About Deb Burke

My work is trauma informed and integrates classical yoga with mindfulness, contemporary understandings of trauma, nervous system regulation, expressive arts, and relational healing. Whether we meet through yoga therapy, expressive art, or my paintings, my intention is to hold a compassionate and affirming space that welcomes you in all of your beautiful complexity—across body, mind, and spirit.

I believe that healing unfolds through relationship—with ourselves, with one another, and through connection with the natural world. This understanding emerged through my work as a community-based social justice educator, my study of yoga, my art practice, and my experiences in the wilderness. While these experiences may seem distinct from one another, they all have supported my healing and my exploration of what it means to be human and how we come home to ourselves.

For more than thirty years, I have worked as a community-based social justice educator in higher education. Alongside students, community partners, and people whose lives have been shaped by marginalization and systemic inequity, I have witnessed how profoundly our relationships and social conditions influence health and well-being. Chronic stress, trauma, isolation, and injustice leave lasting imprints on the body, mind, and spirit. They create suffering and can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves, from one another, and from a sense of belonging.

I have experienced these realities in my own life. Art making, the teachings of yoga, relationships with people and communities across cultures, and time in nature have all supported my growth and healing.

My path into yoga therapy emerged through the healing that the study and practice of yoga offered me. As a yoga therapist, it is my intention to accompany others as they reconnect with themselves through embodied practices, creative expression, and authentic relationship. Over the years, I have witnessed—in both myself and others—that even amidst pain, illness, grief, or uncertainty, there is a quiet presence within us that we can return to. Yoga therapy offers practices that help us remember and reconnect with this part of ourselves—not by striving to become someone else, but by coming home to who we already are.

I understand health and well-being as inseparable from lived experience and social context. I bring an evolving social justice consciousness and humility to my work, recognizing that while suffering is part of being human, unjust systems create unnecessary suffering in profound ways. At the same time, I believe every person possesses an inherent dignity and wisdom that cannot be diminished by illness, trauma, or circumstance. My role is not to fix or change another person, but to create the conditions in which healing, connection, and a deeper experience of belonging in oneself and the world can naturally unfold.