MS, NTP, CGRS
Ancestral Healing
Somatic Griefwork
Lamentation Culture
Mythic & Ritual Arts
Her work weaves Ancestral Healing with Grief Work, all rooted in deep relationship with the living world all around us. By working along our own lineages, Nala empowers all people, no matter what our heritage, to restore our birthright of belonging to Source through connecting to our Earth, and our more-than-human kin.
Deep attention is given to developing somatic ritual practices in which our grief is an ecstatic portal. As we dive in, we to get to know our deep-time ancestral wisdom, and expand our sense of what and who we are.
Through both community and personal ceremonies, we begin to reverse the trend of cultural breakdown and isolation in modern societies.
As we come to recognize and grieve the harmful histories of exploitation and separation, we deconstruct manufactured identities such as “whiteness,” and restore our natural animist orientation towards the world.
To further describe who I am, and what I do,
allow me to share a few sentiments from writer Sonia Horowitz,
responding to the question:
“Where will people who need help turn?”
They will turn to the same places they’ve turned since time immemorial. To the edges and the hedges, to the woods and the wilds. There they will meet the women with twigs in their hair and soil under their fingernails. Hags they called them, cunning women, cut wives and witches. For centuries, through all the twists and turns…these wise women have kept their hearth fires burning, ready to comfort and warm the frightened, the grief stricken, the weary and the wounded. They offer medicine, but are not allowed to call it that. Medicine is only for the sterile white walls and echoing halls of hospitals and universities after all… But when those hallowed halls are closed to many by bureaucracy and politics, you will find her speaking to plants and tending her simmering cauldrons with a wise and patient heart. She is keeping ancient knowledge alive…The cycles will turn, as they always do…There will be dark days, and there will be days filled with glorious light, but still the wise woman will persist. Because she must. —Sonia Horowitz
I set out ages ago from my natal wilderness of Queens, New York, as a young, brokenhearted Jewish woman, with a sack of books and a whole lot of tears for this precious, aching world. I have spent decades voyaging, dancing, singing, bushwhacking, digging, planting, healing.
In the 1990s, I sailed the seas. Literally, I sailed to Alaska in a small catamaran, subsisting on salmon, seaweed and oysters. And I also sailed metaphorically, getting weathered in the seas of grief and loss. All of this amounted to a deep initiatory process in which I was obliterated, and then rebuilt into a larger sense of “Body” which includes not only the personal body, but also the political, the social, and the ecological body.
My work is now to share the toolkit of “somatic-tech” I have assembled — ritual, movement and sound practices which help us feel ourselves somatically to be as big as the Earth herself, and as wide as all the creatures here which are our kin.
To be get to know this miraculous body which connects us to Source.
I’m currently focused on invoking “au naturale” endorphin waves, riding our laments into altered states, sweating and bellowing out of sheer joy.
Eco-Ecstatic Ritual is my drug of choice.
Back in the day, I dove into a masters program in Integrative Arts and Ecology, and surfaced with my writings on the topic of Ecosomatics. I spent years generating up a storm of connections between inner and outer ecology, between dance and soil, between community and prayer and healing. Then, by good grace, I stumbled upon a small homestead where I could put my ecosomatic ideals and visions into practice.
For close to 30 years, it has been my honor to build a permaculture homestead beside the Salish Sea, in the beautiful and magical traditional lands of Chimacum and S’Klallam, on the Olympic Peninsula, Washingon, USA.
Since nineteen ninety nine I have lived built soil, gardens, along with a healing practice and animist artist residency. Currently, I’m director of The Well, a gathering place for those mystics in devotion to the Sacred Waters, the holy wellspring of both grief and joy.
MY TEACHERS
Nothing I have shared here, is mine. All of what I’ve done, the sweetness I have gathered here, has been gloriously hunted, wilder-woven and prayed into this world, then laid at my feet by dozens of generous teachers. Teachers who are far too many to name. Far too many. Please forgive the horribly abridged listing which follows.
My first teachers were, of course, my Jewish Mama and Grandma, Ruchama and Rachma, incredibly generous and spiritually-oriented women, recovering from a difficult childhood as refugees from Nazi Germany. I am forever indebted to them for handing me and indomitable healing spirit, and commitment to learning.
