Niralli D’Costa, MA, LMFT, is a somatic ecotherapist, educator, and incoming Executive Director of the Earth Body Institute. She is also core faculty in the Integrative Counseling Psychology program at California Institute of Integral Studies. With over fifteen years of clinical experience in community-based and private settings, Niralli brings a deeply embodied, spiritually-rooted, and socially conscious approach to healing.

Holding a Master’s in Somatic Psychology from John F. Kennedy University, Niralli weaves together her long-time study and practice of yoga, meditation, and lineage tradition Sri Vidya with ecopsychological principles and the integrative energy healing modality of Syntara System. Her work is grounded in the belief that the natural world offers everything we need to heal, awaken, and remember our wholeness.

As a queer South Asian woman, Niralli is committed to liberatory praxis and to making healing spaces accessible for those who have been historically marginalized. She sees social justice as inseparable from our individual and collective healing and evolution. She has developed BIPOC-specific programming at the Earth Body Institute and taught at the intersection of embodied spiritual practice, social change, and nature-based healing at a variety of institutions including The Psychotherapy Institute, UC Berkeley, John F. Kennedy University, and Antioch University.

In stepping into leadership, Niralli brings a visionary commitment to equity, ecological healing, and embodied learning that honors ancestral wisdom and collective care. She currently practices in Coast Miwok territory, where she resides, wanders the hills with her four-legged companion, and dreams of integrating ecological restoration into future therapeutic group work. https://www.nirallitara.com/

Kara London, MS, LMFT (she/her), is an ecotherapist, workshop facilitator, educator, creative, and Communications Director with Earthbody Institute, residing in Southern California on the unceded lands of the Tongva and Kizh people. She feels most alive among the rolling, grassy foothills and coniferous mountains, and while bird-watching.

She holds a Master’s in Clinical Counseling Psychology, has completed certification in Ecopsychology with Pacifica Graduate Institute, and holds a Level 3 Ecotherapy certification with The Earthbody Institute. She is also the current Southern California Regional Coordinator for the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America.

Prior, she worked in a non-profit mindfulness center, a group private practice, and, for over a decade, developed a focus as a school-based mental health therapist. She founded Three Feathers Therapy in 2023, where she specializes in offering ecotherapy and mindfulness-based therapy. Her approach is grounded in attachment, mindful compassion, creativity, somatic awareness, and relationship with nature.

As a cisgender, HSP, able-bodied, middle-class woman with German, English, and mixed European heritage, Kara is a settler on Turtle Island and is committed to uncolonial and liberatory praxis. Across all her roles, she welcomes work with people of all backgrounds and intersections, including BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQ+, neurodiverse, ability diverse, and other communities. She also enjoys working with creatives, change-makers, perfectionists, empaths, and Earth lovers.

In her role as Communications Director, she hopes to offer her strengths as a builder and storyteller, to nourish deepening connections with wider communities and networks, and to further integrate social-environmental justice into her work with Earthbody.

Amanda Morrison, MA, LMFT is a somatic ecotherapist, educator, and the incoming Curriculum Director of the EarthBody Institute. She brings nearly two decades of clinical experience weaving together earth wisdom, body awareness, and relational healing to help people recover a deeper sense of connection to themselves, each other, and the living world.

Amanda entered the field of psychotherapy after leaving her high-tech career in 2002, following a life-changing awakening to her relationship with nature. Since then, she has worked at the intersection of ecopsychology, trauma recovery, and social change—developing programs that use the healing power of nature as a vehicle for both personal transformation and collective liberation. She is the creator of the Bayside Marin Ecotherapy Program, a pioneering initiative at a residential dual-diagnosis treatment center, and has facilitated ecotherapy groups for incarcerated men through the Insight Garden Program at San Quentin Prison.

As a white, cisgender, queer woman, Amanda acknowledges the privileges and limitations of her positionality and is committed to ongoing accountability, humility, and learning in her work. She sees social justice, ecological healing, and psychotherapy as inseparable, and has devoted much of her teaching and practice to creating spaces where historically marginalized voices and experiences are centered. For ten years, she taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies, offering interdisciplinary courses with a strong emphasis on ecopsychology, somatics, and justice frameworks.

Her training integrates multiple somatic and ecotherapeutic modalities—including AEDP, Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, Authentic Movement, rites of passage practices, and the Work that Reconnects. Amanda’s article “Embodying Sentience” was published in Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. She currently maintains a private practice in the Bay Area, where she works both indoors, as well as outdoors on the trails of the East Bay Regional Parks.

