Conversations with Sophia Kopasakis

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sophia Kopasakis.

Sophia, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I have two businesses:

1. Volcanic Lioness Fire & LED Performing Arts — my circus and flow arts business.

2. Kopasi Kinetics — my human biomechanics personal training business.

Growing up, two themes consistently followed me: athletics and exercise, and Greek dance performance. Neither was something I consciously sought out. They were simply things I naturally found myself becoming deeply involved in.

My parents immigrated from the island of Crete, so I was heavily immersed in Greek and Cretan culture and spent much of my life involved in the Greek community. At the same time, I had a greater-than-average athletic ability, particularly in endurance sports. Given Crete’s cultural history and its reputation for endurance and mountain culture, that felt fitting.

Greek and Cretan dance also came with very specific rules. There were prescribed steps, occasional opportunities for freestyle, and short sections where dancers could introduce something unique or choreographed. There were also separate men’s and women’s sections.

And this created one of my earliest frustrations.

Men were allowed to be warriors. They could jump, leap, stomp, hit the ground, perform acrobatics, and express power and aggression.

Women, on the other hand, were generally expected to be graceful and delicate. If we weren’t doing those “pixie-like” movements, we were usually belly dancing.

I hated that distinction.

At the same time, I struggled tremendously in the athletic world and at school. I was the weird, hairy, skinny Greek girl with big dark curly hair, and I was bullied frequently.

So I literally ran away from my feelings.

In fifth and sixth grade, I would run miles during recess. Part of it was because I was terrified of failing the mile test and becoming the laughing stock of the class. But running also became an outlet for dealing with rejection and emotions I didn’t know how to process.

My gym teachers noticed my obsession and ability to run and contacted the middle school cross-country and track coaches. By the time I reached middle school, I was essentially coaxed into competitive running.

My father, an extremely accomplished and ambitious NASA engineer who had grown up in a poor mountain village in Greece, was ecstatic that his daughter had an athletic gift. Unfortunately, his expectations became intense and unhealthy, sometimes pushing me to the point of injury.

In middle school track, I was technically asked what event I wanted to do. I wanted to pole vault.

Instead, I was told that because I was short and had exceptional endurance, I needed to run distance for the sake of the school’s athletic program.

So that’s what I did.

Throughout middle and high school, I became increasingly successful as an endurance athlete. I even received a letter from Cleveland State University during my freshman year of high school inviting me to join their cross-country team.

But behind the success was an enormous amount of anxiety.

I threw up before every race. I experienced visible panic attacks in class on Fridays because I knew a meet was coming the next day.

The adults around me saw a successful runner and concluded that I needed to keep going.

Eventually, I cracked.

During my senior year, right before a cross-country meet at Lorain County Community College, I ran away again. I disappeared into the woods and hid for two hours. Eventually, search teams were looking for me.

When I finally came out, everyone was furious.

My teammates felt that I had let them down. My father stopped speaking to me for two months and called me a loser. My coach temporarily expelled me from the team and told me that I was making a bad decision because I was “eccentric” and didn’t fit in.

I chose to make the expulsion permanent.

That was the end of my competitive running career.

But I never stopped running.

Eventually, I injured myself by tripping over my own foot and stepping on my toe. I was so addicted to running that I refused to stop, and I developed compensatory movement patterns that negatively affected my running mechanics for years.

I briefly transitioned into competitive road cycling, but that didn’t last. Eventually, I focused on strength training and general fitness.

That growing interest led me to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Sciences.

Toward the end of college, a friend who coached the university rowing team approached me and said, “We need strong women like you on the rowing team.”

That was apparently all it took.

I walked onto the team and quickly became its strongest rower. I broke collegiate records and helped lead the team to victory.

During that time, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree and attempted a master’s degree in exercise physiology. I struggled tremendously, eventually failing out after experiencing what was essentially a complete breakdown over feeling like I was going nowhere in life.

After college, I continued rowing on a women’s masters team, but the cost eventually became unsustainable.

Then something completely unexpected entered my life:

Fire spinning.

A friend introduced me to a fire performance group, and I immediately fell in love with it.

At the time, I was working as a trainer at a gym in Avon and preparing to move to Geneva for an internship at an Olympic Training Center, where I would work with strength coaches for Olympic athletes.

Unfortunately, that internship became an extremely toxic and abusive environment. I left three months before it was supposed to end.

When I returned home to Westlake, however, I had discovered something that would completely change my life: flow arts.

I started practicing with PVC pipes at the gym and eventually bought my first fire staff.

Around this same period, I came out of the closet and began giving myself permission to dance and move as powerfully and “warrior-like” as I had always wanted.

And something shifted.

I had been dealing with a thyroid disorder for years, and during this period I experienced a dramatic improvement in my health.

I became obsessed with fire spinning.

But by the time I reached 28, my body was hurting constantly. I was dealing with one overuse injury after another.

That’s when I hired a friend who was a Functional Patterns practitioner to help me.

He completely changed the way I understood the human body. He taught me how to train movement more intelligently and sustainably, and over time I was able to resolve most of my chronic pain and return to flowing comfortably.

I became so dedicated to this approach that the gym where he worked eventually offered me a position.

I worked as a Functional Patterns practitioner for about 3.5 years while continuing to develop my fire and flow arts career.

