Julia C. Dyer

Meditation Teacher · Nervous System Educator · Classical Tantra Practitioner

Origin

I came to this work at nineteen.

I was navigating a severe chronic pain condition alongside substance abuse and profound nervous system dysregulation — high-functioning on the surface, in crisis underneath. I had tried the available tools. None of them touched what I was actually carrying.

What changed things was encountering a lineage.

I found my teacher, Brooke Shannon Sullivan — founder of the Wild Temple School of Yoga and Herbal Wisdom — and entered the Sri Vidya tradition of Classical Tantra at the base of Mount Shasta, a place that remains sacred and deeply meaningful to me. What I found there wasn't mystical in the way people expect. It was precise. It was structured. It offered a real map of interior life: how attention moves, how the nervous system shapes perception, how reactivity forms and how it can genuinely shift.

That precision was the thing I had been missing. And it worked — not as a cure, but as a practice that built something real over time.

Practice

I work with people who are already thoughtful — people who have done therapy, who practice, who read, who reflect. People who understand themselves reasonably well and are still stuck in patterns they can name but can't seem to move. The gap between insight and change is exactly the territory I work in.

The practice I teach trains attention. Not as a relaxation technique, and not as a productivity tool — but as a way of developing a nervous system that can hold more of your actual life. Steadier under pressure. Less reactive to your own reactivity. More present to what's actually happening, rather than to the story your system runs about what's happening.

This is slow work by design. It compounds.

Formation

I have been a student in the Sri Vidya lineage for over a decade — and I mean that word seriously. Student. The more this practice has given me, the more clearly I understand how much there is to learn.

My training in the Wild Temple School culminated in a 500-hour yoga teacher certification, with the final 100 hours completed alongside my teacher and a group of practitioners at the Himalayan Sage Institute in Khajuraho, India in 2019. That time in India was not a milestone so much as a humbling — a deepening of practice that I am still digesting.

During those same years, I studied clinical herbalism under Amy Branum at the Northern California School of Botanical Studies, entering a body of botanical and Ayurvedic knowledge that continues to inform how I understand the conditions under which people can change. I also trained in individual change work through an ICF-accredited program — not because I sought the credential, but because I wanted to understand how to actually be useful to another person in a one-on-one setting. I trained in trauma-informed and pelvic floor yoga methodologies, each of which quietly expanded what I thought the body could hold.

I worked for a time as support staff at Granite Wellness Centers, a residential substance use treatment facility — sitting with people in acute withdrawal, facilitating regulation groups, responding to crisis. I have also worked as a behavior technician providing one-on-one intervention for a non-verbal client with significant behavioral challenges, and earlier as a physical therapy assistant. I name these not as accolades but as context: they are the places where this work met real difficulty, and where I learned what I didn't yet know.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Sacramento State University. In September 2026, I begin a Master's in Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, with a focus in Depth Psychology and Jungian Psychoanalysis — following a thread that has been present in this work for years.

I am, in all of this, still a student. That is not false modesty. It is the orientation that makes the teaching possible.

Steady Self School is the institutional form this work takes. One-on-one sessions, live cohorts, the podcast Inner Work, Outer World — all of it is in service of the same underlying aim: to help people develop a real, practiced relationship with their own inner life. Not as a destination. As a capacity.

I'm based in Santa Barbara, California, and work with people across the US and internationally.

A note on the name of this work:

Tantra, as the word is used here, refers to a classical philosophical and meditative tradition — not its Western popular associations. The Sri Vidya lineage is a householder path: rigorous, embodied, and entirely compatible with ordinary adult life. If you're curious about what that actually means in practice, the blog and podcast are good places to start.