Rie Katagiri

Rie is a Japanese American, Los Angeles based trauma informed, somatic healer, embodiment educator, choreographer and movement coach for film/tv/music videos and live events with 20+ years of experience in healing trauma through bodywork, yoga and dance.

She is the creator of BODY LAB, a training program for filmmakers and artists to help guide creatives to move out of the conceptual mind and into embodying their work. Rie is also the founder of Erotic Movement Arts® (EMA), a pleasure guided movement method that integrates female-centered Yoga, Qi Gong, Meditation, Erotic & Pole Dance with Goddess Spirituality which awakens the vital life force of erotic energy.

Working with Rie will expertly facilitate the understanding of vital energy in the body (Chi) and how to access it for healing, creativity and self development. You will learn how remarkable your body is through changing your relationship to your body.

Where it all began…

Rie started her own healing journey in 1996 after a serious injury that left her paralyzed and hospitalized. The lack of compassion and care Rie experienced turned from depression to inspiration. The thought that kept repeating was, “People who need healing, deserve better." This traumatic experience set Rie on the path of healing and educating herself about conscious healthy living. Through her injury, Rie realized instinctually her body had built-in healing and regenerative intelligence. Through her own curiosity and life changes, she began to learn first hand what worked and what didn’t when it came to transformative healing models. She started her path at the Shiatsu Massage School of CA in 2001. Her education and direct experience here was all about Traditional Chinese Medicine and Japanese style acupressure that honored and moved life force, ‘Qi’. She unearthed her own healing powers and was immediately able to take her training and turn it into a full time profession as a bodyworker.

Her first yoga teacher's training was with the internationally recognized pioneer in yoga and emotional healing, Ana Forrest. Ana offered her a teaching position at her highly regarded Forrest Yoga Circle in Santa Monica in 2002 where she taught until the studio closed.

In 2004 during a pole dancing class, Rie discovered a superpower. Although she thought she was “in her body” as a full time yoga instructor and bodyworker, she knew that she was not engaged with all of her creative juices. So a few pole dancing classes later, in this intimate room full of women, she realized that her inner dancer and sensual femaleness had been in a deep sleep. This new love affair with sensuality + pole dancing led Rie to fully dive into dance classes at S Factor Los Angeles, where she began tending to another layer of self discovery and healing. At the urging of her instructor, in 2006 she became a teacher as well as a national teacher trainer; developing their anatomy curriculum.

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After many years of supporting someone else's vision, she followed her aching heart to start her own movement called Erotic Movement Arts ® (EMA). EMA is a multi sensory, pleasure based, conscious movement and fitness experience for women. Part sacred temple, part boudoir - every cellular matrix of EMA is from Rie's own body and all that she has come to understand about living well in a female body. EMA offers an open and brave space for women to journey into their inherent spiritual embodied wisdom which includes our erotic body & energy.​ EMA classes bring women from all over the world to explore through sacred dance, dialog, ritual, play and witnessing each other in their exploration of what it takes to choose to move from their liberated authentic self.