THE POWER OF NATURE PRESENTS
an old-new paradigm of radical WHOleness
꩜ holistic health & prayerful practice ꩜
꩜ Individual and collective initiation ꩜
꩜ art, word, service & devotion ꩜
for ecological and cultural regeneration; remembering sacred stewardship of
self, land, memory, water & fire, lineage, relationship, people, place, family, center, heart, home!
Welcome!
This Website is currently undergoing transformation, transition, and renewal.
Feel free to reach out via email for specific needs & requests.
I Am Ness
My name is Vanessa and I consider myself to be an artist and guide.
I value freedom, expression, balance, compassion, service, stillness, truth, loving kindness, the ethics of right relationship. I strive for integrity and wholeness, eternally studying the art of integration and balance in the upside-down world we live in today. I work for reconnection, remembrance, liberation and life — the restoration of bodies, hearts, minds, communities, watersheds, territories, nations, and the sovereignty of each. I am also a human whose heart bleeds, who dreams, falls and fails, with longings and leadings born of both grief & praise.
I currently live and work between the East and West Cascades of Oregon and Washington, traveling up and down along the body of the great Columbia River where I was born — Nch’i Wana, the one who gathers in and connects all the watersheds that together make one larger basin of the Salmon Nation, otherwise known as the Cascadia Bioregion. I spend most my time on 88-acres of forests, gardens, creeks, meadows belonging to a community land trust and education center in the Southern Willamette Valley, where I specialize in local and regional relationship building, community resilience networks, and support regenerative educational models, workshops, and courses.
In my free time and I am journeying, studying, singing, supporting and being in family and community, gardening, brewing and fermenting, napping, conversing, playing. I live to be a witness, muse, and midwife to our deeper, soulful nature and memory of origin, truth and possibility, as experienced in transcendence and immanence, through relationship, diversity, unity and paradox, giving and receiving, walking each other Home…
I place my faith in the intelligence & spirit of Life, and with it our innate capacity to heal once we align ourselves to the forces and principles of Nature. Nature is constantly self-regenerating and re-organizing; Life continues within and through death. Crises are gifts of liberation and renewal — if we choose to accept the sacred invitation and step through the threshold.
My most joyful work involves the co-creation of transformative containers for that self-regeneration to unfold on all levels. I have taught & coached others how to use herbs, food, and fasting for self-healing for the past four years. My approach is integral, holistic, and lifestyle-oriented; wholeness & vitality are cultivated through balance within all our relationships, and within the integrity of our own thoughts, words, feelings, and actions over time. Relationships not only with ourselves and other people — but to our food, to the soil, the spirit, our culture, our lineage, or to the stories that hold them (hostage, in some cases). Slowly we are returning to stories and cultures of place, as we honor and purify the seeds of our own ancestral inheritance, learning again how to listen and bloom where we are planted.
We are all children of this blooming Earth, her dancing waters,
in her immaculate receiving and conceiving of our destiny,
her gracious holding of our dreaming, our suffering & sacrifice.
O birth-giver, blue jewel of heaven’s heart, great home and mother to our bodies & souls — may I be a healthy cell and bless you both in Life & in Death.
I believe that healthy community, authentic relationship, and real food (whole, alive, of genetic and ethical integrity) are the foundation of mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness. Recently, I have been more focused on the development and offering of skills and tools for interpersonal connection, communication, and social coherence. The container depends on the hearts and minds who fill it and thus, my range of tools and language set can vary significantly between different places and peoples. Whatever pathway or tool used, I put my heart and soul into all I do to be able to offer a space of trust, witnessing, deep listening and mutual inspiration.
I take my inspiration from the arts & sciences of permaculture & soil regeneration, the body & lands that hold me, ancestral and Indigenous wisdom, song & dance, grief & praise, and all of the roots, shoots, fruits, flowers, & hearts that have nourished me along the way.
Eternal gratitude to all the lineages, elders, friends and family who have helped foster and raise me into an authentic expression of heritage, place, service, sovereignty and memory, and who continue to hold me accountable to these gifts of grace and beauty given to me in this life.
