Meet our Facilitators!
Devorah Bry (dev)
“Acknowledgement and respect for our bodies — their wisdom and their intersectional, multi-dimential nature — is critical to our creating a more just world.”
dev is the founder and executive director of HoneyRoot.org and honored to be working alongside such loving, full-spectrumed friends. Beyond HoneyRoot, dev works with people to explore, heal, and refine their relationships. dev is a somatic therapist, a dancer, an ordained ceremonialist, a certified Hakomi therapist, a dual-non-dual practitioner, and a certified Soul Motion teacher.
dev is a solo mother by choice, a white cis queer-identified woman of Jewish decent, has an MA in somatic psychology and considers the body a primary pathway for spirit, psychological development, transformation, and self-knowing. Nature, stillness, motion, and breath are her guides. Her mother, ancestors, and teachers - her bedrocks.
tayla ealom
tayla is an earthling dedicated to deepening her relationship to the living planet. she has been working to make clear the connections that exist between the worlds of social and ecological justice, healing arts, and spirit. As a multi-racial, cis-gendered wombyn of color with lineages ranging from West Africa to Europe and Turtle Island, she works in the worlds of cross-cultural wombyn's work that offers access to powerful healing modalities for all genders. She has had the privilege of higher education, holding a Masters in Psychological Studies focused on somatic counseling psychology and currently engaged in PhD studies in Women's Spirituality, Ecofeminism and Spiritual Activism. Her understandings of somatics and justice work guide her to show up in a way that connects the dots between body, earth, womb and spirit. She strives to brings these awarenesses and practices into every kind of space she encounters so healing can remain at the forefront of social-ecological movements.
Amber Field
Amber is a queer, non-binary, Asian American adoptee performer, teacher, facilitator, and healer. They were featured in San Francisco Magazine's Best of the Bay for yoga music. Amber delights in freeing people's voices and helping them sing, sound and speak their truths with more confidence. They are a Tamalpa Associate Teacher of Expressive Arts and studied Indian Classical music at Viswa Bharati University in India. A world fusion specialist, Amber transmits the love frequency through eclectic global sounds and beats. Amber also facilitates expressive arts, drama therapy, and somatics workshops and trainings on Collective Emergence, The Art of Solidarity, Adoption Stories: Healing the Primal Wound, and more
Cris Mulvey
Born in Ireland in 1957, Cris is a feminist who has worked for many years as an educator, community organizer, facilitator and guide with those, primarily women and girls, who live with social injustice, inequality and oppression. She is a white, middle class Irish woman who knows, in her own body and experience, both privilege and oppression.
As an apprenticed elder, Cris seeks to embody her love of the Divine Feminine. She is a writer, a poet and an artist, and founder of Morning Star Guiding which offers mentoring, through nature and arts-based soulwork, ceremony and rites of passage, to those seeking personal/spiritual growth. A graduate of Kim Rosen’s Poetry Depths Mystery School, Animas Valley Institute’s Soulcraft and School of Lost Borders' Rites of Passage work, she is also a Bereavement and Spiritual Care Counsellor with Hospice and is currently training in Cranio-Sacral therapy.
Cris believes passionately in embodied elderhood and the power of engaged spirituality, community and creativity to weave the kinds of intergenerational and cross-cultural/across difference communication and connection that can generate the solutions our world so desperately needs.
Uzo Nwankpa
Uzo Nwankpa RN, MSN-PH, is a fourth generation descendant of women healers. I am a queer Igbo womyn from Southeast Nigeria with an ancestry gifted to restore balance using the indigenous practices of her people. I am an educator, facilitator, performer, researcher and advocate for healing through the use of intentional music and movement. I created the Uzo Method Project- A Public Health Solution as a means to fulfill my mission to ignite a billion souls rising in the divine. As a first generation immigrant to the West, and global citizen, I am committed to decolonizing my patterns, being a bridge between the world of Africans in the continent and the global diaspora. I am committed to learning through my body and how it relates to other bodies that are different from mine. As an advocate for communities that use the arts to heal, I am dedicated to creating and exploring diverse ways to combine ancient practices with innovation.
Hannah Victoria Rosales
Hannah seeks to learn ways of respect and dignity, and guides others in this practice. Deeply grateful to her maternal influences, she is compelled by her own emotional nature, which is to ask: how do we move upon the Earth and with one another carefully, attentively, responsively, generously. How do we meet life more mindfully whether through play, caution, defense, or tenderness? Hannah approaches these questions by way of her training in somatic therapy, martial arts, land stewardship and family work. She holds a masters in Somatic Therapy through CIIS and a black belt in Kenpo Karate Self Defense.
Living as a White, latina, queer woman of Ashkenazi-Mexican descent in the Bay Area, Hannah currently works as a high school counselor to immigrant youth. She splits her time between Oakland and the Sonoma coast exploring ideas of ecology and sanctuary that span urban- and nature-based settings.
