Embodied Education For a disembodied world

Lauren Duke is an author, educator, speaker, and interdisciplinary somatic educator whose work lives at the intersection of movement, psychology, physiology, contemplative practice, and human connection. For more than two decades, she has explored how the body is shaped by what we live through, and how our behaviors, relationship patterns, and protective mechanisms are often intelligent adaptations to experience.

Lauren holds a master’s degree in psychology, with graduate research focused on long-distance walking, resilience, and interpersonal repair. She is the author of Sh!thouse and the forthcoming This Walk Will Change You, which follows her family across more than 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago while exploring the science of what happens when we move together. Her TEDx talk, What Are You Willing to Walk 500 Miles For?, examines the transformative power of walking, relationship, and repair.

Lauren is also the founder of Gather Encinitas, the influential Southern California movement and wellness cooperative that became an important part of Vuori’s early story. As the wife of Vuori cofounder Chris Miller, Lauren played an influential role in the brand’s formative years, helping cultivate the teachers, community, and movement culture surrounding its launch. Gather became an early hub for Vuori, and its deeply engaged community organically championed the company as it grew from a local startup into a global brand.

A central thread in Lauren’s work is family, because family is where so much of the body is first formed. Drawing from her own family’s complicated history, she explores the nervous system, trauma, resilience, repair, and the intricate ways we become who we are. Through her writing and embodied education, Lauren makes the complex language of the body accessible and deeply human. When we understand how our patterns were created, how they live in the body, and how they continue to shape our lives, we gain greater agency and more choice in what happens next.

At the center of Lauren’s work is a simple belief: healing requires more than intellectual understanding. It requires education, awareness, and committed embodied practice. Knowledge gives us awareness. Awareness gives us choice. And choice allows us to interrupt old survival patterns and create new ones rooted in health, vitality, and aliveness.

From Sh!thouse to This Walk Will Change You, from the mat to the road to real life, Lauren’s work reminds us that change is not something we simply think our way into. It is something we learn, practice, and embody, over and over again.