We are the living Waters.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Now is the time to reclaim our self-sovereignty & health freedom.
One blueberry at a time…
EDUCATION
Offerings for Regeneration
Every other month, I offer a 22-day detox challenge with beginner and intermediate variations. This is a brief yet thorough introduction to the key principles and applications of holistic detox. Experience self-healing and food as medicine in this guided container.
Current Service Offerings
Holistic Detox: Food as Medicine
As a Holistic Health Guide, I specialize in regenerative detoxification & whole-systems level healing, focusing on the body. I use therapeutic diets, herbal protocols, re-framing techniques and lifestyle recommendations to help my clients reach their health goals. These protocols offer the possibility of short-term reset in service to long-term health- & self-sovereignty.
As a teacher & facilitator, I offer transformative containers and education in the form of group courses, live workshops, and in-person events.
Transformation & Regeneration:
Death to Life
As a Community “Hygienist” & Rites of Passage Specialist (Doula), I offer consultations with individuals and communities and help co-create containers, ceremonies, and place-based processes of transformation, transition, and cultural regeneration. This work is about caring for Life & tending the heart(h) fire, building community resilience, opening to our grief & joy, offering our service to Life & the seventh generation coming. The following are key areas of philosophical orientation and program design.
✷ Community-based Youth Initiation (Rites of Passage)
• place-based, participatory & action-based research
• youth, family, and community empowerment
• intergenerational exchange, pyramid mentoring
• community centering and collaboration around youth
• cultivation of new possibilities, careers and life paths
✷ Indigenous Science & Place-based Knowledge
• ancestral tools for ecological and social balance
• multidimensional models for communication & education
• right relationship & reciprocity with land
• syncing with natural cycles & calendars
• planting seeds for sovereignty
• alliance-tending
✷ Community Revitalization & Cultural Regeneration
• becoming stewards of Life and one-an-other
• Resource, workforce, and cooperative development
• • cross-cultural pollination, diplomacy & peacemaking
• solidarity and gift economies, trust-building
• joyful interdependence & co-creation
• storytelling, song, dance, grief, celebration, ceremony
A whole-systems approach to regenerative health…
My practices, tools, and stories have been carefully gathered in respect and reverence for the cyclical/non-linear wisdom and life-sustaining systems that we both hold and are held within, so that others may cross the thresholds of life and death, into a more vital, authentic, and fulfilling way of being, relating, and acting in the world.
I work with my clients to create personalized and Place-based protocols, journeys, and rituals that provide both structure and possibility for creative, ongoing adaptation along their unique journey. At the center of this journey is self-sovereignty and balance.
Here are some themes we may touch on in our time together:
꩜ Whole Foods & PLANT ALLIES ✷
Endocrine balance & Adrenal recovery ✷
Building a Healthy microbiome ✷
꩜ Relationship to Food, Land, Place, self & other ✷
꩜ Belonging, Service, home ✷
꩜ Connection & Communication ✷
꩜ Community Empowerment & Resilience ✷
꩜ Re-Framing Personal & Collective Crises ✷
꩜ Healing Ancestral & Multi-Generational Patterns ✷
꩜ Plant Medicines, Micro-dosing, Flower Essences ✷
꩜ Movement Medicine & Somatic Modalities ✷
꩜ Ritual & Ceremony, grief & praise ✷
꩜ Cultivation of Personal Power, Spiritual gifts ✷
꩜ Humor, storytelling, art ✷
Healing is not linear… it is a spiral.
A dynamic, multidimensional journey of perpetually seeking Balance and returning, again and again,
to our Center.
Blog
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Finding your WHY
Why do you want to be healthy?Why do you want to have more energy – for what?Who in your life benefits from – or depends on – you to be well? To be present and available? To be able to listen and feel the full capacity of your Heart…and share it, too? (I sure hope…
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By Fire & Lightning: My Personal Health Transformation Journey
If I told you what is possible in the world of regenerative detoxification, you probably would not believe me at first. And if you are like most humans out there, neither would you likely try something so removed from modern, mainstream currents of Western/allopathic medicine…unless that is, you are suffering & out of options. Most…
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