Eventually, though, I realized something important:

I wasn’t going to build the life I wanted working under other gym owners.

The business model meant giving up a large portion of my income in exchange for help acquiring clients. At first, the gym provided me with a decent client base. But eventually, I was expected to do most of the marketing, networking, and fieldwork necessary to generate my own business while still giving away a significant portion of what I earned.

When I saw my income decrease year after year for three consecutive years, I realized I needed to build something of my own.

So I left and started Kopasi Kinetics.

I now make roughly twice as much per hour, although building and maintaining a full client roster requires significantly more work because I am responsible for generating my own leads.

At the same time, I continued building Volcanic Lioness Fire & LED Performing Arts.

Over the years, I’ve developed skills across many areas of circus and flow arts, including weapon-style props, illusion props, balancing props, and complex manipulation techniques. I’ve created numerous pieces and developed movements that may even be original inventions.

Looking back, the two businesses might seem completely unrelated.

But to me, they are connected by the same thread that has been running through my entire life:

movement, performance, athleticism, creativity, and the desire to express myself outside of the limitations other people placed on me.

Kopasi Kinetics is about understanding the human body and helping people move better.

Volcanic Lioness is about movement as art, performance, and expression.

Both came from the same place: a lifetime of learning how to move through the world on my own terms.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. I’ve dealt with severe anxiety and pressure throughout my athletic career, eventually reaching a breaking point and leaving competitive running. I’ve also experienced major injuries, failed out of my master’s program, and had to leave a toxic Olympic training internship early.

I spent years dealing with chronic pain and overuse injuries, which eventually led me to completely change how I understood and trained the human body. I also dealt with a thyroid disorder for several years and eventually experienced a major improvement in my health during a period of intense personal growth and finding my identity through dance and flow arts.

Building my businesses has brought another set of challenges. I’ve had to learn how to generate my own clientele, market myself, and become financially independent. During COVID, I was also scammed out of $13,000 through an Amazon dropshipping/e-commerce scheme by someone I believed was a friend, which was both financially and emotionally devastating.

There have been failures, injuries, financial setbacks, anxiety, toxic environments, and people who took advantage of my trust. But those experiences ultimately pushed me toward greater independence and helped shape the two businesses I’m building today.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’d describe my work as the intersection of human movement, athletic performance, biomechanics, and creative expression.

Through Kopasi Kinetics, I specialize in human biomechanics and movement training. I help people understand how their body is organized and teach them how to move with better coordination, efficiency, and control. My approach comes from years of studying exercise science, endurance sports, strength training, Functional Patterns, and my own experience recovering from chronic movement-related injuries.

What sets me apart is that I don’t just teach exercises—I look at how the entire body works together through movement. I’m especially interested in helping people who feel like they’ve tried everything but still don’t understand why their body doesn’t move or feel the way they want it to.

Through Volcanic Lioness Fire & LED Performing Arts, I combine athleticism, dance, prop manipulation, and storytelling into performance. I specialize in flow arts and have developed skills with a wide variety of props, including fire, LED, weapon-style, balancing, and illusion props.

I’m most proud of the fact that both businesses grew directly out of experiences I’ve lived through. I’ve taken years of athletic training, injuries, failures, cultural expectations, and creative exploration and turned them into something that helps other people and allows me to express myself.

Ultimately, what sets me apart is that I don’t fit neatly into one category. I’m an athlete, movement practitioner, performer, and artist—and I bring all of those perspectives into the work I do.

What’s next?
My long-term dream is to have a space of my own—ideally, a gym that I could actually live above. I know that sounds a little unconventional, but to me, it represents the freedom to build my life and work around something I truly love. My ultimate dream would be to eventually create this space on my mother island of Crete, although I have deep emotional ties to Cleveland and am still figuring out what that could realistically look like.

I currently rent space from other gym owners, but I envision eventually having my own facility that combines human biomechanics and flow arts under one roof. I want it to be a place where people can learn to move their bodies in a healthy, sustainable way while also discovering creativity, athleticism, and self-expression through dance and flow arts.

Ultimately, I want to build more than just a gym. I want to create a space that brings together movement, performance, creativity, culture, and community—and gives people the freedom to move in ways they may have never thought possible.

Pricing:

• Pricing for training with me at the gym in Avon: $75/ session, $300/4 sessions, $584/8 sessions, $840/12 sessions. Plus a $20-$40 monthly gym membership (possible one time $75 set up fee depending on which membership you choose)
• Pricing for training with me at the gym in Concord: $75/ session, $300/4 sessions, $584/8 sessions, $840/12 sessions. Gym membership is optional.
• Fire performing: $400 per set (5 min-60 min)
• LED performing: $250 per set (5 min- 60 min)
• Day prop performing: $150 per set (5 min – 60 min)

Contact Info:

• Website: Volcanic Lioness: https://www.volcaniclionesscircusarts.com/ Kopasi Kinetics: https://nonagon-okra-yzwf.squarespace.com/
• Instagram: Volcanic Lioness: https://www.instagram.com/volcanic.lioness?stkn=MTdhd2oyZW94NHd4ZQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr Kopasi Kinetics: https://www.instagram.com/sophia_kopasakis.biomechanic?stkn=MXNncDlhbWx3aWE1cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/19ZVDntz7r/?mibextid=wwXIfr
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@volcaniclioness?si=60rJQgbK9GVEiLIb