deepening kinship with the land in our bones
A n c e s t r a l + P l a n t c e s t r a l R e - M e m b r a n c e
COMPASS: Roots
Our work is dedicated to re-membering, reclaiming, and restoring baladi (local land-based) ancestral wisdoms and indigenous** paradigms of practice. Our approach is rooted in healing relationship, unveiling stories, and awakening embodied memory/resilience/knowledge in collaboration with the natural world and our cultural practices. We have a special emphasis on the Crossroads* region.
We re-member in order to heal the “cultures of severance” that have disfigured and dominated our contemporary world—a liberatory transformation of personal, ancestral, communal, socio-political, and ecological traumas and systemic violations, towards a more life-affirming and dignified reality.
The Great Grandmothers from both sides of my family were named Rose (and Wardeh, in Arabic). The “Rose” in “River Rose” is not just for our deep love of roses, but a dedication to them. To the women of my lineages. To the Grandmothers of this earth since the beginning of time. Their love, mysteries, and medicines. May this re-memberance honor and be blessed by them <3.
* Crossroads is my term for the broader region of Southwest Asia and northern Africa, a less colonial description of the area typically called the Middle East and North Africa. It is a descriptive word for this region that veers away from colonial continental bordering. ‘Crossroads’ evokes the positionality of this complex borderland area as a significant eco-cultural bridge between multiple worlds, continents, cultures—preceding colonial intervention and within its wreckage simultaneously. The word was suggested by Sanyu Estelle Nagenda, who has been involved in our ongoing conversations of communal remapping. It expresses an attempt to thoughtfully reclaim the dignity and truths within our layered ancestral legacies towards a liberatory praxis and self-determined realities for all involved respectively.
HOW
One primary way that we facilitate this work is through partnering with ancestral plants as teachers and agents of consciousness-raising, healing, culture, memory and story. We work in a way that emphasizes relationship and strives to honor and re-centralize the wisdom and memory alive in our own blood, bones, and hearts to uncover/recover "lost" or forgotten ancestral knowledge, and co-create forward from relationship to this place. We call this Plantcestral Re-Membrance* work.
We understand that just as ancestral trauma remains alive in the memory of our body, as does ancestral resilience, wisdom, and medicine (which is also alive in the body of our plantcestors***). Through building intentional relationship with our plantcestors, lands, dreams, cultural traditions, bodies, and stories, we work on waking up this wisdom and healing in our own lives.
Re-membering our ancestors' wisdom necessitates rewiring how we think, relate, and arrive to understanding & truth. We work on this rewiring through creating sacred containers for intentional, experiential, relationship-based knowledge-building and story making with our medicines and one another, and supported by/honoring the teachings of our living Indigenous and traditional elders where it is extended to us.
We ARE our ancestors. What we are re-membering, is ourselves.
* re-Membrance as in: remembering/returning to the source of something that has always been true - reclaiming some part of us that has known before - awakening primordial knowings *and also,* re-membering, gathering the fragments of something severed back to a unified and more whole state, collecting + mending the dislocated, displaced, and lost back to oneness - healing.
What
We share this work through:
Online + in-person courses facilitating Plantcestral re-Membrance work, EmbodyBirth™/BellydanceBirth®, and other ancestral, herbal, and traditional healing themes
A product line of herbal medicines, flower essences, writing, apparel, and more available in our Souk-Marketplace
Hosting a Crossroads community ancestral re-membrance program + an online archival HUB run collectively by SWANA community members for the communal re-collection and cross-pollination of stories/oral histories, traditional healing, ancestral folklore, cultural practices, indigenous wisdoms, and plantcestral re-membrance across all SWANA time and space zones (diaspora + motherlands)
Offering consultation, educational workshops, and talks to organizations, universities, communities, individuals, and other institutions on topics pertaining to any of the above subjects. We are also eager to share explorations around subjects of ancestral + intergenerational + colonial trauma, cultural work in the context of diaspora, mental health and healing, embodied + somatic healing, traditional + ancestral healing, oral history + storytelling, decolonizing research methodologies, and the decolonizing/feminist pedagogies*, epistemologies*, and paradigms* of practice embedded within our philosophy of practice and more generally.
