Kaya Leigh
Kaya is a Master Breathwork Practitioner, International Speaker, Teacher and Trainer, Conscious CEO, Womb Awakening Practitioner, and Embodied Leadership Guide, alongside a Multi-Modality Creatrix and WisdomKeeper across many spiritual traditions and healing art forms. Kaya is also of Cherokee blood and seeks to preserve and honor the sacred indigenous codes of her lineage. Visionary, wisdom-keeper, creative, teacher, guide, catalyst, initiator, sister and friend, Kaya is a woman of many facets.
Kaya is trained in Emotional Intelligence, Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory, Compassionate Inquiry, Conscious Communication, the Subconscious Domain, Trauma & Nervous System Awareness, and much more.
ADDITIONAL Qualifications
Multiple Courses, Studies & Workshops with Dr. Peter Levine & Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma-Informed Care Certification, SOSHA
Nervous System-Informed Certification, SOSHA
Nervous System Repair & Neuro-Resiliance Training, Tina Nance
100-hr Restorative Yoga, Yoga Nidra & Somatic Trauma Integration Training, Tina Nance
PolyVagal-Informed Certification, Deb Dana
Womb Awakening Certified Practitioner, Fountain of Life
Biomancy Certification, Dr. Azra Bertrand
NVC, Compassionate Inquiry and Conscious Communication Training, Various
Kaya is the Founder and Director of Sacred Breath Academy, a trauma-informed, holistic Breathwork School, established within the Breathwork field for over 7 years, with more than 500 Sacred Breath Facilitators around the globe, on 6 continents, and over 45 countries. Kaya is additionally the Creator of The Sacred Breath Method™. She has also created a Sacred Feminine Mystery School, a living library of the feminine mysteries and wisdom teachings.
Kaya’s core breathwork modality, The Sacred Breath Method™ takes a holistic, trauma + polyvagal-informed, and feminine approach (the feminine principle exists within all beings) to Conscious Connected Breathwork, which allows for a greater depth of somatic safety, nervous system coherence, and emotional unwinding. Kaya has been working with breath medicine for over a decade now, and to this day, remains continuously in awe of the metamorphoses it catalyzes in both the individual and the collective. She believes that conscious breath is an art form which holds the most profound treasure we seek: intimate union with self.
Kaya is passionate about pioneering Breathwork Ethics, Accountability, Responsibility, and Safety, and has been teaching, writing, and speaking on this subject for many years, often as a minority voice. Safety and ethics are not only needed within the facilitator’s landscape and how they are showing up within the teacher-student dynamic, but also these textures are essential within the container itself, as no two nervous systems are the same. Kaya believes breathwork should be deeply informed and nervous system-led to account for the infinite diversity present within myriad individuals comprising the whole- because we are all intimately different, and thus so too is our healing.
At 38 years old, Kaya has been crafting sacred and transformative spaces for over 12 years, weaving immersive experiences, retreats, workshops and trainings all across the US, Europe, Asia and Central and South America. Her life’s work exists for one reason: to guide others home… back into their sacred totality, in the reclamation of their full-spectrum embodiment and most radiant and enlivened self. Kaya takes a holistic, spacious, trauma + polyvagal-informed, and feminine approach to breathwork journeying, which allows for a greater depth of somatic safety, nervous system coherence, and emotional unwinding.
Kay is an advocate of this powerful truth: before we may harness any kind of collective change, we must first live and embody that change within ourselves. So the question remains: Are you ready to become it?
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EXCERPTS FROM A recent Q&A WITH KAYA
Who are your ideal students, clients, participants and allies?
My soulmate allies, clients and students are committed to the path of awakening and self-actualization, here to create more conscious, connected and loving ways of being, seeing and relating; those devoted to breath as healing medicine.
What Pain Points Do You Solve?
I don’t appeal to or “solve” pain points— my work is instead about allowing people the gift of safely connecting to and communing with their pain (as a teacher) so they can transmute that pain into higher awareness, wisdom, knowledge, and even pleasure. My work invites the transformation of one’s wounds into wisdom, in the inner-standing that even pain is a gift; a call back into the deeper layers of ourselves, as a journey and homecoming to our soul.
4. What is Your Highest Offering?
Deep, powerful and meaningful work + intimate containers of transformation, reclamation and self-discovery
5. How Do You Make Your Participants Feel?
Seen, remembered, held, activated, nourished, supported, honored, reclaimed
6. How Are You Different?
I compassionately challenge the status quo of breathwork (including open-mouth breathwork that overrides our the deeper needs of our nervous system and physiology), along with breathwork too focused on an overly-polarized (and at times aggressive) Masculine Principle. I am a Sacred Rebel here to lovingly ruffle the feathers of the old, in service of the highest evolution and expansion of Western Breathwork. My dharma is instead to invite Breathwork back into the divine waters of the Feminine Principle, nurturing the ethos of allowance over force, parasympathetic over sympathetic, ease over aggression. I am here to gently trailblaze a new way, guided by the Goddess and the Divine. I am here to bring back ceremony, intention, and sacredness in modern Breathwork Containers. I am here to be an agent of change for Conscious Connected/Circular Breathwork. I walk in the beautyway in service to Spirit, not my ego.
7. Why Do Your Participants Trust You?
Because I invite them into their totality by asking them to meet every part of themselves in radical intimacy, vulnerability, courage, strength, forgiveness and acceptance. Because I hold a deep mirror for them to soften, lean in and turn toward what is; meaning what is alive and present within them. Because I gently challenge my students and clients into their highest (which also means encouraging them to breathe into their edges and layers of resistance that protect their heart from opening and widening enough to let all of life in). Because I create a container where all emotions, all textures, all parts of their being are welcome, invited, held and compassionately witnessed. Because my healing spaces are devoted to vulnerability, de-armoring and uncompromising authenticity, and this is refreshing to many. For we all yearn to be met, seen and accepted just as we are. In my containers, we drop the masks, facades and pretenses to arrive just as we are. No spiritual high horses present or barriers created between teacher and student. At SBA, we journey in the way of togetherness, in the divine remembrance that we are all walking each other home.
8. What is your vision and prayer?
My vision: To support the healing, liberation, activation, and evolution of humanity.
To hold an anchor of soul remembrance, self-actualization and sovereign empowerment for the collective, guided by the Divine.
My living prayer: May all beings be free. May all beings remember the magnitude of who they are.
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin