“Make embodied, discerning, and courageous choices that bring you closer to the life and world you long for.”

~Rochelle

Hi, I’m Rochelle

I’m here to help you remember the powerful being you are beneath what the world has taught you to believe.

My sense is that… you’re feeling anxious and uncertain about all that’s unfolding.

You know there is another way to be and the longing in your heart tugs at you for deep change. But you’re unsure how to get started. You’re finding yourself feeling stuck and wondering…

How do I feel more grounded and gain more clarity in the midst of these troubled times? How do I prioritize my own needs when so much needs my attention? How do I get clear about what matters most to me and begin to feel more fulfilled in my relationship with myself and others? How do I find meaning and purpose in the midst of so much upheaval and overwhelm?

I know how you feel. I’m here to offer guidance for your journey.

You can become a leader for the change that’s sorely needed right here in your own heart and in your own home.

You can feel at home in your own body. You can feel free and empowered, engaged and alive.

You can have the more vibrant and meaningful life you were born to live and I can show you how.

I’m a trauma and culture-sensitive anti-oppression leadership facilitator, mentor, and mindfulness teacher. I have a unique set of skills that empowers women from the inside out. I’ll help you figure out how to get free from conditionings and narratives that keep you small. I’ll show you how to get yourself unstuck, grounded in your body, and connected to your own inner resources of strength and stability. I’ll help you gain clarity about what your heart deeply longs for. I’ll help you rise rooted as an agent for meaningful change in your own life.

I create spaces where we can do deep healing work together. Where you’ll reclaim the wisdom of your body and heart and forge a path that is deeply attuned to your core values, where you remember the wonder and reclaim the beauty. Where you grow a life connected to yourself and help bring humanity into right relationship with the Earth just by being more fully you.

My Approach

WRW Pillars that lead to Wise and Rooted Action:

EMBODIMENT

Your body only ever exists in the present moment and your essential self speaks to you through your nervous system, at all times. In cultivating an intimate connection with your body, you gain access to your own inner resources as a source of stability and groundedness. Connect with and honor your human experience as a practice of self-acceptance and self-discovery. Develop fierce and loving boundaries and lead a life deeply guided by your core values for yourself and the world. Move in the world from this place of presence.

SACRED WAYS

Learn to respectfully reweave yourself into the fabric of the animate world and tend to the sacred ground of your dear heart. You’ll learn about the sacred peoples who tended the land where you find your feet and acknowledge the historical trauma that continues in our modern lives. Work to use your privilege as fuel for meaningful change in your life. Shift dynamics of destructive patriarchal normativity and uplift, embody and amplify equity, and inclusion in your circles of influence, and experience soliderity as a source of strength and courage.

SELF-HEALING

As you begin to stand rooted in your dignity and sovereignty, you’ll gain clarity, discernment, and insight. Learn to accept yourself as you are, completely as you are, and grow your capacity to tend to your own tattered heart like the loving mother so many of us did not have. Tend to your basic human needs of compassion, love, and freedom. Reclaim wonder, awe, and joy through humility, gratitude, and accessing the power and pleasure of the present moment. Align with your purpose and be the change you wish to see.

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My Story

I tell my story, not because it’s unique, but because in its essence, it’s the story of so many women.

This is a story of multi-generational ancestral colonization, and the destructive oppression of women and how oppression is internalized and perpetuated. It is also a story of the reclamation of clarity and understanding in the midst of patriarchal normativity. It is a story of beauty, embodiment, clarity, courage, advocacy, solidarity, and perseverance.

More than fourteen years ago I embarked on a journey to teach mindfulness at a local university in Silicon Valley. I had no idea this would become my initiation into an authentic and profound experience of love from within myself. It was a heart-opening (and sometimes heart-breaking) process of decolonization and a radical recovery from the dynamics of internalized systemic oppression and systemic genered violence.

My maternal 2nd great-grandmother’s mother died in childbirth and she was raised from infancy in a Central Valley orphanage. My mother’s great-grandmother came to California on the second wagon train across the Oregon Trail in 1844 and, at the age of 12, buried her father who died of smallpox, married at the age of 13 and settled in Half Moon Bay. At the age of 6 years old, my paternal grandmother was sold off to be a maid and caregiver for an abusive, tyranical grandmother. Our family has lived in the wake of these traumas and so many others in various ways. The past is never the past. The past lives on with us all to this very day.

I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area on unceded Ohlone land on September 3rd, 1973 to young parents doing their best in their own adaptive ways to stay afloat, make ends meet, and participate as best they could in a capitalistic, exploitive, misogynistic culture. A generation who were often raised themselves by distracted parents, not even questioning the dominant narratives.

At the same time I had the opportunity to develop a deep connection with the Earth through a childhood living close to the land on the Colorado landscapes of unceded Anasazi and Ute land at the foot of the range of Book Cliff mountains at the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers. I lived with, tended to, and cared for our horses and other animals which was a deep source of nourishment.

