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Kayla Skinner-Roy, MSW

@you.are.expansive

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Creative containers for personal growth, radical action, and liberated learning. Healing happens in community. 🌎🛸
📍Riverside Arts Center, MI

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Expansive (and exhausted) hello ✨

I’m not sure I’ve ever properly introduced the human behind You Are Expansive.

So… hi. It’s me. A tired, devoted, art-making, container-crafting human, psychotherapist, and toddler mama figuring $h*t out in real time.

I built YAE as a mental health and community care initiative, with the mission of creating supportive, responsive spaces for self-exploration and growth within community. Spaces where expressive arts, therapy tools & techniques, storytelling, and reflective practices help us dream and deepen our relationships with ourselves, each other, and this world.

I’m also still learning how to actually do that. And right now that looks like embracing the mess and multi, leaning into accountability and repair, and trusting whimsy as a legitimate methodology.

At its heart, YAE exists because I believe healing and learning belong together. That they can be creative, collective, and freeing.

That both can create portals of return, remembrance, and opportunities to intentionally explore our inheritance and the stories we choose to carry forward.

That ritual and community witnessing are inherent to the human experience, offering pathways toward deeper connection, collective meaning-making, and the reclamation of our capacity to evolve and transform alongside one another.

My capacity these days is tender and intentional. I've spent years building and becoming, and now I'm being called to reinvest in the intimate ecosystems of my everyday life. To tend to the relationships, rituals, and rhythms that sustain me, and remember that expansion doesn't always mean reaching further. Sometimes it means rooting deeper.

All that in mind, we have some timely, heart-led offerings in the works exploring:
✨ Expansive Healthcare
✨ Expansive Love
✨ Expansive Impact
✨ How to care for ourselves and each other in times of collapse and unrest

If you’re a creative dreaming about art as activism, liberatory learning, or building spaces where people can be more fully human, reach out. Let’s see what becomes possible when we create with care and intention.

We are expansive.
We belong to each other.
Thanks for bearing witness. ❤️‍🔥 by @you.are.expansive

Meet You Are Expansive (YAE) ✨🌱
YAE is a community-rooted, healing-centered art program that blends expressive therapies, liberatory education, and the Internal Family Systems therapy model to create transformative spaces for growth and connection. Our approach fosters emotional insight, resilience, and meaningful connection in ways that honor both individual experience and collective well-being.

A few of the brains behind the program:
💫 Kayla Skinner-Roy – social worker, artist-activist, educator, and founder of YAE
💫 Laura Lee Smith – researcher, educator, and dialogue facilitator
💫 Sara Sadek – liberation-centered wellness practitioner & co-creator of our Inner Child Meditation series
💫 Jarell Skinner-Roy – researcher, abolitionist scholar, and educator

Together, we dream, create, and hold space for healing, justice, and radical imagination.

We invite you join our community and get in touch to learn more about how me might support your next event: kayla@riversidearts.org

#YouAreExpansive #CommunityCare #ArtAsHealing #riversideartscenter #ypsilanti by @you.are.expansive

NOVEMBER 13th - Madam Spider’s Cosmic Womb 🕸️
Our third @neuroartsprod @you.are.expansive collaboration uplifts expressive arts, music, and somatic practice to weave a web of energetic revival, as we acknowledge and release intergenerational wounds through education, empowerment, and embodiment.

Experiences facilitated by @sacralloveconceptions @dearmotherearth_ @queenqueetie @you.are.expansive @grassyjoy & @sashagusikhin by @you.are.expansive

What a wonderful way to close out August. I’m so grateful to be in community with such innovative advocates and changemakers who continually inspire me to imagine connection, creativity, and care in new interconnected ways.

Be sure to follow @neuroartsprod and keep up with the incredible work they’re doing to make healthcare more accessible, inclusive, and life-affirming! by @you.are.expansive

Our COSMIC WEB drop-in day at @rac.ypsi last week was a beautiful reminder of the vulnerability and tenderness and creativity in our community 💫 Thank you to all who came and created with us as a way of honoring interconnected legacies.

Thank you to facilitators @sacralloveconceptions @grassyjoy @sashagusikhin @you.are.expansive for bringing this experience to life, and we can’t wait for the next iteration 💐

Photos by Brian McFarlane @_briancmcfarlane by @you.are.expansive

another drop-in event at @rac.ypsi this Sunday, August 23rd 💐💫 come by anytime 2:30-8pm for movement, storytelling, music making, and an afternoon performance with poetry by @sacralloveconceptions and music by @grassyjoy & @sashagusikhin 🌺

We’re so grateful for our collaboration with @you.are.expansive & @rac.ypsi to bring our community arts-in-wellbeing series to life ❤️ take what you need, and we’ll hold what you need to release by @you.are.expansive

A collaborative offering with @neuroartsprod happening next Sunday, August 23rd.

Stop by for free food, heart-centered activities, and community connection. Let’s take care of each other. by @you.are.expansive

It was a PLEASURE partnering with @cmb.ypsi and witnessing @valenna__ bring her vision to life!

“Spotlight on Imperialism: Surviving in the Belly of the Beast” served as a celebration of local Black artists and their embodied resistance and resilience against carceral violence. It also served as a reminder that we are global citizens and that our liberation is inextricably linked, no matter where we find ourselves in the world.

The art show was subversion itself, with community resources, global education and awareness efforts, and counter-narrative culture in action. If you missed this one, don’t worry, there will be more.

In the words of Mariame Kaba, “we do this ’til we free us.” If it wasn’t clear before our current geo-political nightmare: none of us are free until all of us are free. Let’s keep showing up to care for each other and radically imagine our way to freedom. ❤️‍🔥

#ypsievents #ypsilanti #youareexpansive #artshow #collectiveliberation by @you.are.expansive

^ June 7th
drop in sometime between 1-7 pm to support

#ypsilanti #ypsicommunity #communitymovementbuilders #ypsiartist #localaction by @you.are.expansive

We are the ones who have come, to this place on Earth, at this time in evolution, skilled and gifted with the will to heal ❤️‍🔥 none of us can do this alone. Let us come together 🤲

Meet your community of peers🤝for open-hearted conversation, rewarding connections, and revolutionary strategizing for building the new paradigm together 🐦‍🔥

Open to facilitators of all healing modalities ⚕️

#healing #annarbor #therapists #ypsi #community by @you.are.expansive

This was such a tender and heartfelt drop-in community care event with @neuroartsprod! Here’s to many more opportunities to collectively care for each other. Big thanks to the radically talented @sasha.gusik and @grassyjoy we love you!

#ypsilanti #communitycare #expressivearts #musictherapy #riversideartscenter by @you.are.expansive

Yall Love, Lather, and Lines with @beebeebri.21 was so nourishing.
It was a reminder that we need spaces to show up as we are, to be witnessed, to process, to release, and to be held in care. And right now, that feels more important than ever.

That’s why YAE has collabed with @neuroartsprod to offer a drop-in community care space this Sunday (4/26). Scroll to the last photo for details.

We’ll gather in creative practice, with soundscapes by @grassyjoy and @sasha.gusik to guide and ground us, art to support our imagination outside of a world beyond our inheritance, and community to witness us in our wholeness.

Come as you are. Be in connected community.
Stay as long as you need. Release and/or take what you need.
And if you just need a warm meal, we’ll have that too.

#affirmingspaces #communityofferings #ypsilantimi #ypsilanti expressivetherapy by @you.are.expansive