Grounded in her own daily nature practice, Amanda is an avid gardener and hiker. She continues to draw inspiration from the land she calls home, honoring the histories and resilience of the Ohlone people who are native to this place, while tending reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world. https://www.amandamorrisonmft.com/

Ariana Candell, MA, LMFT, is a somatic ecotherapist, a licensed psychotherapist with 30 years of experience, and the founder of The Earthbody Institute. For the last 15 years, she has been an active teacher, trainer, leader, and innovator in the field of Ecotherapy, introducing it as an essential part of healing in the field of psychotherapy.

As Executive Director of The Earthbody Institute since its inception in 2020, Ariana has led with a social justice approach: offering hundreds of equity scholarships, supporting the creation of vibrant BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ programs, creating free community offerings in response to the needs of the times, and fostering a diverse EBI team. She recently passed on the role of director and created a new leadership team. Ariana will continue at EBI in the role of mentor and elder.

Ariana is the original creator and trainer of the EBI 100-hour Professional Ecotherapy Training and Certification Program and has collaborated with the EBI team to refine and update it over the years. She has also facilitated numerous nature-connection workshops and Work That Reconnects rituals for community organizations, as well as taught Ecotherapy seminars at John F. Kennedy University.

As a cisgendered, able-bodied, heterosexual white woman (with grandparents immigrating from Italy, Germany, and Poland), Ariana is committed to continued learning, practice, and humility in advocating for justice with awareness of her privilege. As a mother of queer, neurodiverse children, she is devoted to supporting the LGBTQIA+ community and welcomes working with people of all genders, backgrounds, and cultures. Over the years, she has stewarded the Earthbody community toward a place of welcome, inclusion, and inspiration.

Ariana believes that developing a consistent nature-connection practice with elements of somatic awareness and openness to the sacred can foster a more holistic and balanced way of life. She is devoted to her own daily embodied spiritual practice with nature and encourages her private clients and students to develop their own as well. In all of her programs, she facilitates the creation of a strong Earth-honored community, fulfilling an ancient human need of experiencing a profound connection to the sacredness of all beings.

Ariana is happy to be practicing Ecotherapy outdoors in the East Bay Hills with many of her individual clients and also brings the power of nature indoors to her private practice in Oakland. Her main therapeutic influences include Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy, Somatic Ecotherapy, Dance Movement Therapy, and Earth-based training from The School of Lost Borders.

Visit Ariana’s private psychotherapy page here.

Musenge Luchembe, LMFT, Ecotherapist, is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice. She has training in Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy, Reiki, Acupressure, and Authentic Movement and earned her Ecotherapy Certificate from The Earthbody Institute in 2018. Some populations Musenge has worked with include immigrants and refugees with environmental and war trauma as well as social activists and  people of color in the LBGTQ+ community.

Musenge’s advocacy and appreciation for nature began in the tropical forests that surrounded her childhood home in her native country of Zambia. Musenge moved frequently as child but always made friends with the trees and animals around her until she moved to the United States as teenager. After a difficult transition to California, Musenge was able to reconnect with nature, feel safe in her new home and deepen her spiritual connection to nature through participating in several years of ecotherapy sessions.

Musenge supports her clients in experiencing a similar sense of freedom, creativity and healing at Edwin Warner Park, in Nashville, TN. In addition to Urban Ecotherapy, Musenge also practices Indoor Ecotherapy and Animal Assisted Therapy with her Chihuahua/Terrier, Doobie, as well as provides workshops for other healers.

Musenge enjoys walking the trails with her partner and young son, tending to her indoor and outdoor plants, listening to live music on the grass at Centennial Park, canoeing the Harpeth River and trying out new ethnic dishes. www.musengetherapy.com

Ryan Van Lenning, MA, is an inner and outer wilderness guide, ecotherapist, teacher, and poet of the Great Turning. Ryan is passionate about supporting people to re-connect with the wisdom of both inner and outer wild nature, to live their callings into the world, and to assist in the work of repairing broken belonging in this time of the Great Turning/Great Composting. Trusting in co-liberation, he is grasped by a wondering: Can we, with wild nature hearts and humble courage, intentionally face this Collective Initiation of intersecting social and ecological crises?