I questioned dominant cultural narratives and structural gendered violence from an early age but they were so insidious it was difficult to gain clarity. I was taught to be nice, quiet, obedient, and to go along with the program. I was restricted by self-limiting beliefs and feelings of being misunderstood.

Grounding

Unresolved ancestral, familial, and cultural conditionings caught up with me. 9/11 happened. I used food and excessive busyness as adaptive tools to numb over and check out. I was disconnected from my core values and over time, I developed anxiety and heart palpitations.

All of which became a catalyst for my journey seeking a life of connection, meaning, clarity, and understanding which led me to the work of Mindfulness Scholar Jon Kabat-Zinn at UMASS Medical School's Center for Mindfulness. I dove into the medical research, participated in intensive mindfulness, & compassion training including multi-week silent meditation retreats, I integrated the skills into every aspect of my life, and I developed a new way of being in relationship to myself and the world, one that honors who I am, as I am, connected me to my inner wisdom, and the precious present moment.

I began a PhD program in Humanistic Psychology, participated in workshops, trainings, and read extensively on a wide range of topics including spirituality, psychology, emotional intelligence, embodiment, mindfulness, poetry, healing trauma, human behavior, cultural somatics, conscious parenting, independent-led educational models, neuroplasticity, epigenetics, gut-brain axis, gut microbiome, nourishing traditions, plant medicine, food as medicine, ancestral healing, social and ecological justice as well as dynamics of patriarchal domination, and weapons of the rich such as structured gendered violence, systemic oppression, racism, and inequity.

I was blessed with the deepening and stabilizing connection to the present moment, to my inner wisdom. I built a loving relationship with my body. I developed healthy boundaries, values-based living attuned to the more-than-human world, and I came into my voice, and through a profound journey of reclamation, I re-membered my power, voice, joy, and purpose.

In 2008 I began teaching mindfulness and compassion at a local university in Silicon Valley which became an initiation, a process of decolonization, and a homecoming.

During that time, I had a healthy pregnancy and homebirth and began raising an independently-educated, fiery human being. I healed my body and our family with nutrient-dense, farm-to-table food, and traditional ways. I built an intimate community of inspiring people that supported my ongoing healing, rooting, and rising.

Growing Awareness | Clarity

I’ve healed so much from the integrations of practices that promote discernment and I continue to choose to dismantle destructive patriarchal ways though this work is not easy. Determination to push back against oppressive socio-cultural forces has required me to ground myself with love in my body and uphold fierce boundaries in order for me to show up at the table again and again in the service of this new way of being in the world.

Resolve | Meaning | Purpose

Being embedded in this culture and dismantling it at the same time has been a humbling, often painful, and paradoxical experience. I have kept coming back to my anchoring and healing practices of mindfulness as I developed intimacy with this being human.

Learning | Growing | Teaching

I believe there is a new way of living in these troubled and troubling times. Women are being called to rise, but not from the same consciousness and ways of being that created the mess we are in. Today’s challenge is to integrate a combination of new and ancient tools, lenses, perspectives, and practices to support our healing, rising, and advocacy, as we witness the collapse of this destructive capitalistic culture. This time is ripe with the possibility to co-create the world we long for.

I rose through the forces of my own lifetime of modern-colonized descent as I studied and practiced the modalities that were most effective on my healing journey. Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of women in person and online all around the world in roles varying from mindfulness and compassion educator, workshop facilitator, women’s empowerment mentor, mindfulness-based anti-oppression pedagogy curator, and multi-week course teacher and retreat leader.

I’m humbled to have been given the opportunity to help hundred’s of women reclaim their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health, as well as their power, pleasure, and purpose. To reflect back to them how close they are to living a vibrant life of meaning and to put the pieces of their modern cultural experience together so that they have greater clarity and understanding of how that has impacted their current world and how to build solidarity if we are to survive.

The Curriculum | Reaching Others

I am devoted to healing on every level ~ mentally, physically, emotionally, relationally, ancestrally, and spiritually, and to bringing this important work to as many women as I can in my lifetime. To that end, I have founded the Ways of the Rising Woman pedagogy and approach helping women heal from familial-socio-cultural colonization and multi-generational trauma to rise rooted as agents for meaningful and lasting change in the service of their most liberated and vibrant lives and the more just and joyous world we all know in our hearts is possible.

As the sum total of many years of international teaching and research, hundreds of in-person and hands-on sessions, thousands of hours leading groups (online and in-person) through the process of decolonization, and most importantly, my own experience on the road to postmodern recovery reweaving myself into the fabric of this breathtakingly beautiful world, I have spent the last several years tending to the emergence of Ways of the Rising Woman.

All this being said, my most astounding accomplishment is being a mom, mothering, and being daughtered by my fiery seventeen-year-old daughter and loving, imaginative seven-year-old daughter.