One Move

A 21-Day Gentle Somatics Exploration

October 21 - November 11, 2025

Accessible somatics and teachings for disabled and chronically ill people, and anyone looking for a gentle, low-to-no exertion movement and rest practice.

Exploring the possibilities of gentle somatic practice for people with PEM, MECFS, Long Covid, MS, Fibromyalgia, and other disabling illnesses.

Learn one new somatics exercise each day for 21-days.

Learn how to customize a practice that meets the real needs of your body while unwinding patterns of self-rejection and disconnection in your relationship with your body.

Develop a vocabulary of very simple movements and practices that can improve physical and emotional calm and connection when practiced even 2-10 minutes a day.

This is a space where you can permit a softening, slowing down and settling in, letting the body explore restful positions and gentle movements, within the parameters that are accessible to you.

We practice building attunement to what your body feels, needs, knows and wants, prioritizing always a commitment to protecting your body and accepting its abilities and limitations in a given moment.

Abled people also welcomed.

What is Somatics?

I use the word somatics to mean a practice of exploring and paying attention to your experience from within.

It’s a way of tending to your real needs in the moment with care, learning as you go what helps you get more settled, centered, regulated and connected.

A method for cultivating loving attention, attunement and acceptance of your whole self, of tuning in to your feelings and felt sense and experience of life. A way of listening to your body with kindness and curiosity which expands your ability to notice and be present with whatever is going on with you in the given moment, while helping to restore inner rhythms and harmony.

Somatic practice allows you to become more present to and accepting of your wholeness, including all the aspects of you that society judges or rejects, a practice of honoring that you are always all of you, every aspect of your character and experience an integral part of the whole and deserving of acceptance and inclusion.

What does it mean to take care of your body and tend to your nervous system when exercise and practices that rely on exertion are unsafe for you?

As a person who cannot tolerate exertion without becoming very ill—reliably—because I have PEM, I’ve had to find a way of connecting with my body and paying attention to it that requires little-to-no exertion.

I had to learn how to recognize the ways I was chronically aggressive with my body and in my expectations for myself. I had to grieve my loss of capacity to meet the expectations of an ableist culture in order to find my way to acceptance of my limits, and then eventually, to respect and appreciation for them.

I didn’t expect the process to heal my relationship with my body, but as I’ve dismantled internalized ableism and unwound all those stories about what my body should be capable of I found myself settling into the warmest, kindest, most expansive relationship with my body I’ve ever experienced.

None of this was because I broke through my limits. Or met some arbitrary fitness goals. Instead, it happened because I let go of the ambition to be other than I was, let go of my attachment to the ableist standards of the overculture and the judgment of my limits and illness I had internalized.

Or, to be more accurate, I became committed to a practice of unwinding the influence of the ableism of my culture on my relationship with my body.

Because it is a practice. Ableism is a deeply rooted, primarily subconscious set of beliefs, bigotry, expectations, prejudices and biases, and it is absolutely ubiquitous in the dominant culture, so unlearning it is a daily practice of noticing, tending to and uprooting that whole way of thinking and relating (to yourself and others).

This is the experience I want to make available for others, especially other disabled and chronically ill people.

I want you to have an opportunity to immerse in a very gentle practice for a few weeks while establishing a consistent habit of 2-5 minutes a day, learning and practicing new ways of tending to yourself, in the embrace of a group of people interested in repairing our relationships with our bodies and grounded in a commitment to disability justice.

Hello, I’m Lauren Worsh, the founder of Horsetail & Oak Soma School and I will be your guide and teacher in this experience.

I am a liberation midwife and curricula designer, writer and teacher.

In my work I focus on supporting and guiding people through a process of unlearning — unwinding those aspects of our core conditioning that lock us into patterns of suffering.

I teach practices that help people root into a deepening sense of connection to the body’s subtle and ancestral insight, knowledge and perception and train people in the practices of developing somatic awareness and attunement.

I am a cisgendered disabled and chronically ill queer and neurodivergent cycle-breaker.

It's my mission to create experiences that speak to your heart and answer your true needs, experiences that awaken deep insight, generate connection with your body’s rhythms and sense and support you in ending generational cycles of suffering.

I taught yoga and experimented with my own intuitive somatic practice for 15 years, until 2010 when I became too ill to work more than a few hours a week.

For the first 15 years of chronic illness, before I was too ill to work regularly, I was focused on chasing a cure. I wasn’t aware of my internalized ableism or of how it fundamentally distorted my relationship with my body.

I had to learn the territory of disability and PEM, slowly and painfully, over years, until I understood how dangerous it was to exert myself past a very limited envelope of tolerance. The somatics exploration I had been practicing on my own in the before times became my greatest teacher. This is the kind of practice — customized to your needs and dis/abilities — that One Move is designed to help you build.

I currently live and work on Chinook, Clackamas, Cowlitz and Siletz lands colonially known as Portland, Oregon, US.

Why this course is different

  • The goal of this practice is learning restful postures and simple movement patterns to help you settle into your body more, rather than exercising with a goal of exertion, improvement or “fixing”.

    This is the distinction between most western conceptions of exercise, which is integrally tied up in the health supremacy of the dominant culture, and somatic practice, which can help us break free of how we’ve internalized that cultural ableism.

  • We live in a culture of hegemonic body norms and ableist expectations, and practices that help us unlearn these harmful, stigmatizing, monolithic norms can help us liberate ourselves from internalized bigotry and self-rejection.

  • Every body has unique needs, abilities and limitations.

Testimony

“Lauren was my first yoga teacher. She moved to the other coast about 5 years after I began taking her classes, and I’ve never found a teacher since whose classes are so reliably soul-soothing, restful and illuminating, though I’ve had many good teachers.

There is a poetry in her guidance, the way she invites you to bring curious attention towards what you’re feeling and noticing in your body’s experience. I miss her classes and her wisdom.

— C. Summers, Arlington, MA, US

Lauren has a genius for guiding your awareness in a way that helps you to ease, bit by bit, into more presence and trust in your body, its sense and intelligence and inner quietude, and its capacity for self-healing.

— Ash McLeod, Portland, OR, US

“I feel from your writing a gravitas about our world, a sense of stewardship, a seriousness about wanting things to be better but also the necessary ability to look at things as they are.

To study or interact with you is a rewarding process of asking myself to see and think with clarity, and to mobilise the compassion of my heart.

If you are in the water, I feel you are standing deep in it, immersed in mangrove mud to the waist, body and arms and face and hair somehow a lot out of the water, and it's sparkling from the sun, and your hair is long, and you reach higher than makes sense, and you can see very far.

So to be around your work and you feels like you move with that current without falling over.

I read your writing because that feeling of being around someone rooted deep enough to feel it and sway in the water but still stand, gives me more of that feeling in my body.

— Taeko Alphonso, Melbourne, AU

“Working with Lauren has been one of the most powerful and impactful experiences in my adult life. Her work is eloquent, powerful, deep and vast.

I have been awakened, enlivened and healed by my experience with her.



We’ve worked deeply with my ancestral lineage and as a result my patterns have changed (and are continuing to) — contractions releasing, insights and a-ha experiences abound.

Lauren’s insight, experience, and intuition have helped me to address past and present trauma — our work has served me in deep and profound ways, as it has those I am connected to and serve in turn.

— Lisa Evert, Cleveland, OH, US

Our aim is to make this as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, but this cohort of the program will not be safe for people with severe PEM or people who are primarily bedbound.

We hope to do a dedicated run of this program for bedbound people in 2026.