Maurine. I studied Reiki and was attuned as a Reiki Master by Dr. Eric Rubin. My primary Thai Massage teacher is Saul David Raye. I studied Chi Kung and Chi Nei Tsang, a form of Taoist abdominal massage, with Gilles Marin.
When people ask me what I do, my natural response is something like, “You know, I’m that weird old wise lady out in the forest to whom people bring their aching hearts and bodies.”
I cherish being a link in the chain of transmission of ancient, living knowledge about how to be human. I wish for all beings everywhere to know wholeness, freedom, and belonging. I do my best to support this. I would be honored to support you.
I am a white, cisgender, pansexual, kinky woman. My husband and I have practiced ethical non-monogamy happily since 1997. I have walked my own healing path with endometriosis; this involved explorations in nutrition, intuitive healing, bodywork, herbal medicine, and abdominal surgery. My best surgeon, after seeing inside my abdomen, sat me down and said, “Your quality of life. Please explain to me: How are you doing that?!” I intimately understand living robustly well with challenge.
In 2015, my husband James and I began carefully deconstructing our beautiful life in San Francisco to take to the sea. Our intention was to dream new dreams for what we hope will be the second half of our lives. We spent five years on a beautiful boat named Rejoice, sailed from San Francisco to Pacific Mexico, and lived aboard there for four years. In 2023, we returned to land on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
Yogic teachings describes four stages of life: Brahmacharya: student, Gṛhastha: householder, Vanaprastha: forest dweller, and Sannyasa: renunciate. James and I had always imagined living in the forest as our lives flowed along, and we are now nestled in a rambly house in the woods just outside Port Townsend, Washington. These are the traditional lands of the Chemakum and S’Klallam people. After years on the wander living as guests, we are honored and humbled to be putting down roots as forest dwellers in this place. I hope to bring my skills into the loving service of my new local community as well as my increasingly dispersed long-time community, and to all who wish. My community holds people of many faiths, genders, and orientations. All who come in kindness are welcome.