Judy Lay
After living in NM for 43 years, Judy retired her psychotherapy practice with women and children and moved in 2011 to the wildness of off-grid living with her son and his family, building a straw bale RoundHouse and Life Spiral to hold ceremonies, Rites of Passage, classes, workshops and fun events.
Ordained in 2011 as a Minister of Walking Prayer through the Center for Sacred Studies, Judy brings reverence for all of Creation into her personal interactions and ceremonies. She played a significant role in the formation of HoneyRoot’s Elder’s Council and has been creating workshops and Initiation Ceremonies for all those exploring and seeking to take their place as Conscious Elder in their communities. Judy is also a Hospice volunteer facilitating bereavement circles, providing spiritual care and sitting in Dying Vigil. She says she is learning from these experiences how to be with her own dying when it arrives.
Judy is Grandmother to 6 grandchildren ages 7-25, and mother of three. She is a fiber artist—wet felting, paper making and knitting are her favorite creative things to do with her hands.
Hannah Tamezoujt
Hannah's approach to healing through movement & alignment is deeply rooted in her background as a dancer, cultivated by her training in Pilates & Gyrotonic, and consistently nourished by her current studies of somatic techniques in the Somatic Psychotherapy Masters program at CIIS. Hannah lives for the small sparks of awareness. The "aha" moment when a person feels the connection between their core and the ground beneath their feet for the first time, the joy on a person's face when they reclaim the full range of motion in their pelvis. True strength, grace, healing and beauty are rooted in these experiences. They come from within.
Stephanie Meux
Stephanie, one of HoneyRoot's core facilitators in both our large-scale retreats and the School for Embodied Leadership, has been exploring the connection between the body, mind and soul since she was a young girl. Deep connection with nature and animal, dance, the study of psychology and other somatically based practices have all been her muses and inspiration for this life.
Stephanie has a degree in Psychology and is trained in Somatic Experiencing. She works as an Equine Guided Educator (which utilizes the relationship developed between horses and humans to catalyze personal growth and healing), as a body worker, and as an event coordinator for embodiment based events.
Odessa Avianna Perez
Odessa facilitates transformative embodiment in group workshops and individual sessions. Raised in the Sufi tradition, Odessa has been immersed in mystical and heart-centered wisdom all her life. As a cis-gendered woman and white boricua, she is investigating her own layers of whiteness and privilege, hidden identities and oppression within her own skin, and is curious as to how our individual healing can support the collective healing process. She is a certified ThetaHealing Practitioner and Instructor, Licensed Massage Therapist and current graduate student at California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS) for Somatic Psychology. She holds BA degrees in Sociology, Dance, and Theater, and has been making dances since 2005, most recently using video, text, and dance performance to explore healing from trauma. She teaches Contact Improvisation classes that engage the physical, emotional, energetic, and spiritual aspects of being in a body: the limitations, the metaphors, and all the rest of our human experience.
Lorina Manzanita
Lorina is a Somatic Sex & Relationship Coach, certified SE© Trauma Resolution Practitioner, writer and teacher. She is a cisgender, pansexual, ecosexual, Asian American woman that has learned to share love and intimacy within a diverse range of relationship styles. Her work integrates a number of healing systems that honor mindfulness and the body's intelligence. Her approach is unique in that she brings her authentic, vulnerable, embodied self into the space with those in her care. With Lorina, intimacy skills are learned in an embodied way, in real time, with compassionate support and guidance. Her influences include Somatica Sex & Relationship coaching, Somatic Experiencing, Shakti Malan’s Somatic Sexual Presencing, healing developmental trauma with Larry Heller and attachment wounds with Diane Poole Heller and CoActive Coaching with CTI. Lorina loves helping people to break free of old, unsatisfying relationship patterns and embody more conscious, empowered, interdependent, loving ways of being.
Margo Stebbing
Margo has gone through many incarnations and iterations of this human beingness in 65 years around the sun. Born of a Filipino father and a Portuguese-Italian mother, Margo identifies as a cis-gendered woman residing on Nisenan land in the Yuba watershed. She has worked in the healing arts for many decades, designed spa therapies for Ojo Caliente and Two Bunch Palms, been an entrepreneur and owner of two businesses.
The thread that has always run through her life has been her love of poetry and the written word. She has recently written a anti-hate proclamation that the City of Nevada City, Ca. recently passed unanimously. Her mantra is 'Justice is what love looks like in public'.
Misha Montoya
Misha is a parathlete who hails from the Yosemite area. She is a mother and adventure lover who is passionate about reforming the current relationship that our culture has with relating to those with physical challenges.
She has traveled the world numerous times to deepen her spiritual practices, and work on charitable activities with the MA Math based in Kerala, India. She is now a returning student studying to become a Rehabilitation Psychologist. Through this work she intends to share tools with newly disabled people, as well as to educate able-bodied people in order to bridge the chasm that too often divides us from authentic relating.