I have had a long and varied history studying, performing and teaching improv arts: dance, clown, ritual theatre & music. Here is just a smattering: I learned Flamenco with Juana Amaya in Sevilla when I was 19 years old, studied TinTaal with Marco Zonka and the Mishras in my 20s. I played with a ton of dance and physical theater and butoh with folks like Diego Pinon, Shinichi Momo Koga, and Ruth Zaporah.
I rounded out my 30s spending years in a ritual poetic drama troupe with Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates and Maureen Freehill, and lived and breathed Contact Improvisation Dance on a remote Island with Karl Frost and a group of intrepid dance and ecology adventurers. In my 40s, I became a mother, and performed with Keeth Apgar on dozens of stages across the country with our earthy children’s show, The Harmonica Pocket.
I consider myself down-lineage and deeply indebted to a number of grief innovators, including Joanna Macy, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, Martin Prechtel, Francis Weller, Laurence Cole, Therese Charvet, and the honorable poet-bard and griefwalker, Stephen Jenkinson.
Last, but certainly not least, the Lands and the Waters–I received a Permaculture Design Certification over 20 years ago with renowned teacher Doug Bullock. And I have been practicing and implementing forest garden practices ever since. The soils, the seaweeds, the plants and trees of continue to be the most influential of all my teachers.
There has never been a time in my life when I was NOT engaged in some type of intensive study — a deep thirst for learning which I credit to a central ethic of Jewish culture.
I did my original undergrad studies in the History, graduating Magna Cum Laude from Dartmouth College, and my masters work integrating Arts and Ecology at the University of Washington and Gaia University.
I have since continued learning (and plan on continuing til I die) from a ton of other programs and trainings outside of the University setting. A few notable examples: The Moving On Center: Bridging Somatics and Performing Arts for Social Change, the Nutritional Therapy Association, the Grief Recovery Institute, Ancestral Medicine, and spent years studying the intersection of myth and somatics in The Mythic Body Program with the wonderful Joshua Schrei.
In 2017, I began my intensive training in Ancestral Healing with Dr. Daniel Foor, which completely changed my life and my approach to griefwork. I have been apprenticed for many years to Laurence Cole and Therese Charvet in Community Grief Tending Ritual.
Currently, I am in a multi-year apprenticeship in Animst Daosim and Mythosmatic QiGong, and integrating this with my studies in Kabbalah and Animist Judaism.
And, oh yes, did I mention I am also a Jewish mother, a foodie, an unapologetic postwoke postfeminist, a lover of hip-hop and downtempo, as well as an incurable performing artist? You can sometimes catch me in a spontaneous and unauthorized Butoh dance or Grief ritual in the forest.
Throughout all these explorations, I have been either living on a tiny boat or a tiny home on our off-grid homestead, staying “close to the ground” with a minimum of overhead expenses, so I had space — to learn, to dance, to heal. This type of humble life, living without most modern conveniences, helps ensure that I’m keepin’ it real.
I have now spent decades with dirt under my fingernails, tending firest, face down on the earth, dancing by the seashore, listening to the subtle languages of sensation so hard to hear in the blare and haste of the city.
Nala has been a part of the Network since 2018, which means we actually got to share in circle before the pandemic slowed down the world. Which is saying a lot, as she’s an off-grid, witchy, Earth person in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula who can most often be found tending with the land and peoples of her specific bioregion.
I’ve come to know Nala as someone who is caring, creative, and living her own distinct life-song and trajectory in a self-possessed way. She’s scrappy in the style of folks who have built their own home, grow much of their food, and know about sacrifice. Her people are Jews and Romani folk, and she walks with their resilience, heart, and communal spirit.
Nala is committed to grief work, cultural healing, and honoring the creative in ways that keep the energy of life flowing through challenging times. She’s a mom (which is all kinds of training) and she’s also done a ton of formal study with people from diverse backgrounds. She wears it all well and in authentic ways, and I can easily recommend her work in the world.
–Daniel Foor, director of Ancestral Medicine