Somatics & Psychedelics Practitioner
trauma healing • politicized awareness • grief tending • psychedelic integration • earth & ancestral reconnection • spiritual care
Video Image Description: Gaia in a purple shirt with moons phases and light grey long sleeves, sitting in a chair in a forest, looking up to their right and smiling. Video by Karen Prosen.
Somatics, or conscious embodiment, is a radical practice that reminds us that living on this planet is a bodily experience. Through relationship with the body and the Earth, we can regain our human birthright to sense aliveness, inviting more choice in how we engage with our emotions, mental & cultural stories and relationships.
My work is grounded in the awareness that most of our individual dis-ease in Western culture is shaped by multi-generational practices and systems of oppression, extraction, violence, exploitation and disconnection from the Earth and our ancestral lifeways. While one-to-one healing is just one of many practices that will bring us closer to collective freedom in the context of oppression, it can offer each of us more skill, awareness and choice in relating to one another, the Earth and our activism.
Together, we can practice bringing awareness to internalized oppressive patterns, co-regulate and co-create a culture that embodies safety, dignity and belonging (generative somatics) for all bodies and all of life.
Image Description: Close-up of white yarrow, chamomile and purple cosmo flowers growing together in a dense flower patch.
Image description: A close up of Gaia in a black top and brown hat, with silver-framed glasses, a silver septum nose ring and silver spiral earrings, looking to their right. Photo by Julia Maryanska.
about gaia
I am a white, queer, neurodivergent Jewitch, ecofeminist scholar & ritualist and somatics practitioner. I am nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. I live on the lands of the Coastal Miwok, Southern Pomo and Kashaya Pomo peoples in Sebastopol, California with my cat companion, Luna. My ancestors are Western European fairies & witches, immigrants & colonizers, as well as Eastern European Jewish mystics & refugees. I am deeply influenced by Somatic and Ecopsychology, Liberation Psychology, Buddhist meditation and yogic practices, feminist, womanist & indigenous movements for collective liberation and practices for reconnecting with my own ancestral lifeways. Some of my practices are ceremony & prayer, tarot divination, dreamwork, land-tending, herbalism, subsistence living and solidarity activism. I used to be a professional photographer and a theater kid, and bring a creative playfulness to the process of healing. I believe in the power of healing together in relationship and the way it ripples out and creates a culture of healing and care.
Thank you for being here! You are welcome here.