Tina Hylton
A bridge-builder & community activist, Tina comes from a life experience of strong ethnic heritage & multicultural mothering. She received her BA from the University of Oregon, where she focused on the literature & poetry of the most marginalized voices of women from around the world.
Years after living in rural Jamaica & raising 2 biracial children in Northern California, Tina works today to help bring awareness & education on diversity issues to her local schools & larger community. Currently working towards her masters degree in Educational Leadership & Social Transformation, she is hopeful for humanity's healing & reparations through the confrontation of social injustice.
Laura Linsteadt
Laura’s passion is to awaken, re-member and be alive in sacred comm-unity with her Self, with her relations, with Mother Earth and all of Life. As a licensed Massage Therapist, dancer, Scalar Heart Connection mediator and teacher of EmbodyDance, she is a practitioner of embodiment and the integration of body, heart, mind and spirit. She guides people to root deeply within their bodies and the Earth, to flow with ease and pleasure, to feel their full range of aliveness and to play in creative self-expression. She holds healing space for those who desire to connect to their own body and heart, to hear their needs, to embrace their wounded and painful parts with compassion, and to learn to love themselves.
Joy Khoo
Joy is a life designer/zen infuser and is devoted to her mission of creating an impact in the world through her coaching work. She has roots in Malaysia and was born into a fisherman's family of 13. When she was two weeks old, Joy was adopted by a Chinese woman who was single. A rare circumstance in those days and Joy was given a second chance at a "better" life. In 2003, Joy led two major evacuations for 350 American family members and employees at the US Embassy in Indonesia and was honored by Secretary Colin Powell as the Community Liaison Officer of the Year. This life changing experience set the stage for her to move into a journey of healing and service. During her decade of service at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she travelled to Africa, India and Brazil, organized chaos for busy high level executives, and created memorable team building events. Joy has a background in piano performance, an MBA. and certifications in ecotherapy, yoga nidra and SoulCollage. An inquisitive and playful student of life, she enjoys the journey of cultivating holistic tools and sharing them with her clients in group workshops and 1:1 sessions.
Barbi Joffe
In her own movement practices and in her teaching, Barbi aims to facilitate a sense of ease, strength and connectivity in the human form through music, dance and somatic embodiment practices. Her practice explores ways to empower an expanded & integrated awareness through the body-mind-spirit. Barbi teaches 'Embodied Flow'- inspired movement/yoga & studies Indian classical with sufi musician Tahir Qawwal (her husband). She lives between two homes of Nevada City (CA) and Byron Bay (Australia) and is privileged to have travelled through the the world to experience culture and music. It is through music and dance that she has connected most strongly to her own ancestry, which follows long journeys of immigration from Eastern Europe, to South Africa and Australia. Questions of home, belonging and connection are often present in her heart. "Honeyroot has provided a rich resource of learning and reflection, helping me to make sense of my identity as a white cis gender woman, mother & sister, in this wild, beautiful & often painful world".
Madeline Maddox
Madeline is a cis gendered female of Euro-American descent living on Nisenan land in Nevada City, CA. She serves her community as an herbalist, nutritionist, wellness consultant, mentor, and plant talking enthusiast. She is the co-creatrix of Seta Vida, a female owned and operated healing collective that is committed to applying ancient and traditional wisdom to the modern herbal world. Madeline is a certified JOYW mentor for girls ages 8-18 and WFA certified herbal medic, serving to help provide our next generation with the empowerment tools they need for rites of passage, body sovereignty, compassionate communication, and social/emotional intelligence. Her source of inspiration draws from deep and reverent connections to Mother Earth and her teachings. By observing nature and Gaia’s intelligent design, she believes that we can deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world around us, infusing our daily actions and intentions with rootedness, reverence, connection, and compassion.
Lisa Chipkin
Lisa is an artist, healer, and Somatic Learning facilitator with a prayer to help people birth beauty, ease, and well-being in the world from the inside out. She revels in ushering folks into wondrous relationship with their somatic intelligence as a guiding force for their lives. Her superpower is opening access to the infinite space that is revealed when the overstimulated nervous system truly settles. Her artwork, born from this space, serves as sacred portals, totems, and medicine.
As a young adult, she taught theater, movement, and visual art to teens in a multi-disciplinary, project-based learning academy. Together, they developed numerous original productions based on relevant social, environmental, and political issues. A cisgendered daughter of healers and descendant of Eastern European Jews, she is grateful to live on Nisenan land in French Corral and be a member of the HoneyRoot community.
Erin Summers
Erin is a facilitator of healing, a ceremonialist, Minister of prayer and earth steward. Erin practices Plant Spirit Healing and is currently training as a Somatic Coach. She is co-facilitator of the Earth Advocate Apprenticeship and founder of the Growing Free Organization.
Erin creates a safe container through which one’s true self can emerge and realize its place as divine, multidimensional creator.
