iSōma is a community-rooted path of facilitation, art, ceremony, activism and leadership that returns us to what sustains the human spirit.

We bridge ancestral values and re-centre them in contemporary practice — restoring coherence between the fire of purpose to serve, which is increasing in people around the world by the day, and the capacity to walk in that direction with humility and care.

This is not a technique or additional certification to stack atop other ribbons or accolades.

Grounded in over 24 years of combined rite work, clinical depth, and ceremonial tradition, iSōma is an apprenticeship that matures capacity through ritual, time on Country, time in the void, personal practice, pauses for integration, and community weaving, whose arrows point toward thanks and reciprocity.

We work through a psyche-somatic lens, rooted in relationship.That is to say, we stimulate the wisdom dormant in the body and extend that to meet that place in others and the living world.

The Latin root of "intimate" — intimus — means innermost. Our work lives there: in the intensity of being alive, of being born, living and dying, and in the restoration of harmony with nature. The Earth itself, so alive, animates the simplicity of the cycles around us — the great rhythm of the story within all stories.

We used to get this. For Indigenous people (people of the land), maintaining the position of peak and preventing the deceleration of descent in a cycle would have been considered dangerous and in conflict with necessary regeneration, as it is. In our time, we idolise a narrow heroism. We worship ‘peak experiences’ and tend to celebrate a ‘rise’ from the ashes. What about being turned on your head in the land of the unknown and unresolved?

This path is about helping you turn inward and hand yourself back to relationship with the intelligence of that cyclical nature, with a hand lent by our teachers, the elements (check out the archetypes in our curriculum). That same rhythm is a map for facilitation — but only if we practise enough self-restraint, discipline, respect and willingness to unlearn — many times over, as the cyclical paradigm asks.

We’re stepping outside fast-track titles and commodified shortcuts. The obsession with solo success and visibility is drenched in our longing to belong. It’s brutal. It’s exploitable and it’s brutal. That pursuit is draining our genius. It keeps us from helping each other. The healing industry is fast becoming, in some places, washed out, brittle and depleted.

We need to feed it well, replenish it again. We want the healing arts — and all its offshoots — to become trustworthy again. Not digested into soundbites or veiled in performance.

It’s loud out there. Let’s put our bums on the Earth and get quiet again. This path invites us to leave behind goal-oriented, pathologising models of working with others. To stop objectivity, analysing and reducing people to fit into diagnostic tools, coaching blueprints, or spiritual facsimiles. All pretty on top, hollow inside. I know you feel it — we all do.

It’s rubbing us crazy, with a side of healthy shame. Instead of criticism, we offer this path that asks us to sit in the tension of the unknown, to enter their world, to find an intersection of your wisdom and theirs, and let Spirit also play its part.

There’s paradox present, yes. Ageless wisdom is coming through — sometimes in waves — through people only a few decades deep into life. Something ancient is poking its head up again, reawakening from the ground it was pushed into. And it’s also crucial that we meet it with respect, rather than assuming authority. Its presence should be calling us to our knees, not the top of social podiums.

Remember — the posture of an apprentice! The tremble of the beginner.

This work asks for honesty. We are not exempt from the shadows of the systems that seem to exist only to feed off the domination and fall of all others. Collective change is a personal task.

We aren’t speaking this for performative reverence. The world is on fire. Bombs are dropping. Too much of Earth has been wrecked by greed, the lust for power over others, spiritual posturing, and disconnection.

Humans are, by nature, prey. We posture as predators with nervous systems designed to be forward-moving, alert, and wired to run and fight. Somehow, as a pack, we’ve found ourselves at the apex — by virtue of the very attributes we’ve misused. Collective anxiety a symptom of this unnatural stance.

We’re immobilised by distraction, spinning our wheels and reaching for energy top-ups and the applause of an audience to get us through. So far from discomfort are we, we’ve put out our own fires with temperature control and dampened our capacity to navigate the dark, the descent, the winter and the void.

We are strong together. I really do believe we can turn this ship around if we remember this — in particular, the industry of the healing arts. Our future depends on pushing back our sleeves, reaching into our hearts with an enthusiastic and determined squeeze, our knees to the Earth, as we pray that our hearts have not forgotten how to speak back.

Of course, they have not. We’re simply in dire need of gathering together and learning how to listen again. Really listen.

iSōma holds both horror and hope for the times we are in. Outrage towards the atrocities of an active genocide against the Palestinian people is a healthy response for a human with a heart.

We are witnessing what happens when we treat the Earth and each other as objects. And we are also experiencing together what is possible when we reconnect with our humanity and stand as one people to protect Life and give to it.

This is yet another cycle in a long list of intentional moves by ideas that dehumanise one another at the cost of Life — so much cost. May it mobilise our numb, distracted selves and shatter the reality we grip in the West — that this is ‘the good life’. May it rattle us alive and give us the courage to look at ourselves and back in history, and take in what it is we've been doing to one another for thousands of years, and to do our part in the repair we so desperately need.

The wheel needs to turn, and we need all hands on deck.

We continue to offer the perspective that sinking into despair and proclaiming our inevitable doom is a piss take. Our ancestors' devotion was remarkable in its steadfast consistency, and many of us have forgotten just how present their support remains — if we stop leaning on hyper-individuation and psychologised practices as the way forward.

Instead, we invite you into places — be it here or somewhere else — that resonate, where we turn toward each other and realise there really is something solid in the old ways.

We at iSōma are both descendants of lineages that once lived, asking what they could offer and give back to an Earth that provided life and to the community around them, which took care of one another. Kurt and I (Amber) also walk with teachers whose people have carried this memory with care — at great peril — through colonisation’s attempts to destroy it, and survived.

And part of our team of teachers are direct descendants of Indigenous peoples, walking with pride, courage and strength, extending their hands and reminding us what many have forgotten.

The path does not ‘teach’ any one cultural way or lineage. Instead, to bring all of us in close, we carry the responsibility to tend to the universal language of reverence, reciprocity, and feeding of Life. A language that, as our teachers, Elders and Abuelas remind us, lives in all of us.

And at the root of it all, we might find our way back to the original agreement: to cherish life.

It’s tough and necessary business we’ve got ourselves into. We’re opening this path as an opportunity to walk it in community. If your arrow is pointing in the same direction as ours, we might just walk it together, as we were always meant to.

With deep care,
Amber and Kurt.