Jennifer Little is a 500-hour certified, trauma-informed Somatic Yoga instructor and Ecstatic Dance facilitator based out of Lexington, KY. Her private and group offerings are for students and clients who want to redefine what it means to inhabit the human body and honor the human spirit, setting the sails for the journey to a lifetime of whole, sustainable health.

Jenn learned invaluable tools founded on cutting-edge kinesiological and neurological research through the 300-hour training at the Essence of Yoga Center in Richmond, KY. She offers these tools to one-on-one clients and students of her weekly group classes in order to help disengrain dysfunctional movement patterns and develop healthier postural habits. Whether the issue is caused by acute injury or accumulated stress on joint and muscle tissues, there is always something to gain from the refined insights of her teachers, Amanda McMaine (1957-2022) and Cara Sparkman.

Somatic Yoga can also be used in healing processes for post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic anxiety and depression, and many other psychological conditions. In fact, learning to cope with PTSD, ADHD, and then-undiagnosed Bipolar 1 Disorder was Jenn’s entry point into the world of Yoga. Clients using Yoga and other somatic practices to better their mental health are some of Jenn’s favorite to work with.

Jenn has maintained a lifelong romance with dance as well, and gets her weekly therapeutic dose of creative movement in Ecstatic Dance, which she hosts alongside Maja Willow Linden every Sundays from 5:30-7pm. After 14 years of studio and competitive dance education, this language has become her most accessible resource in expressing the unnameable impulses of the mind and body. Her most recent role in choreographed dance was in the devised dance theater production, “Who Holds the Devil” (Afterculture Theatre, Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, 2020). 

She sometimes finds herself envious, however, of dancers with no training whatsoever – there is a freedom to guiding oneself through movement, unrestrained by the urge to replicate forms seen and remembered (or the effort not to do so). It is this freedom – the deconstruction of habit and recognizable form – that she seeks to experience and offer through Ecstatic Dance.

Whether in Yoga or Ecstatic Dance, Jenn meets all who enter with the highest respect and honor; it cannot be understated that bravery is an essential quality of any Western person who chooses to take a leap of faith into vulnerability, challenge, softness, deep listening, and connection. These are the results she wishes for all of her students and clients: that they persist in the inner work they feel aligned with and that this work leads them to a long life of good health, unconditional self-love, boundless compassion, abiding joy, and a direct and easily accessible path into the calm waters of equanimity.

She hasn’t perfected it, but she’s working on it too. Jenn’s inner work is constantly supported by her writing practice, her love for music and singing, her culinary curiosity, her blood and chosen families, and, most importantly, her dog, Chandni.