[ *pedagogies: ways of educating, *epistemologies: ways of knowing, *paradigms: ways of viewing and existing in the world. ]
Mentorship consults for folks seeking guidance around topics pertaining to my experience. For example, seeking insight about pursuing an MSW, herbal, or re-membrance path, advice or resources about visiting Lebanon or one’s ancestral region, support around how to start pursuing cultural re-membrance work, resources about a specific SWANA plant or tradition (check the HUB archives first), or any other area which you desire my specific perspective or insight on. Email me with a general explanation of what you hope to discuss to arrange a session of this sort. Please note, this is NOT the same as an herbal consult or healing session. I will not be offering clinical guidance or remedies in these consults - only sharing relevant reflections and resources based on my own experience regarding the topic of interest.
Published works including my book, The Land in Our Bones.
WHY: healing a culture of severance
We understand colonialism as a profound wound which marks the violent severance of many of our globe's people from our culturally rooted relationship to the living natural world, its complex mysteries, and our understanding of ourselves within it. A primordial trauma of sorts, an original mother wound whose implication has a massive effect on every aspect of our lives and wellbeing as individuals and collectively. We view this trauma as a primary source of the dissociation/disconnection/spirit-loss which un-dealt with, has contributed to a diminished reverence for life in the broader culture and institutions that dominate our contemporary world. Leaving this wound untended has resulted in both profound spiritual and mental sickness and lostness amongst everyday folks like ourselves, as well as horrendous acts of institutional man-made violence at the systemic level which are desecrating the life-affirming nature & possibility of our earth and humanity. We look to our ancestors for a remedy to this trauma and the multi-dimensional suffering and imbalances it has caused. We understand that healing trauma always means healing relationship. Through reconciling this relationship to our own internal landscapes/embodied knowings and stories, to our original (Indigenous) ancestors, to the stories, sciences, and nature-derived paradigms they lived by, to our roots and cultural forms of practice and resilience, to the inter-dimensional natural world we are a part of, we restore much needed medicine for our times, our future, and even our past. We begin to recover a fundamental piece of ourselves; we start to reclaim what was violated and intentionally stripped by the colonial process. We relocate parts of ourselves and our lineages that have been displaced, repressed, left behind, and severed intentionally to defeat our spirits and dismember our communities and our culturally rooted know-how to sustain life in responsible, joyful, and dignified ways. We recalibrate ways of knowing, healing, and being that help us reclaim who we are at our best, and access the deep medicine within our unique relationship and purpose in the interconnected web of life we are a part of. We restore integrity in our ability to relate, love, and persist thru all dimensions of our lives. We restore our ecologies and our abilities to live in equitable, respectful, life-affirming, and sustainable ways for the longevity of our earth and lineages to come.
We see this re-membering work as fundamental to healing both the deep personal confusion, relational disfunction, and suffering so many modern humans experience, as well as the prevailing systemic imbalances and injustices of our time and the consciousness of greed, discrimination, patriarchy, and profit that perpetuate the destruction of life characterized by this global era. This work is fundamentally restorative, de-colonial, feminist, ecological, and liberatory - sacred and life affirming - anchored in the Justice of a cosmic/natural order that dignifies all living beings and holds us all accountable to doing the same. It grows upon and alongside an extensive body of liberatory, creative, sacred, and consciousness-building work being done by Indigenous, feminists of color, ecological and de-colonial thinkers, cultures, and communities across the globe, and anchored in the wisdom of our most righteous ancestors who work through us.
WHO
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 eco-cultural re-membrance and decolonization movements, and the many layers of relational restoration, systemic reckoning, and healing that entails.
Feghali offers a line of plantcestral medicine, education, and other culturally-rooted offerings and mutual aid efforts, with an emphasis on land-based ancestral practices from the Crossroads (southwest Asia + northern Africa) and its diasporas.
Feghali comes from a movement building background, and carries a masters degree in community mental health (MSW) in which her focus was cultural interventions for treating trauma and grief in Arab diasporic and queer communities. She has been a student of ancestral knowledge and traditional healing for nearly 2 decades. Her areas of focus include herbal medicine, birth tending, folkloric dance, earth-based knowledge systems, and more.
