About me
Photography by Diana Hagues
This may already give you a good sense of who I am. But if you enjoy a longer story — or just like to know the person behind the work — feel free to keep going to learn more about the threads that shaped my work.
Growing up between worlds
My early life held questions about identity, belonging, migration, and power — long before I knew the language for any of it. I learned early how bodies hold tension, how silence shapes families, how difference sits in the skin.
These experiences eventually led me into academic study and later into embodied practice, though I didn’t realise it at the time.
My work sits at the intersection of somatics, trauma-informed practice, and social justice. I’ve spent many years exploring how experiences of race, privilege, migration, and inequality shape us — not only intellectually but physically and emotionally. My PhD and academic research in sociology, ethnic relations and identity deepened my understanding of how these patterns form, while more than fifteen years of yoga and somatic training taught me how they live in the body.
The academic thread
I went on to complete a PhD in ethnic relations, identity, and racism. I became deeply attuned to how inequality is lived — how it shows up not just in systems but in the body: tightening, shrinking, bracing, disconnecting.
Working in higher education for many years, I supported institutions as they grappled with culture, equity, whiteness, inclusion, and change. I led on the University of Cambridge’s successful Race Equality Charter submission and, as Race Unit Lead at the Royal Society of Chemistry, worked with organisations across the UK to help them understand not just what needs to change, but how people actually meet change.
This work taught me that transformation requires honesty, regulation, spaciousness, and embodiment — not just strategy.
The somatic thread
Alongside my academic and organisational work, I’ve practised yoga for more than fifteen years. What began as body movement slowly became a way of understanding myself.
Through training in trauma-informed yoga, somatic coaching, embodied movement, and therapeutic approaches rooted in choice and agency, I began to see how bodies store memory, survival patterns, identity, and hope.
Move Rooted grew from the realisation that social justice work cannot be separated from the body — and that embodiment cannot be separated from justice.
The mediation thread
I am also a qualified mediator, with a practice grounded in deep listening rather than quick fixing.
My approach centres spaciousness, slowing down, and helping people really see and understand one another. Mediation, for me, is not about pushing people toward agreement, but creating conditions where honesty, dignity, and humanity can re-emerge.
This work complements my somatic and anti-oppression practice: all of it is about helping people stay present with difficulty and rebuild the possibility of connection.
What working with me feels like
Whether I’m facilitating a workshop on race and justice, offering trauma-informed yoga, supporting someone one-to-one, or guiding a mediation, the focus is the same:
creating spaces where bodies feel safe enough to stay present
supporting people to notice their own patterns with compassion
inviting curiosity rather than defensiveness
slowing down to let insight arrive through the body, not just the mind
choosing gentleness over urgency
making room for discomfort, nuance, and unexpected shifts
People often describe sessions with me as grounding, spacious, steadying, and quietly transformative.
If you’d like to connect
If you’re curious, if something here resonates, or if you’re seeking a gentler, more embodied way to approach healing, justice, conflict, or change — I’d love to hear from you. You’re warmly invited to get in touch, whether to work together, collaborate, or simply explore what might be possible.
A beginning that wasn’t a plan
I didn’t begin this work with a neat plan. What I followed instead were small moments of noticing — in my own body, in the rooms I held, in the conversations about justice and belonging that stayed with me long after they ended.
I’m Joanna, the founder of Move Rooted. My practice grows out of the belief that change doesn’t just happen in our thinking. It also happens in the body — in breath, in impulse, in how we brace, soften, or make space for ourselves and others. Over the years, I’ve woven together trauma-informed yoga, somatic approaches, and social-justice practice to create spaces where people can slow down, feel, reflect, and connect more honestly with themselves and their communities.
My own story sits at the heart of this work: growing up between cultures, studying migration and identity, navigating questions of whiteness and belonging, working inside institutions trying to shift patterns that run much deeper than policy. Again and again, I saw how our bodies quietly hold both harm and possibility — and how transformative it can be when we learn to listen. I came into this work not just as a teacher or a scholar, but as someone walking alongside my own questions: What does it feel like to belong? How does my own history of migration, whiteness, neurodivergence and trauma shape my relationship to my body and to others?
Today, I support individuals, groups, and organisations who want to move towards more grounded, embodied, and equitable ways of living and working. If something in you is curious, tender, or looking for a different way of being, you’re warmly invited in.