Whitney chose the Great Blue Heron almost intuitively, only to realize this magnificent bird had quietly followed her through nearly every place she’d ever called home. From the wetlands of Florida to Georgia, Ohio, and eventually Michigan, the Heron kept appearing beside the waters that have always grounded her.
But embodying such a large, elegant bird brought up an unexpected question for this dancer, mother, facilitator, and lifelong space-holder:
How much space am I willing to let myself occupy?
At Huff Park, with her daughter Sedona beside her, Whitney stretched her wings and began exploring the answer.
How We Met
I’ve known Whitney for about three years through the mindful movement and dance experiences she creates. She first started rocking my world at Wild Zen, but I’ve since followed her into all kinds of spaces where her love for movement and other people is evident.
We’ve danced together. I’ve joined her for flash mobs. I’ve moved through Thriller and Praise You with Whitney’s smile guiding the way. I’ve watched her create spaces where people who might not consider themselves dancers suddenly feel safe enough to move their bodies, be strange, take risks, and play.
Whitney has a gift for making other people feel comfortable taking up space. Part of that magic is being ready and able to embody self-permission, to take up space herself and empower others to do the same.
She is used to expanding in a way that encompasses, holds, and encourages. What I hadn’t realized until this portrait was how stepping to the center of the frame, taking up space purely for herself, would feel different. For once, I wanted to stand still and let Whitney move.
Who She Is
Whitney Dawn Pyles is a certified Somatic Coach, accredited Life Coach, Human Design Guide, creative facilitator, dancer, and business owner at Whitney Dawn: Movement & Coaching ↗. Her work centers around helping professionals, creatives, and purpose-driven leaders stop compartmentalizing who they are and begin showing up more fully and authentically.
She’s also the creator of The Zone of Authenticity ↗, a social art and connection project that creates space for honest expression, presence, empathy, play, and meaningful human connection. Through movement, coaching, creative facilitation, and experiences like The Zone, Whitney doesn’t just talk about authenticity—she creates places where people can practice it.
Whitney is also a space holder and mother to three-year-old Sedona, whom I’ve had the joy of watching grow. She has been her caregiver while navigating major changes at home, growing her business, and stepping into greater visibility professionally. There are a lot of identities being held at once: facilitator and participant, artist and business owner, mother and individual, person holding the container and person who sometimes needs to be held by one. Whitney’s Heron became an opportunity to explore all of them.
Why the Great Blue Heron
Whitney could have chosen an owl.
Owls have carried deep significance in her family for decades. Her grandmother loved them and filled her home with them, and since her grandmother passed away twenty years ago, the owl has remained an important symbol for Whitney and her mom. Whitney has encountered owls in the wild and had experiences with them that she holds close.
If you’d asked her beforehand which bird she would choose, an owl might have seemed obvious.
But when Whitney opened my bird books, the Great Blue Heron grabbed her instead.
At first, the decision was intuitive. Only later, as she sat with it, did Whitney realize this bird had been quietly appearing throughout her entire life.
She grew up in Miami, seeing Great Blue Herons in the Everglades and throughout Florida’s wetlands. She lived in Atlanta for nearly seven years and encountered them along the Chattahoochee River. In Michigan, a place that has become deeply connected to her sense of home, she found them again along the Grand River.
Even Ohio, a place that never quite felt like home, gave her a Heron. On her 38th birthday, Whitney took herself on a solo paddleboard adventure and watched a Great Blue Heron take flight from perhaps ten feet away. She later saw a pair flying together.
The geography kept changing.
The Heron remained.
And beneath all of those encounters was another constant: water.
Whitney grew up minutes from the bay and close to the Atlantic. Her family had a boat. She spent time kayaking the Miami River toward the bay, later discovering the rivers and lakes of the places she would call home. She didn’t fully understand how essential water was to her until she lived away from it.
Water has become one of her teachers. It flows and adapts, but it is also immensely powerful. It can hold you or reshape an entire landscape. The expanse of big water offers perspective while reminding us how much remains unknown.
For someone whose life has included movement between so many places, there is something beautiful about discovering that the same bird had been waiting beside the water wherever she landed.
The Look
We built Whitney’s Great Blue Heron from Wedgwood Blue, Charcoal Gray, Mist Gray, and just a flash of yellow.
She wore handmade dance sweatpants in Wedgwood Blue with a handmade Charcoal Gray rayon jersey top. A Wedgwood Blue Wild Rag wrapped around her neck brought the blue upward, while a Mist Gray wrinkle rayon wrap became something between fabric and wings—something Whitney could drape, stretch, throw into the wind, and allow to move around her body. We tied small yellow bands around her wrists as a playful reference to the Heron’s long yellow bill.
The fabrics were soft and fluid, designed to move rather than hold a particular shape. Whitney knew exactly what to do with them.
As soon as she began dancing, the wind caught the Mist Gray rayon. Fabric became feathers. Her arms became wings. The edges of her body seemed to extend farther into the landscape.
Nothing about it felt like Whitney was pretending to be a bird.
She simply needed enough fabric to show us the wings that were already there.
The Session
We photographed at Huff Park, where the marshland, wetlands, boardwalk, and enormous open sky felt like somewhere we might actually encounter a Great Blue Heron.
Whitney brought Sedona, and almost immediately I felt like I was photographing two kids playing. We meandered along the boardwalk while Sedona explored everything around her, turning my pieces of fabric into costumes and playing Rapunzel with the flowing wraps. Whitney played right alongside her.
Then the sky opened around us, the wind caught the fabric, and Whitney danced.