Through Wild Nature Heart, Ryan offers 1-on-1 earth-rooted mentoring, custom renewal wilderness ceremonies/rites-of-passage, ecospiritual courses and writing play workshops, and community Circles of the Great Turning.

Ryan is certified as an ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute and trained as a Wilderness Ceremony/Rite-of-Passage Guide through the School of Lost Borders. Prior to moving to California in 2007, he taught Philosophy, Comparative Religion, and Environmental Justice at Sinclair College in Ohio.

Ryan is author of Re-Membering: Poems of Earth & Soul (2018), One Bright and Real Caress, (2025), and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest. His poem ‘And All the Walls Between Them,’ responding to current immigration policies and social injustices, was recipient of the 2019 Jodi Stutz Poetry Award by Toyon Literary Magazine. His new collections Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, From Inside These Wild Ones, and Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony will be released throughout 2025-2026. He lives and works among the forest and rivers in northern California, ancestral Wiyot and Yurok lands.
http://wildnatureheart.com 

Yvonne McGaughey, she/her/ella, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California (and approved telehealth provider for Florida), Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), and a Lifestyle Medicine Professional that is Board Certified through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She is first generation to the United States and fluent in Spanish. Yvonne’s matrilineage is Afro Cuban (from West and North Africa/ Spaniard) and patrilineage is Nahua-Pipil and Lenca from El Salvador.

Yvonne is a highly skilled, compassionate, empathetic, and solutions-oriented therapist and health educator dedicated to providing exceptional care and implementing effective treatment plans for children, adolescents, and adults experiencing physical and mental health concerns. Working one-to-one and group settings with diverse populations–ranging from women coming from domestic violence situations to children on the verge of being wards of court, to those with eating disorders–she strives to increase opportunities for connection through mindfulness and ecotherapeutic practices.

Yvonne sees nature as a context to better know her higher power and connect to God. Yvonne recognizes when she is nature-deficient and often needs to reset in this way. The practice of ecotherapy has afforded her the opportunity to welcome this to her professional life. Yvonne’s rejuvenating source of power is water, and therefore is a water seeker. She loves to visit the ocean, waterfalls, creeks, rivers, and lakes, and has even been known to lay down in a puddle. Yvonne is very active and engages in activities such as hiking, kayaking, swimming, scuba, snorkeling, walking, and playing frisbee with her dog just so she can get outside.

Yvonne is currently a visitor on Najavait lands, raised in Tamenoga land of the Fernandino Tataviam band of the native Serrano people currently known as Lancaster, CA, part of as an area known as the Antelope Valley, within the Mojave Desert. Connect with Yvonne.

Olivia Chapman Goss is an Ecotherapist, Reiki Master, Yoga Practitioner and Artist-Creative. Before finding her path and passion within Ecotherapy, Olivia cultivated a successful career in the design-build industry, spending many years traveling the Bay Area between Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Contra Costa Counties. She credits this time, with the emergence of her connection and relationship with the land, as she would often make stops along her drives to ground and regulate her energy among the trees and seaside. Born in Panama into an Air Force family, she spent her childhood living both abroad and stateside, with her family eventually settling in Colorado, and later North Carolina. However, Olivia has called the South Bay Area
home for the last twenty-five years, residing in Tamien Nation, Ohlone Territory.

Olivia moves through the world and approaches her work as a cis-gendered, straight and queeradjacent, Foundational Black-American woman. Her work is infused with a deep reverence for the land and a desire to support others – particularly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color – in reestablishing their natural bond and exchange with the earth. Personally, she found her way to Ecotherapy as an outgrowth of her own healing and transformative journey. It was this journey that brought her to the Earthbody Institute where she began her formal training in 2021, enrolling in the BIPOC Online Level 1 Ecotherapy Certificate Training Course. This training was a complement to the Reiki and Yoga work she was already engaged in. Fast forward to present day, Olivia is a certified non-clinical Ecotherapist and practitioner (Levels 1, 2 and 3) through the Earthbody Institute, and holds certifications through her training in Trauma-sensitive Yoga for Children, alignment-based Hatha Yoga, meditation, and the lineages of Usui and Kemetic Reiki.

