Ritual Facilitator

Sojourner Zenobia (they/them), Sojourner has completed decades of somatic performance training at Marymount Manhattan, Pearl Ubungen’s BFA at Naropa University, The School at Steppenwolf and Pantheatre’s Roy Hart school in Paris. They have trained in connecting with ancestors, nature and the spirit world and healing facilitation at Life Force Arts in Chicago, they trained in circle keeping with Circles and Ciphers and Kay Pranis, and in 2021 they completed Tracee Stanley and Chanti Tacoronte-Perez’s yoga nidra Training.

Sojourner found spirituality through the practice of presence as a performer. This portal of presence opened up the Buddhist path to them and the Buddhist practice opened the healing of connecting with the earth. They became the spider that they were terrified of as a child and began to weave together everything that gave them feelings of trust, hope and freedom. They are now an embodied sacred space facilitator, installation artist, experimental vocalist, body mover and earth steward.

For the past 10 years Sojourner has held a meditation and ritual space called “Stillness,” where they have guided hundreds of BIPOC queer folks in deepening their connection with ancestors, nature and personal spiritual gifts. Sojourner is currently exploring stillness by trusting the wisdom that emerges in their body at quiet moments and by trusting the relationships in their life.

Yoga Nidra

Yoli Maya Yeh is a Yoga & Shiatsu Therapist (AOBTA, VYASA, Yoga for the Special Child) and an Educator in Comparative Religions and Global Studies (MA Comparative Religious Ethics). Yoli works at the intersection of Indigenous Preservation, Healing Arts and Social Justice and is co-founder of DEIcipher Group.

Raised in her family's Native American spiritual teachings, Yoli spent twelve years of her young adulthood studying language, yoga, tantra, healing arts and meditation in India and continues to travel and teach around the globe.

Yoli holds transformative healing space for especially hard to treat, autoimmune, chronic conditions, unexplainable, undiagnosable, compound situations. She is devoted to healing for women and birthing bodies and offers supportive space for grief, loss, birth loss, traumatic birth expereinces and the spiritual dimension.

Winter Cave Herbalist

I was born of the deep winter in zhekagoynak/zhigaagoong/šikaakonki and the expansive dreams of an immigrant community, who raised me to know the cultural medicines of touching your food, mixing salt with water, and “bahala na.”

Across the last decade I’ve studied how we heal, completing formal trainings and apprenticeships in trauma-informed yoga, vipassana, loving-kindness, and transcendental meditations, reiki, traditional farming, and spirit-led clinical herbalism; and sowing these modalities into the lush embodied sanctuary I now facilitate. I created Dirt & Free Herbal Arts to support culture-bearers and world-builders remembering health as interconnectedness, and something we can regenerate from symptom to system and seed to soul. 

What I’ve learned in this work and my body is that the plants, fungi, algae, animals — our non-human neighbors — remind us that we're never out of relationship.

Herbs offer accompaniment, wisdom, and tangible support on multiple levels:

They can help us ease into the softness for which our inner child yearns.

They can stoke the fires of our digestion as we process the old shit we’re still holding onto.

They remind us that we are of the earth, that we belong to the land.

As we regenerate these relationships, more vitality flows through us. Our sensitivity becomes a superpower, through which we reclaim medicine everywhere. And healing happens together.

Learn more about my offerings at dirtandfree.world

Dream Work

Asia Dorsey is a bioregional, rootworker raised by a collective of aunties and grandmothers in Historic Five Points Community in Denver. She has apprenticed with elders in, India, Ghana, New Zealand, New York and more to discern a practice of a People’s Medicine, grounded in the movement for reparations, healing justice, and her ancestral earth-based practices.

Asia is the owner of Bones Bugs and Botany an organization committed to creating pathways towards embodied liberation though food and herbal medicine education. She teaches ecological design with the Regenerative Education Collective of Denver and uses her talent of pattern recognition to decipher and reintegrate the sacred instructions of plants and ecosystems into people systems with Regenerate Change.

Find her on the Petty Herbalist Podcast helping her people to rise together in the power that is their birthright and at www.bonesbugsandbotany.com.

Storyteller

Zahra is a vocalist, ritualist, storyteller, actor, teaching artist and wellness practitioner. She is recognized for her performance work as an engaging performing artist, a keeper of African American oral traditions and an experimental vocalist. She is honored to have collaborated with phenomenal musicians, poets, dancers, artists, filmmakers, and storytellers over the past 35 years in Chicago.

As a creative musician, Zahra has performed extensively with Shanta Nurullah, which include Shanta Nurullah’s Sitarsys, Freedom Song Leaders, Classic Black and ShaZah. Zahra has also performed with Hamid Drake as a member of the improvisation ensemble Moment to Moment. Storytelling performance history includes the Performance duo “In the Spirit,” with Emily Lansana and collaborative works with performance artist, Sojourner Zenobia. She has performed at venues such as the World Music Festival, M3 Festival, MCA, The Chicago Art Institute, The Old Town School of Folk, The Chicago Jazz Festival, The National Association of Black Storytellers Conference and Festivals, The Chicago Cultural Center, Jonesborough National Storytelling Festival, Rhode Island Black Storytelling Festival and countless Schools, Museums and Festivals.

As a 2024 Elastic Arts Dark Matters Artist in Residency, she developed a ritualized performance that included Adam Zanolini, Avreeayl Ra, Luc Mosely and Paige Brown. As a teaching artist, Zahra has developed wellness music and performing arts programs in schools, community centers, shelters, recovery centers, eta Creative Arts Foundation, the Chicago Department of Corrections and the Chicago Park District.