Dani Harris, OCT, B.Ed

Dani Harris, OCT, B.Ed
Indigenous Studies and English Teacher, Rebel Breath and Breathing Room

AMS2022 Learning Session

FutureWork: Present Moment Safety and Breath for Post-Pandemic Frontline Youth

This workshop will discuss (both empirically and evidence-based), the on-the-ground, frontline needs, and challenges youth are facing coming out of the pandemic. We will pay special attention to safety, containment, boundaries, and strength-based approaches in using breathwork to regulate nervous systems, the trauma-response and bring playfulness and equanimity to the youth we serve. We will look at structuring and best practices.

Dani Harris, OCT, B.Ed

Dani Harris is the co-founder of Rebel Breath, a social enterprise whose work is to help everyone to grow stronger in their own brilliance, and feel safer and more capable in meeting life’s diverse and sometimes grave challenges, through the patient pulse of breathwork.

Dani is an international holistic mindset and meditation teacher and a secondary school Indigenous Studies educator working to decolonize education. With 20 years of experience, and recognizing she is one of the next ancestors, she teaches youth in high priority neighbourhoods facing extreme challenges. She believes breathwork and a strength-based approach is the foundation for students’ well-being and survivance. Dani seeks to see the amazing uniqueness in every student, the Truth in their storytelling, their lived experiences and the joy that exists in celebration for their wholeness.

Dani was the inspiration to Breathing Room, which she began in her classroom in Scarborough, Ontario, a section on the east side of the Greater Toronto Area. This program gave 24 elementary schools and 5 high schools access to trauma-informed mindfulness programs focussing on whole school resilience.

Dani has served not only as Breathing Room lead in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), but has led the the Queer Straight Alliance at her school and board levels for nearly 2 decades, as well as serving on equity, literacy and safe schools committees, and working with the Urban Indigenous Education Center throughout her career.

She has taught hundreds of adults in addition to thousands of young people, and she has contributed to Street Yoga (USA), Each Amazing Breath (UK), and the Yoga Service Collective (YSC), where she is an author of several chapters on the well-received best practices book Yoga and Resilience: Empowering Practices for Survivors of Sexual Trauma, as well as writing centering around safety in yoga and mindfulness communities. She has presented with YSC at the Omega institute on anti-racism and mindfulness. She is currently the co-editor of an upcoming book with the Omega Institute and the Yoga Service Collective on Yoga for Addiction Recovery.

Additional upcoming projects include writing around Surviving Mindfulness and writing a collaborative book, Breath Medicine which focuses on healing styles using breath as the anchor.