In April of 2022, she joined the EBI Team initiating the launch of their Earthbody Instagram page to promote their Ecotherapy training courses and build their Earth-Loving community – a role she continues to enjoy. In 2023 she assisted with the Fall Online Level 1 Ecotherapy Certification, as well as the 2024 Spring LGBTQIA+ Online Level 1, and in the summer of 2025, she assisted in the West Coast Level 2 Immersion. Since completing her certifications Olivia has slowly and intentionally built a small practice as an independent nature guide, bringing somatic and ecotherapy practices to her clients as an instructor for community, nature-based wellness programs. Her clients include one-on-one, groups, and non-profit, state park organizations. Olivia is excited to now join the team of Earthbody Institute Instructors, and will be co-teaching the 2026 Spring BIPOC Online Level 1 Ecotherapy Certificate Training Course.

Olivia takes her role as a steward of the land seriously and uses her voice to advocate for representation, mindful engagement, and to hold space for accountability and the unlearning of normalized practices that can produce harm – to people and the land. Over the last five years, Olivia has taken the education and training she has pursued and enmeshed them into every aspect of her life. She moves through this world as a humble example of how embracing a love for the earth and leaning into your power to protect, honor and heal it, can completely shift your life and all those you engage with.

Kai Siedenburg is a nature connection guide, Ecotherapist, and poet who is a pioneer in integrating nature awareness and mindfulness as a path to mind-body wellness.  She is passionate about helping people connect with nature as a path to greater peace, joy, and healing in their lives and in the world.

Kai loves to empower people to find simple ways to connect with the Earth in daily life, to cultivate deeper bonds with wild places, and to access nature-based healing.  Her first book, Poems of Earth and Spirit:  70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen Your Connection with Nature, celebrates our innate kinship with all life and helps us strengthen that kinship wherever we are.

As the founder of Our Nature Connection, Kai offers group programs, individual sessions, and consulting services based on a unique approach she calls NatureWise.  Her approach is rooted in deep listening to nature, infused with love for people and the Earth, and shaped by what activist Carolyn Casey calls “a willingness to collaborate with everything.”

Kai’s work is also is informed by 30-plus years of professional experience developing innovative educational programs and by extensive training and practice in mindfulness, holistic healing, and creative expression.  Prior to founding Our Nature Connection, she spent 25 years leading non-profit campaigns and programs to advance sustainable and socially just food systems.

Kai is profoundly nourished by her deep love of the lands and waters of the Santa Cruz area, where she has lived for more than 30 years.

Lili Nakita Kroutilina, LMFT, MA, Somatic Ecotherapist, is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified Somatic Ecotherapist, Certified Holistic Health Practitioner, artist, and activist from Sofia, Bulgaria that is currently residing in Berkeley, California. Lili received her Master’s in Counseling from the Institute of Transpersonal Therapy specializing in Expressive Arts and Transpersonal Psychology. Lili graduated from The Earthbody Institute’s 100 hour Professional Ecotherapy training program in 2015 and has worked with Ariana Candell on retreats, workshops, online classes, and curriculums.

She is passionate about connection with the earth, ourselves, and our community. When she was a young girl in Bulgaria, she has fond memories of swimming in the black sea with her family. Immigrating to California as a young girl she found solace in nature whether that was the ocean, mountains, desert, or rivers. Lili cares deeply about protecting the earth as well as the humans inhabiting it. She has worked in community mental health the past 8 years with various populations including children, teens, adults, and elderly. She is highly passionate about working with women’s empowerment, alternative lifestyles, LBGTQ+ community, people of color, immigrants, artists and musicians, spiritual counseling and integration, activists, as well as PTSD/trauma/grief work. Lili also has experience creating and facilitating workshops on a wide range of therapeutic topics. https://www.lilinakita.com/

Maraina Montgomery, M.A., is an international educator whose calling empowers institutions and their community members to seek out and maximize global learning opportunities from a reciprocity-centered, ethics-driven, culturally humble way of being. With more than 11 years of experience working overseas and for U.S. postsecondary institutions, Maraina’s work advances justice, access, inclusion, equity, and diversity (JAIDE) as an administrator, teacher, and student.

As a practitioner-scholar, she has published widely on topics that invite educators to reimagine their roles and responsibilities as pathways for discovery and collective transformation, especially when engaging students from diverse, minoritized, and marginalized backgrounds. To do this work, Maraina looks toward the natural world, both for personal fortification, as well as a place of grounding when inviting stakeholders into meaningful and trust-building conversations within the academy.