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. Feghali asks: How do we embody what binds us together while holding the ways we’ve been wrested apart? What does it mean to be of a place when extraction and empire destroy its geographies? How do we disentangle ourselves from exploitive paradigms to create more liberatory worlds? What can we re-member when we reach beyond what’s been lost and tend to what remains? How do we cultivate regenerative kinships with the lands where we live, especially when displacement has led us to other peoples' unceded territories?
* This vision and body of work would not be possible without the generous mentorship and lineages of teachers and elders of the various herbal, ancestral, and Indigenous traditions that have blessed my path from across Turtle Island (aka. the Americas- from Maya land & Mexico, to the northern Indigenous cultures of various tribal peoples across the “US & Canada”), the African continent and the African diasporas (especially Ifa and it’s lineages), and the Crossroads region. My work is deeply influenced and moved by the ancestors of my own lineage and family, who have inspired and guided every step and mystery and it’s unfolding in my life in both the diaspora and motherlands. Your names are etched on every aspiration, understanding, and sharing that I weave. My re-memberings are branches sprouted from your trees, flowers bloomed from your seeds. My offerings are inseparable from your guidance and influence, sacrifices and resilience, and precious knowledge shared. Thank you. *
Where
We are a reflection of our diasporic reality, living and working between California and Lebanon. We also travel and offer services through other parts of both the Crossroads region and the so-called “USA”. We can offer talks or workshops wherever in the world we are invited, including virtually through regular online programs.
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** Indigenous refers to the original (pre-colonial), nature-based (earthly & cosmic), regional ancestral paradigms of understanding and living, rooted deeply in the specific geography of a people and the culture and stories that place has reflected/created for them to understand, heal, and conduct themselves within- the ecology, origins, cycles, and laws of our natural living world & their particular relationship, purpose, and roles within it. EVERY people across the earth lived indigenously at some point in time. We strive to regain proximity to the Indigenous ancestors we descend from, while honoring and tending to those from the places where we currently live. We strive to re-member these parts of ourselves. We also honor the ways that people currently living Indigenously across the earth face particular political, social, and ecological struggles and threats to self-determination that not all of us experience. We uplift and honor these communities deeply, support their struggles for sovereignty, and respect the unique relationships they have to these bodies of wisdom and movements alike and our responsibility to learn from, protect, and fight for/with them, from address to origins.
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***PLANT·CES·TOR (aka. PLANT·CES·TAR)
\noun\ plant-ses-tər also -səs-\
: an ancient living organism of the kind exemplified by trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns, and mosses, who live through absorbing water and the soil's minerals through their roots, sunlight/starlight/moonlight/cosmic energy through their leaves, and the carbon-dioxide exhaled by humans and other mammals which they transform into oxygen. These beings are predecessors to the human kingdom, which depends on them to survive for food, breath, medicine, fire, shelter, and more. Through their intimate daily relationships to humans for many centuries, they have acted as vessels of ancestral, elemental, and *cosmic* knowledge, folklore, culture, history, and memory, and have been utilized to support the spiritual and earthly well-being of humans for many generations. They are our ancestor's ancestors, amongst the earliest and most ancient beings whose livelihood, sacrifices, and brilliance has made human & animal life possible upon this Earth. Through intentional and reciprocal cultivation and respectful relationship with these diverse and multi-dimensional allies, humans have been able to access the masterful and mysterious healing miracles and deep wisdom afforded by these highly intelligent ancestors, towards greater alignment with our own authentic purpose, greater wholeness, peace, and balance with the natural order of the universe that ensures and sustains all life. This wisdom of “plants as ancestors” is practiced and tended by indigenous and traditional peoples from all over the globe, rooted in and passed down by the original ways of our ancestors.
[***This terminology was coined and popularized by Layla Kristy Feghali, founder of River Rose Re-membrance, to honor, express, explore, and revive a deeper relationship to these ancestral paradigms and understandings through her own body of practice.]
