Rachelle grew up in the foothills of the appalachian mountains in East Tennessee.

I grew up hiking, rock climbing, and rappelling with my family and friends; playing in creeks, and catching turtles and crawdads. One day on our way to climb the most majestic 200-foot cliff we got to the trail only to find the forest had been clear-cut. Fires burned all around. Something inside of me unlodged. It was my first experience of soul death.

In my undergraduate, I studied Environmental Economics and Policy. I wanted to understand how blowing up our mountains for coal made more sense than having clean drinking water and protecting those momma mountains. I had the privilege to travel to Washington, D.C. many times over a year while working under a professor and lobbied the coal industry. What I found (generally speaking) was a culture of power brokers, who loved profit, and were disconnected from nature, the people, and themselves. I realized then that working within the ecosystem would not work for me.

I moved to Northern California in 2012 and began a ten-year-long recovery process; recovering myself from individualism, cultural assimilation, traditional Baptist Christian culture, and a white male-centric dominated world. During this time, I took classes and studied capitalism, white supremacy, and global mechanisms of profiteering like corporations and the stock market.

During this time, I also went back to school got my preschool teaching certificate, and taught at a small private Waldorf preschool in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I also taught at a public preschool and eventually became a certified paraeducator and worked with various populations of students who were not in the common classroom.

I began somatic psychotherapy, craniosacral therapy, and bodywork. I danced at ecstatic dances and festivals. And I began a 5 year-long intensive initiation into Sri Vidya Tantra. For the next 7 years, I would study, practice, teach, organize, and build out programming for a yoga studio, school, and business. I have taught over 2800 hours of Yoga in private, group, retreat, and training settings. I am a Karma Yogi and I take my practice off of my mat and cushion into the front lines of our world and practice there. Using life as the tapas to gain more clarity. I continue to hold myself accountable for my work by sitting in community, seeing a therapist, receiving body & energy work, and in general working in the world with others.

I had attended many protests and been on many front lines while in undergraduate school, during my time of self-recovery, I stood on front lines in battle zones and looked into the eyes of people who wanted to and could hurt me.

I experienced the built world of “order, safety, and peace” as an illusion, and realized how truly unsafe it could be when you do not comply with the norms of capitalism, patriarchy, or white supremacy. I’d been raised to see myself as a “good girl” and believed I was a good person, (I really do love me <3)…. but when I had large men surrounding me, intimidating me, and spewing vitriol… I understood how quickly others can berate an individual into believing their reality is incorrect. My practice of Yoga and my life’s experience wrapped itself around me in these times and I stood steady amidst this…

These experiences helped me to see beyond the systems and webs of Western society and it was there beyond that, that I met the world of collective liberation, of love, of queering it up, of singing and dancing and crying together… a place where instead of doing it alone and judging yourself against some unrealistic (individualistic and western) norm… we grieved the terror together while stomping our feet to the beat of a drum and making offerings to the Ultimate Mother… Mother Earth and all her creation.

I tapped into the power and love of the Earth and learned how to be in an ongoing relationship with it and through that… I have recovered myself and continue to deepen that recovery.

So I’m here now. A relator with a deep heart and a steady heart. A social worker. An embodiment practitioner. A somatic therapist (ASW #123417) with supervision. With a desire to help others work their way out from the grip and insanity of whiteness/isolation, individualism, hyper criticalism… and back into the arms of the Mother, into the arms of ourselves, and the arms of our community.

It can be messy and painful and there is deep psychosocial education, emotional regulation, and a whole hell of a lot of history and education that supports the process… Being together in community and implementing all the learnings is part of the work.

Working our edges. Feeling the feelings. Learning to tip toe into them and find steadiness. Identifying and witnessing our reactions. Comprehending the impact we have. Practicing Grace. Learning how to forgive. Nourishing ourselves so we can keep going despite the mechanism of the built-up world outside that piles up despair and hardship for us to spiral into…

And there is no final step, no completeness, no arrival. There is no expert. There is just the path and our willingness to be devoted to it. To evoke reverence for the life we lead, the community we share, and the world we are a part of.

“Who is closer to the shore in the endless sea?” - Irine Tweedie

I’m so grateful to be here, to have survived waking up, to have “gotten out”, and to support you as you do the work you’re called to and long for, for yourself, your people, and our world.

<3 Rachelle