Born in Colorado and raised throughout the state, Maraina’s passion for nature was cultivated by a mother who also felt a deep connection to the Earth. Taking long walks (hours long!) through the plains near their cabin in Guffey, in search of remains of arrowheads and owl pellets, or throughout the neighborhoods and parks of Denver, resting in and under trees is how she was raised to value time, details, creativity, freedom and many other lessons from the natural world.

Maraina has studied, worked, and/or traveled in more than 35 countries with children, adults, English language learners, and higher education professionals. In each country, she has revolved her lifestyle around building a relationship with the land she has occupied as a cultural guide, spiritual teacher, and source of refuge. Her work with students and faculty at Historically Black Universities and a religious institution have invited her to imagine how applying eco therapeutic practices to support student development, healthy group dynamic development, and cultural humiliation, in preparation for and during overseas programming. She understands the incorporation of nature appreciation and therapy into her work to be a social justice cause that improves the state of existence for humans and the planet we need to be better stewards of.

Maraina celebrates life by joyfully frolicking (also known as jogging) outdoors, hiking near rivers, and tending to the numerous plants she intentionally positions throughout the areas of her daily life. Connect with Maraina.

Mary Sanders (she/they), LCSW, is a politicized somatic psychotherapist, educator, and community builder, infusing passion into both her clinical endeavors and community initiatives. With over a decade of experience in community mental health, she’s provided psychotherapy and clinical case management to communities of color and historically marginalized populations addressing trauma and various forms of oppression.

Mary’s deep love for mother earth began at a young age when her family of eight camped for weeks every summer at Cleveland National Park. She felt a deep peace listening to the birds, connecting with the winds, and swimming in the sweet waters. In recent years, Mary’s spiritual connection with plant spirits expanded upon sitting and studying from the Shipido people located near the Ucayali River in Peru. Mary continues to deepen her knowledge and connection with the native plants and trees on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ohlone people also called Oakland, Ca. She is currently enrolled at Soul Flower Farm BIPOC Herbalism apprenticeship program. Mary can often be found exploring the local trails, praying to the waters at Sausal Creek, and offering roses to the land spirits. 

Mary believes earth’s healing and healing ourselves is interconnected. She integrates the teachings and lessons from mother earth into the therapy room while holding various clinical modalities. Mary is trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy at CIIS CPTR, MAPS, and the Ketamine Training Center. Mary is also equipped with certifications in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems (Level 1). She served as a founding board member at People of Color Psychedelic Collective championing inclusivity and accessibility in healing spaces. Mary was core faculty at UC Berkeley Center for Psychedelic Facilitation Training Program leading the JEDI and Somatic Awareness curriculum and JEDI mentorship program. Mary advocates for collective healing through an intersectional approach, and sparks dialogues on community-centric infrastructures rooted in accessibility and cultural sensitivity. 

For nearly a decade, Jessica Sala-Bonin has been a driving force behind EBI’s technology, operations, and online presence. As the architect of the team’s tech stack and the manager of day-to-day systems, she ensures that EBI runs smoothly and efficiently behind the scenes. From website development to process design, Jessica has built the operational foundation that allows the EBI team to serve its clients with consistency and excellence.

Jessica brings more than 20 years of experience supporting small to mid-sized businesses in achieving their marketing goals, 14 years through her own business, Sala Social Marketing.

Known for her meticulous attention to detail and her ability to blend creativity with strategy, Jessica excels in problem solving, content creation, and systems management. She is continually learning and evolving alongside the fast-changing digital landscape, keeping EBI and her other clients ahead of industry trends and best practices.

Her approachable and collaborative nature makes her an invaluable connector within the team and with clients. Whether designing a streamlined workflow, refining SEO content, or troubleshooting complex challenges, Jessica’s work ethic and innovative mindset are at the heart of EBI’s success.

Fun fact, I don’t have to look this up because the roots of our land is SO SO SO honored in this area due to the casinos. Literally, our town would be NOTHING without “the tribe”. Some of the most beloved members of our community. We actually just won a huge battle in town last year changing our high school mascot from the Indians to the wolf. XO

Jessica resides in eastern Connecticut, the ancestral and unceded lands of the Mohegans, with husband (Chris), toddler (Tessa), dogs (King + Blue) and cats (Lil’ Mew and Trouble) and enjoys going on adventures near and far, gardening, homesteading and being in nature. You can learn more about Jessica’s work here – salasocialmarketing.com