Land, Lineage & Resisting Genocide

Layla K. Feghali is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised. Her dedication is the stewardship of our earth’s eco-cultural integrity and the many layers of relational restoration, systemic reckoning, and healing that entails. Feghali offers a line of plantcestral medicine and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on Southwest Asia and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.

Taya Mâ Shere is a ritual artist embracing embodied, earth-honoring devotion as liberatory spiritual practice. She serves as a professor of Organic Multi-Religious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry and co-weaves Makam Shekhina, a Jewish and Sufi Muslim multi-religious community committed to counter-oppressive spiritual practice. Taya Mâ hosts the acclaimed podcast, Jewish Ancestral Healing and The Sarah & Hajar Series: Sacred Practice and Possibility at the Intersections of Judaism and Islam. She is currently tending Ceasefire movement chaplaincy and From the Deep, an emergent mystery school of earth-reverent ritual and counter-oppressive devotion. She co-founded the Kohenet movement and  is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership. Her five albums of sacred chant have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.”

Daniel is a doctor of psychology, experienced ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. He is a practicing Muslim and initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa who has also learned from Mahayan Buddhism and the older ways of his English and German ancestors. Daniel was a U.S. Fulbright scholar in Cairo, Egypt as a student of Arabic language, and he is passionate about generational healing and training leaders and change makers in the intersections of cultural healing, animist ethics, and applied ritual arts. He lives with his wife and daughters near his adoptive home of Granada, Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.