First, Breathe: Healing Arts Series is a 4-month movement and arts-based program rooted in creativity, community care, and embodied storytelling. Hosted by Arts + Public Life and led by certified yoga instructor Rhya Moffitt, the project combines culturally grounded bodywork with artmaking practices including poetry, movement, collage, and storytelling.
First, Breathe creates space to release stress, reclaim personal and collective narratives, and rebuild a sense of wholeness and connection. Each session begins with community yoga, followed by an artist-led activity that transforms what the body holds into story, imagination, and possibility.
Offered monthly from February - May, the program is anchored in four phases—RELEASE, RECLAIM, REIMAGINE, REBUILD—a healing arc that moves from letting go of harmful narratives, to recovering suppressed histories and wisdom, to re-imagining possibilities for self and community, to co-creating new visions for the future.
April’s theme is REIMAGINE – dreaming new possibilities and breathing them into word. Yoga will be followed by a poetry session lead by Ireon Roach for participants of all backgrounds.
About Ireon Roach
Ireon Roach (she/her/hers) is an award-winning spoken word artist, actor and playwright based in Chicago. Her essays and poems have appeared in Hoochie Feminist Mag and Charcoal Magazine, while plays have been staged and workshopped by ReGround Theater Collective, Jackalope Theatre and Definition Theater. Her debut collection of poetry, L(Eyes) The Limestone Tells was self-published in 2025. Recent performance work has been featured at regional theaters including Goodman Theatre and SpeakEasy Stage Company with film/TV credits such as Candyman (2021) and ‘The 4400’ (CW). She is grateful to have last been hosted at Arts + Public Life with apophenia: anatomy of a prayer, a workshop curated by Jupiter Magazine in collaboration with APL’s Chicago Critics Table. Ireon is anchored in the belief of diasporic Black folks as preeminent architects of language as a tool of everyday liberations.