I grew up in a house where the elders talked late into the night, and the children were allowed to sit at the edge of the room and listen.

That is where my education began — long before any conference stage. I learned that grief has a shape, that a family's silence can travel three generations, and that the people who hold a community together are rarely the ones being applauded.

In my twenties I began apprenticing with elders in herbal medicine and ritual practice. In my thirties I traveled and studied in West Africa, where I was received, corrected, and eventually entrusted with teachings I had no right to invent. I have tried to be a faithful keeper of them ever since.

For three decades I built a life and a body of work alongside my husband, Kilindi Iyi — a teacher, martial artist, historian, and researcher whose curiosity was matched only by his generosity. Our home became a place people arrived at with questions. We hosted, argued, cooked, studied, and raised children in the middle of it. When he passed, I learned my own teachings from the other side: what it means to be the one who is grieving while others still need you.

My work today lives in that inheritance. Sacred mushrooms and expanded states are part of the conversation — I do not pretend otherwise — but they are not the center. The center is what people do the morning after: how they parent, how they lead, how they repair what was broken, how they return to their people.