About Steady Self School
No one develops alone.
Steady Self School is an educational and creative practice founded by Julia Dyer in Santa Barbara. It grows from a simple observation: our capacity to care, teach, and serve is sustained through relationship.
About Julia
Teacher, writer, and graduate student in counseling psychology.
My work lives where contemplative practice, psychology, creative inquiry, and community education meet.
I am an RYT-500 with a B.S. in Psychology and a graduate student in Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. My interests include the unconscious, the creative life of the mind, contemplative traditions in their original contexts, and the development of people whose work asks them to care for others.
I have recovered from a substance use disorder and have lived through severe chronic pain and repeated dismissal in healthcare settings. Care changed when practitioners listened to me instead of reducing me to symptoms. That experience remains part of how I understand attention, relationship, and responsibility.
My formation has happened through relationship: ongoing study in the Sri Vidya tradition, mentorship from my Jungian psychotherapist, graduate education, and work with children on the autism spectrum that strengthened my patience in the presence of intense emotion and behavior.
About the school
A place for careful practice and serious study.
Steady Self School began as a place to study yoga, meditation, breathwork, and the inner life of practice. Its work now has two clear directions.
Community initiatives bring contemplative and creative gatherings to helping professionals, public-service teams, organizations, and local groups. Professional education is being developed for people who want to teach and facilitate contemplative practices with context, sequence, ethical consideration, and respect for scope.
Both are concerned with how people develop the capacity to remain present with others without treating care as something that must be sustained alone.
Education
Professional programs for yoga and meditation teachers, facilitators, educators, and practitioners in helping roles are in development. A dedicated program page is forthcoming.
Community initiative
Custom gatherings, collaborative events, and short partnerships for the people who sustain the wider community. Explore community initiatives.
A living practice tradition
A practice carries a history.
My study in the Sri Vidya tradition is ongoing. In 2019, my 500-hour yoga teacher training culminated in a final 100-hour intensive with my teacher at the Himalayan Sage Institute in Khajuraho, India.
Parampara—the relationship through which teaching is carried from teacher to student—has shaped how I understand contemplative education. A practice has an origin, a sequence, and a context. These are part of the teaching, not background decoration.
Tantra refers here to a classical philosophical and meditative tradition. Sri Vidya is a householder path: a practice tradition lived within ordinary adult life.
Chausath Yogini Mandir · Khajuraho, India
Creative practice
Art gives experience somewhere to go.
I once believed that I hated drawing. It became one of the practices that most reliably helps me move through periods of emotional charge.
Color, shape, writing, and the movement of the hand can give experience somewhere to go before the mind has found language for it. Creative practice at the school is exploratory rather than performative.
Continue
Continue into the work of the school.
Explore concrete gathering objectives, past collaborations, pricing, and the inquiry process for community initiatives.
Explore community initiatives