Kari Stettler (she/her), SEP, CMT is an educator, facilitator, healer and land tender.  She has been a facilitator of the Work that Reconnects (WTR) since 2006 and was anchored throughout the past 18 years as a facilitator of the WTR and as co-director and core facilitator of Tree of Life Adulthood Initiation by eco-philosopher, engaged Buddhist and root teacher of the WTR, Joanna Macy. She is also anchored by elders Ann Rosencranz and Marie McRee. Kari was co-director and core facilitator/ceremonialist of Tree of Life Adulthood Initiation 2014-24 and has been leading groups in fasting ceremonies in the wild since 2013. She is currently on the facilitator team (since 2018) holding an annual Healing Retreat for Survivors of Childhood Sexual Trauma and maintains a private healing practice, Somatic Resiliency, integrating nearly two decades of experience in body & energy work, somatics and community healing. She is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner as well as a practicing Vedic Astrologer under the tutelage of Komilla Sutton. She incorporates her studies of the cosmos into her biodynamic approach to growing food and medicine and curates a four season garden apprenticeship in her home food forest. Kari is Wilderness First Responder certified. You can read Kari’s complete CV here.

Rachel Kaplan MA, MFT (she/they) joyfully offers up 40+ years of wild initiation into somatics, conscious movement, expressive arts, deep ecology, the Work that Reconnects, large-scale movement ritual, herbalism, permaculture, elemental embodiment, ecosomatic attachment, myceliated awareness, community praxis, council, land-tending and body prayer to folx seeking community, personal compass and purpose in this powerful time. She is an embodied ritualist in ceremonies of initiation, remembering, honoring & prophecy. An old school queer from a privileged, totalizing Ashkenazi lineage, she currently lives on unceded Pomo/Coastal Miwok land where she tends a small homestead with other humans, the wind and waters and the wild and domesticated creatures of that place.

Working the lifetime threads of ancestral healing and the dismantling of human and white-bodied supremacy, Rae is gifted in holding space for trauma and joy, and our collective participation in the Great Turning. A generative somatics practitioner, as well as a group facilitator of conscious movement, nervous system resiliency and social permaculture, she brings ongoing commitments to direct action social change and advocacy for the rights of nature.

Gaia Esensten, MA (they/them) is a white, queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent Jewitch, somatics practitioner, ecofeminist scholar, activist & ritualist. They live and work on the lands of the Coastal Miwok, Southern Pomo and Kashaya Pomo peoples in a community home in Sebastopol, California. Their ancestors are Western European fairies and witches, immigrants and colonizers, as well as Eastern European Jewish mystics and refugees.

Gaia’s offerings are influenced by their MA in Women, Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice from CIIS, where they began studying Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects. They completed the WTR Facilitator Training with Lydia Violet of the School for the Great Turning in Fall 2022, and since then have offered WTR grief rituals to support Jewish community members in the Movement for Ceasefire. Their other influences are Somatic Abolitionism, Ecopsychology, Liberation Psychology, Transformative Justice, Relational Somatic Healing, feminist, womanist and indigenous movements for collective liberation and reconnecting with their own ancestral lifeways. Gaia is committed to the lifelong practice of composting white body supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, queer/transphobia, and ableism, from the inside-out.

Helen Cowart (she/her), MA, PsyDc is a trauma and rewilding informed somatic therapist with a masters (and soon to be Doctorate) in Post-Jungian Imaginal Therapy. Her therapy practice is informed by the understanding that much of the soul lives outside the body, in the earth itself, and that healing work we must do in these times involves not just inner excavation but also connection to that which exists outside our skin: the anima mundi, or living earth.  

Mythic storytelling is a core passion and offering of Helen’s. She has been telling mythic stories around flickering fires at gatherings for the past seven years. She believes that the stories we need today arrived right on time hundreds and thousands of years ago – and that the old stories that have moved enough hearts and minds to be repeated by enough tongues that they have carried forward to this day carry ancestral wisdom to guide us through the troubles of our times.

Helen is a co-founder of Animist West County, a group that hosts regular gatherings of ancestral story and song from the Bonnie Shoals of Herring (much of Western Europe) on the astral holy days – solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter celebrations.