Kira Macoun has spent nearly two decades exploring what can happen when people become more deeply connected to the bodies they live in. What began in the world of fitness has grown into work centered on something much bigger than movement itself: how our relationship with our bodies can shape the way we move, experience pain and tension, respond to stress, and ultimately move through our lives.
That evolution is now reflected in Soma Inspired, the new identity of Comfy Fitness, the 19-year-old business Macoun co-founded with her partner, Carrie Drapac. The rebrand gives a name to what their work has increasingly become: an exploration of the profound, often life-changing possibilities that emerge when people learn not simply to exercise their bodies, but to listen to them, understand them, and develop a relationship with them.
Macoun’s own path began in 2007 as a functional strength trainer. But years of working with bodies sparked a growing curiosity: Why do we move the way we do? Why does one part of the body work overtime while another seems to disappear from our awareness? And what becomes possible when we stop insisting the body perform and begin paying attention to what it’s telling us?
Those questions eventually led Macoun to somatic movement and movement re-education. Today, she is an Essential Somatics Movement Teacher whose work draws from modalities including Hanna Somatics and the Feldenkrais Method, using slow, intentional movement and felt-sense awareness to help people recognize habitual patterns, release unnecessary effort, and discover new possibilities for how they inhabit and move through their bodies.
“Many of us are on a healing journey, and we can map out intellectually why we are the way we are, but sometimes it feels like our bodies haven’t come along for the ride,” Macoun explains. “Somatic work gives us a way to approach that healing from the bottom up, bringing the body into the conversation. We can begin to feel more supported from within ourselves, experience less pain and unnecessary tension, and develop a deeper understanding of our bodies and ourselves.”
While Macoun’s work has moved well beyond traditional fitness, she hasn’t left everything about the fitness world behind. Instead, she has brought some of its most valuable principles into her approach to somatic movement, particularly the idea that meaningful change comes through consistent practice.
Just as strength, mobility, or endurance are built over time, Macoun believes our capacity to notice ourselves, understand our patterns, and respond differently can be practiced, too. And much like exercise, that practice can become easier to sustain when it’s a part of daily life and supported by a community of people doing it alongside you.
“Orienting inward, being with yourself, is a daily practice, like exercise,” she says.
That idea informs the business’s digital model. The company has developed an online portal featuring live virtual classes, individual guidance, on-demand replays, and a growing library of somatic videos, making it easier for members to build a consistent practice around the circumstances of their own lives.
But for Macoun, the purpose of that practice isn’t simply to become more aware of the body. “What happens ‘in here’ inevitably shapes how we show up ‘out there’—in our relationships, our communities, and the choices we make every day,” she says.
Macoun has experienced that shift in her own life. A Chicago political organizer since 2009 and now a member-leader of The People’s Lobby, she was engaged in the work of collective change long before somatics became central to her practice. But as her relationship with her own body changed, so did the way she approached organizing. Somatic awareness gave her another way to understand what people bring with them into the work of changing systems, not only their ideas and values, but their patterns, reactions, fears, relationships to power, and ways of navigating conflict.
“The systems we hope to transform are made up of people,” Macoun says. “When we develop greater awareness of our own patterns, how we respond to fear, conflict, discomfort, power, and one another, we can change how we participate in those systems and how we work together to build something different.”
That perspective gives the forthcoming Soma Inspired identity significance beyond a conventional business rebrand. It represents an evolution from fitness as a service toward a broader philosophy of embodied living, one in which physical awareness, emotional capacity, and personal agency can inform how people move through their lives and communities.
As Soma Inspired emerges, Macoun and Drapac are carrying nearly two decades of that work forward while giving it a name that more closely reflects its purpose. The ambition is grounded in a simple premise: the body is not separate from the process of becoming healthier, more capable, or more engaged with the world.
For Macoun, learning to inhabit that body more fully is where meaningful change begins.
