These women, this dance, helped me remember and showed me a way of remembering when I inevitably will forget. May all people remember their way home, in their bodies and in the family of all things.

~JL, 2017-19 Tree of Life Initiate

 
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It takes a village to initiate a young woman into adulthood!

The Tree of Life container is supported by a collective of individuals who are devoted to supporting young women coming through the passage into adulthood.  Below are some of the facilitators, mentors & elders who help to hold Tree of Life journeys.


 

Rachel Ruach Golden (she/her) Visionary Stakeholder, Founder

Rachel (Ra-hel) Ruach Golden has been working in the ceremonial arts since 2004. Trained in deep nature connection, cultural regeneration, and rites of passage, she is seen & known as a cultural midwife; helping us individually and collectively come back into remembrance and alignment with the earth and spirit around us.

Having a BS in AstroPhysics & BA in Religious Studies, she continued on to train with the Regenerative Design Institute, Institute for Nature Awareness, & Red Tent Training. Being put through a Spirit led, multi-year initiation, Rachel was given the Mari Altar to tend, then founded and has run Tree of Life Adulthood Initiation for the last 17 years.

Currently, she has the honor of raising her 3 children in the land that she was born and raised, in the coastal forests of Occidental, California, working with groups and individuals as a spiritual mentor, running earth based ceremonies with the Mari Altar, holding first moon & adulthood initiation rites alongside other ceremonies, while training to be a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. 

 

Kari Stettler, SEP, CMT (she/her) Visionary Stakeholder
Core Mentor & Facilitator - Foundations & Initiation Journey

Kari is a guide, somatic practitioner, bodyworker, astrologer, ceremonialist and land steward living on stolen lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people since 2006. Her roots follow the trails of the corded ware culture into what is now Poland to the north and Sicily to the south, across the northern Germanic lands and into Scandinavia. Her most recent ancestors landed in Baltimore and Minnesota and eventually migrated to coastal California, where she was born in 1976 on the stolen lands of the Tongva people. She has been in practice and service at the crossroads of cultural regeneration and repair, physical/emotional/spiritual healing, embodiment, rites of passage and land stewardship over the past 25 years. She hosts spaces within which individuals and groups can: cultivate presence through embodiment, explore their ancestral roots through inquiry, research & ceremony, resolve traumatic imprints that are held in the body, grow capacity for experiencing the full spectrum range of sensations and feelings that life has to offer, foster reciprocal relations with the natural world and dismantle internal conditioned patterns of systemic colonization and white bodied supremacy. Kari’s work contributes to the movement of peace work and centers around the prayer of co-liberation…may individual liberation be in service to and experienced as inextricably linked to collective liberation of all people in the human community and the systems that shape us. She has been leading groups in fasting/vigil ceremonies in the wild over the past 11 years and is Wilderness First Responder certified. Kari’s passions include dancing, planting trees, medicine making, cooking, tending forests and immersing in wild waters...alone and in community. For more info on Kari’s meandering learning journey and practices that inform her work, read her CV here.

Kari sat in her first fire ceremony with Rachel in 2009 and was an anchor/auntie in the Tree of Life Initiation round in 2013-14.  She joined Rachel as co-facilitator and co-director of the process in 2015 and this Ceremony continues to shape and grow her seat in the grand hoop of life.  

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Ann Renee Rosencranz (she/her/multiple)

Anchoring Ceremonial Elder Facilitator Initiation Journey

Everyday Mystic, Woman of Prayer, Ordained Minister, M.A. in Philosophy and Religion.  Through her life-long devotion to the Great Spirit, Ann has been guided by visions, dreams and miraculous encounters. In the last three decades she has received initiations into traditions from around the world. This journey brought her to the center of her Star origins in her ancestral Jewish and Moravian lineage.

For several decades she has joined with her beloved husband Bob growing their spiritual prayer family. As a devotee of the Mother Waters, Ann birthed the WaterSongline  with Omileye Yeyeochun and sits on the Mothers of the Water Council.

Ann serves as a ceremonial guide for people in life transitions: birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.  She walks a prayer of peace, making offerings to sacred sites of our Mother Earth and cultivating alliances among all beings.  She sings and dances to celebrate the many faces of the divine, offering ceremonial ways of transmutation and Belonging. Ann is here to honor and to serve, for the next seven generations and beyond.

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Kait Singley (she/her) Facilitator Foundations & Initiation Journey

Kait delights in the paradoxes and delicious dynamism of life as a homesteader and sex educator, a grief walker and ecstatic dancer, a systems designer and an improviser, a mystic and a pragmatist. She looks to the cosmos for archetypal alignment and sees the mythological in the mundane.

With a lifelong spiritual practice of accessing the Divine through the body and connection to the natural world, she uses the tools of somatic healing, ecological design theory and nature connection to guide and support the mysterious and frightening (when foreign) processes of growth and transformation.

She honors the intimacies of death and birth, and from her fierce commitment to the liminal and sometimes uncomfortable realms, she is so grateful to support those willing to meet their own life cycles consciously and willingly. She recognizes grief and patience as among her greatest teachers in living honorably and making beauty with what we are given. Through a relatively radical life of spiritual seeking and experimental relating, Kait has learned to trust heartbreak as a gateway to true love and she offers herself wholeheartedly in service to women on their path of self-knowledge and self-love.

Her medicine basket features dance, sound, breath-work, fire tending, body-work, somatic coaching, erotic embodiment, transpersonal psychology, astrology, intuitive presence and play! She grows food & seed, tends to the village and the waterways, and scampers with her dog Blu around her home on the Yuba River in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

 
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Joti Shephi Levy (she/her) Facilitator Foundations Journey

Joti Shephi is a long time searcher, adventurer and edge walker of life. She honors all sides of life including the deep joy and grief that are essential in our human experience. She has a great capacity to hold neutral space for others as they walk through the many changes that life brings.

