How to Reduce Your Pain, Boost Your, Energy, and Move Confidently in Your Body Again

In this workshop for folks living with multi-systemic chronic illnesses and auto-immune conditions, like Long COVID, RA, and mold illness, they will learn how to:

• Reclaim Your Body: Regain ownership in their bodies using folkloric, contemporary, and popular cultural movement practices;

• Resource Your Innate Joy: Cultivate joy throughout every cell of their bodies using brain retraining and nervous system exercises; and

• Rejuvenate In Community: Build their circle of support through storytelling, movement practice, and other trust-building exercises.

Participants will walk away with a framework on how to find liberation in their body again, a self-assessment to determine where they are currently on their health journeys, and exercises for their home practice.

Workshop instructor

Tyese Wortham

Tyese, a lifelong mover, nearly lost this vital part of herself during a chronic illness journey that began over 30 years ago with a tick bite. After 25 years, she finally learned she had been living with Lyme disease. Drawing on more than two decades of equity work in the arts, she now shines a light on Lyme and other multi-systemic chronic illnesses in queer, trans, and BIPOC communities. Her approach weaves cultural movement traditions as medicine, community connections as care, and joyful practices as healing. By blending folkloric, spiritual, and performative traditions of the African diaspora with integrative and functional healing techniques, Tyese created Thriving With Lyme—an alternative pathway to health that helped her reclaim her power and agency, and now supports others in doing the same.