About Molly

Over the last two decades, Molly Boeder Harris (she/her) has worked in community-based rape crisis centers as a medical and legal advocate, provided sexual trauma crisis support and violence prevention education for students on college campuses and has directed a campus-based Women’s Center. During that time, she also became a certified yoga instructor and has since been teaching yoga at rape crisis centers, yoga studios, counseling centers, and social service agencies. Molly feels especially drawn to connecting survivors with support systems that facilitate embodied and sustainable healing while recovering from trauma. She is humbled to witness survivors explore their unique and innate capacity to heal and believes that each person’s individual healing bolsters the healing of the collective. 

In 2012, Molly founded the non-profit organization, The Breathe Network: Building Resilience through Embodied Approaches To Healing in order to connect survivors of sexual trauma with resources about the vast range of holistic healing practices that can transform the imprints of trauma and to make identifying trauma-informed healthcare and healing practitioners more accessible. In addition to direct healing services, The Breathe Network provides training for healthcare and healing practitioners across a spectrum of disciplines including; acupuncture, bodywork, energy healing, psychotherapy, naturopathy, yoga, birthwork, medical doctors, and more. These trainings serve to enhance clinicians’ capacity to offer survivor-centered, trauma-informed care within their practice and to also bolster their resilience in their field.

Molly holds a Master’s Degree in International Studies and a Master’s Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also a certified yoga instructor offering public classes and private instruction as well as workshops focused on healing trauma with the support of yoga. She regularly facilitates workshops and teacher trainings for yoga instructors seeking to gain greater skill and confidence in teaching with a trauma-informed lens. In early 2015, Molly began her 3-year training in Somatic Experiencing, a revolutionary and naturalistic trauma-resolution method designed by Dr. Peter Levine. With over 300 hours of study, she completed her Somatic Experiencing training in the Fall of 2018, earned her Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) certificate, and began infusing this approach to trauma healing into her yoga teaching and her yoga teacher trainings. She also shares this somatic healing practice on its own to support people in renegotiating trauma and restoring greater physiological function. Since earning her SEP certificate, Molly has completed a 96-hour training, Somatic Skills Online with Kathy Kain and will complete the year long Touch Skills for Therapists training with Kathy in September of 2023. She receives monthly case consultation as well as personal sessions from two seasoned Somatic Experiencing Practitioners.

Molly’s work and writing has been featured in Medium, Origin Magazine, Mommy Mystic, Clapp with Jane and The Trauma Therapist Project. She has had multiple essays exploring the themes of trauma, sexual violence, and holistic healing published in elephant journal. Molly curates and writes the content for the Breathe Blog and her poetry and artwork was published by Healing is an Art. She is a nature lover and a photography enthusiast and has created all digital media for The Breathe Network's website and social media content as well as her own website.

"Tell yourself again and again – there is no timeline. Yes, you will have tremendous grief, but you are not your grief. You are the one who watches this brutal and exquisite human experience, who feels it surface, and who with bravery and nothing to lose, allows its fullness to surge. It will pass, even if for a brief moment, and in that openness, when your breath returns to rest and your perception has been cleared by your own tears, you can acknowledge yourself for letting go of that which had to come through you." -Molly Boeder Harris

My Story

I realized through my own process of navigating trauma and the way in which it pervaded every aspect of my life – personally, professionally, relationally – that each survivor must intuitively, often through trial and error, discover and create a healing system that works their unique experience. The nonlinear process that begets healing causes many people to question their capacity for resilience living in a world that communicates an arbitrary timeline for how long they are allowed to grieve. In my experience, healing is an ongoing, lifelong practice that requires intentionality, consistency, and endurance.

Repeatedly, I hear from survivors that they feel disconnected from their body and ultimately, from themselves on a fundamental level. The body (and the mind-body-soul connection) remains undervalued by mainstream advocacy spaces in its ability to facilitate healing and be a resource for resilience. Understandably, many survivors are drawn to coping behaviors that numb or distort their physical, emotional, or spiritual reality because they have not been adequately supported in the nuanced process of recovery. I recognize these behaviors as physiologically rooted attempts at healing, regulation, and resilience that simply need recognition, valorization, and eventually, compassionate redirection.

We live in a culture where we are not encouraged to acknowledge our pain, let alone, explore it. However, in fully facing the scale of our most painful experiences, what is revealed is not only our wounds, but also, our incredible strength. We may find that beneath our suffering, we hold a reservoir of wisdom. Survivors have endured the most intimate kind of violence and yet it has not destroyed them. They have the capacity to go to the depths within themselves and examine the residual emotion, sensation, and stagnation that has been left in the wake of the trauma. It is an important voyage to go on, because it is there beneath everything, that they will bear witness to the wellspring of their resilience. I believe all survivors have the ability to thrive if given access to healing practices that are meaningful to them and that facilitate the re-integration of the physical, mental, energetic, and spiritual aspects of their being. I am committed to being a part of the movement to re-center survivors and their healing process within the wider movement to end sexual violence.