There was no music.
That was strange for me because Whitney has led me through so many movement experiences. I’m accustomed to being the one moving while she holds the space. This time, I stood completely still behind my camera and watched her.
I could feel it all from behind the lens.
Whitney leaped and stretched, throwing her arms outward and activating all this energy around her. The gray fabric caught the wind and stretched around her, until this physically small woman suddenly seemed enormous against the open sky.
And then she sat down.
Sedona climbed into her lap, and everything softened.
Watching them together, I understood something Whitney had been wrestling with since becoming a mother. She doesn’t have to choose between being the enormous dancing bird and being the nest. She can expand and nurture. She can dance and mother. She can be fully herself while remaining deeply connected to her daughter.
Sedona and Whitney seem to move into one another instinctively. They play, lean, cuddle, separate, explore, and return like birds sharing a nest.
Whitney can stretch her wings and still be the place Sedona lands.
Color Connection
Wedgwood Blue feels like the meeting place between water and sky. It carries calm, reflection, openness, and possibility without demanding attention. It isn’t a loud blue. It feels lived in, almost as if it has traveled.
Charcoal Gray brings depth and grounding. It reminds me of the Heron’s darker feathers and of the stillness underneath Whitney’s movement—the pause before the leap, the feet planted before the wings open.
Mist Gray is softer and more ethereal. In motion, it almost disappears into the sky. It became the perfect color for Whitney’s wings because it allowed the wind to participate in the portrait.
And then there was that little flash of yellow—bright, playful, unexpected, and impossible not to notice.
Together, these colors hold so much of what I see in Whitney: softness and strength, stillness and movement, subtlety and play. Like water itself, there is gentleness here without weakness.
Taking Up Space
Before our session, Whitney admitted that embodying the Great Blue Heron brought up some unexpected anxiety.
She’s physically small.
The Great Blue Heron is decidedly not.
It’s tall and commanding, with a tremendous wingspan and an almost prehistoric elegance. As Whitney imagined herself becoming this creature, a little imposter syndrome crept in.
Was she really the person who got to embody something this big?
The more Whitney sat with that discomfort, the more she realized it wasn’t really about physical size.
There are ways she is comfortable taking up space and other ways she still resists it. She described a fear of being perceived as someone who takes up space—or even as someone who wants to. What happens if she becomes more visible? More successful? Bolder? What if fully occupying her own life somehow alienates the people around her?
And yet, there’s a deep desire inside her to expand.
The Heron gave her a body to practice with.
A Great Blue Heron can become incredibly still and compact while standing at the water’s edge. Then it stretches its long neck, unfolds enormous wings, and suddenly occupies an astonishing amount of sky.
Small and big.
Still and expansive.
Whitney doesn’t have to choose.
Reclaiming the AND
Whitney’s relationship with dance has evolved over years. She taught dance for twenty-five years and came from a world shaped by performance, technique, competition, choreography, and prescribed movement. More than six years ago, she began deconstructing that relationship. She wanted to reclaim her love of dance from the perfectionism, sameness, performativity, and expectations that had become tangled around it.
That journey brought her toward freeform and ecstatic dance—movement that could be intuitive, liberated, strange, emotional, playful, and completely her own. It also became the foundation for the spaces she now creates for other people. She helps people release the idea that there’s a correct way to move and instead become curious about what their own bodies want to do.
But lately, something else has been returning. Whitney has been taking dance classes again. She’s allowing her skill and grace to be seen. She’s choreographing again—including the Praise You flash mob we’re preparing for Michigan Birds.
And she isn’t returning to the dancer she used to be.
She’s bringing everything she’s learned with her.
Freeform AND choreography.
Moving independently AND moving in unison.
Holding space AND being held.
Mother AND individual.
Facilitator AND dancer.
Whitney sees dance as deeply human, something that belongs to all of us. Free movement can help us experience liberation and self-expression. Moving in unison can give us another powerful experience: belonging.
They awaken different things.
We need both.
Maybe that’s another lesson hidden inside the Great Blue Heron. It can stand impossibly still at the water’s edge and then suddenly unfold into an enormous wingspan.
It doesn’t have to decide which version is the real bird.
Neither does Whitney.
Join the FLASH MOB
This portrait arrives at a particularly meaningful moment because Whitney is one of the people helping Michigan Birds actually take flight. The thirty Power Portraits are complete, but the flock isn’t finished gathering. On September 6, I’m throwing a Flock Party at the More Joy studio where we’re going to create bird-inspired outfits, eat together, play with color, and start learning the choreography Whitney has created for our Praise You flash mob.
Join the September 6 Flock Party ↗
Then on September 12, Michigan Birds comes off the wall. During ArtPrize Preview Weekend, The Joyful Disruptors will gather at Rosa Parks Circle dressed as birds and move together through Whitney’s choreography. After years of exploring both individual freedom and the particular magic that happens when bodies move in unison, Whitney is helping turn thirty individual portraits into one moving flock.
And I can’t think of a better way for this project to leave the nest.
The Great Blue Heron had been following Whitney long before she chose it from one of my bird books. Maybe it didn’t follow her across the country to teach her where home was.
Maybe it followed her to teach her how much space she was allowed to occupy there.
And now she’s helping the rest of us occupy that space together.
Come make your wings. Learn the dance. Join the flock.
September 6 — Flock Party
September 11 — Full rehearsal at Rosa Parks Circle
September 12 — Michigan Birds takes flight at Rosa Parks Circle
I’ll see you in the sky.