In 2014, she helped facilitate and structure the Tree of Life journey and since then has been in mentorship support for the participants of this program.

As an outgrowth of this work, she created Wings of Water and has been offering workshops and one-on-one work to hundreds of people throughout the United States and abroad. She has practiced and studied several different religions and attained a Masters Degree in Jewish Education. She is currently studying  Neuro Linguistic Programming, an outdoor educator and debuted her first CD “Legacy”. She also rock climbs, dances and likes to stay adventurous and playful in all she does .

 

Lo Ashley Brown (she/they) Facilitator - Initiation Journey

Lo Ashley Brown (she/they) Queer, cis gendered, middle-class, educated Ashkenazi Jewitch living on stolen Miwok/Pomo lands. 

  • As a storyteller, music weaver, fire tender, and apprentice at the wellspring of the starry night, Lo fans the embers of cultural regeneration through earth-based body-oriented practices.  She carries a laser compass to help us find our way in these mythic times and supports folks deepening in connection with the more-than-human realms.  Star Bard by night and somatic therapist by day, she has a private MFT Somatic Therapy practice in Sonoma County.  

  • Lo is dedicated to the dismantling of anthropocentricity (human-centered as most valuable perspective) and the healing of the white bodied supremacy virus in service to the waters and the liberation of all beings.  She carries a toy box filled with games and song to accompany the journey of life. Lo lives in intentional community with her mischievous water dog, Teyo.

  • Lo has been leading rite of passage journeys and fasting ceremonies in wild places since 2016.

  • Find her @  www.laurenashleybrown.com.

 
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Tracey Wright (she/her) Facilitator - Initiation Journey

Wilderness Guide, Process Coach and Process Coach Facilitator, Herbalist

Tracey loves guiding others to discover their deep connection to self and all of life. She is a certified Process Coach teacher/facilitator, licensed minister, gifted leader of ceremonies, Wilderness Guide (in nature and within ourselves), and mother.

Tracey has explored the healing arts on a deep journey of self-discovery through studying Ayurvedic healing, QiGong, AcuPressure, homeopathy, herbalism, Feminine Power and Process Coaching which has helped her acquire the tools to break lifelong patterns (finally!) clearing the way to manifest more of what she desires in her life.

 
 

Anchoring Elders

 
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Ann Renee Rosencranz (she/her/multiple)

Anchoring Ceremonial Elder - Facilitator Initiation Journey

Bio above.

 
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Madeline Wade (she/her) Ceremonial Elder

Madeline believes that to open the door to change or moving through a life transition, the body must become an advocate. She serves as a personal guide for those who are willing to build a body that can be in action — moving toward and actually doing what is meaningful in their life.  

Madeline has studied for more than 20 years at Strozzi Institute, where she earned her Master Somatic Coaching certification in 2002. As a somatic coach, she helps people reshape their bodies to increase their ability to be in action in the world and unlock their potential by integrating intellectual, emotional and physical components into embodied practices.

Her commitment to clients is to help them to build a "self observer" to support them in being a powerful instrument to face change in the world.

Her passion is guiding people to reach their full potential and live lives with joy. She supports them in identifying their natural strengths and transforming self-limiting beliefs and habits. She does this through deep understanding and relationship through the body.

Working one-on-one and in workshops, Madeline facilitates cultivation of the self by bringing in practices of somatics, more than 15 years of somatic bodywork experience, plus aspects of art, theater and ritual.

Rachel Kaplan, MFT (she/they) Supporting Elder

Rachel Kaplan joyfully offers up her skills as a somatic mystic, permaculture activist & teacher, wild mycelial tracker, plant tender & ritualist in ceremonies of initiation, re-membering, honoring and vision. An old-time queer from a privileged, totalizing Ashkenazi lineage, she currently lives on unceded pomo/coastal miwok land. Rachel is a stand for a world of belonging for all beings, working the lines of ancestral healing, hospicing modernity & dismantling embodied human & white-bodied supremacy. Grounded in the wisdom of the great open heart, Ray is gifted in holding space for trauma and joy, and our collective participation in this perilous & passionate moment of The Great Unraveling. As a newly minted young elder, Rachel is committed to offering up a lifetime of good learning to folx looking for path & purpose in this time. She holds her own feet to the fire of transformation and offers that opportunity to others. Alongside decades of practice in somatics, deep ecology, ceremony, conscious movement & expressive arts, she brings life-time commitments to social change & advocacy for the rights of nature. Her toolbelt is filled with the medicines of laughter, rigor, courage, tenderness, devotion & play. She is a new initiate on the kundalini energy path which brings surprises, uprisings, breakdowns and resonant reconnections of all kinds. Her deep joy comes from dancing & engaging deeply with others in the wildness of the multi-species parade. Find her @ www.ecosomaticaction.com

 
 
 

Aunties, ZiZi’s & Supporting Elders

We acknowledge and send gratitude to the Aunties, ZiZi’s & Elders who weave through the Tree of Life journey, offering their voices, witness, and gifts to the circle.

 

Halley Bass
Adi Aboody
Leiah Borowsky
Mo Washburn
Elaine Daly
Sarai Shapiro

Rachael Knight
Sarah Nutting
Emily Liolin
Suzannah Sosman Cassandra Ferrera
Tracey Wright
Helen Cowart

Lindsey Whited
Kat Thompson
Elders:  Shadi Shamsavari Plumeria Hertz
Ellie Shindelman
Yael Raff Peskin