My name is Zoë Ackerman and I am a ritual artist and spiritual practitioner living in Curitiba, Brazil. My roots are in Charlottesville, Virginia, on unceded Monacan land.

I believe there is no singular place where one “learns ritual.” I’m not even sure that ritual can be taught, because our bones already know ritual. Our lives are ritual. We’re surrounded by people, plants, animals, elements, and ancestors moving with intention. Sometimes I’ve been an intentional person, sometimes not.

The “four schools” of my life — the Schools of Grief, Theater and Organizing, Land and Ancestral Relationship, and Storied Rites — have all led me back to ritual.

Grief

I first encountered the idea of being “embodied” when my friend Laura Rozo was diagnosed with cancer when we were in college. Laura was 19 when she passed away, and faced death with a kind of fire I’d never encountered. “Death is not a threat, but a condition that maximizes my life,” she said, near the end of her life. She was the very first person I witnessed embodying their bravest and most whole shape.

In 2019, my sister Nelle’s chronic illness journey took a sudden and challenging turn when a cluster of events landed her in bed with all sorts of really painful symptoms. She was getting few answers from doctors in the U.S. about what was going on. As her sibling, her older sister, I knew in my bones that I needed to be with her.

I moved back to Charlottesville and began confronting a question within myself that propelled me into a five-year journey: How do I show up for myself and the people and places I love in a way that honors my needs and feelings in balance with theirs?

Theater and Organizing

In 2015, I had the honor of meeting my dear friend Elijah Moray. Elijah opened my mind and heart to the world of Theater of the Oppressed, a set of tools and practices developed and refined by Augusto Boal, Barbara Santos, and many others, designed to support individuals and collectives to embody their fullest sovereignty. Elijah and I co-designed workshops about environmental justice and racism, as a way to allow people to not only understand the impacts of injustices but to also feel them.

My call towards being a student and teacher of embodied and relational learning drew me to study urban planning and public policy in grad school. In 2020, I completed my M.A. thesis on anti-oppressive, participatory learning environments and co-authored articles with Penn Loh on power and relationality (2021, 2022). From 2015 to 2023, I worked as a fundraiser and policy researcher for social justice organizations, including Community Labor United, People’s Action, and Hand in Hand: Domestic Employers Network, integrating the principles and practices of bottom-up learning whenever possible.

Land and Ancestral Relationship

In 2020, amid the swell of Black-Led uprisings and devastation of the pandemic, I pursued deeper learning about my own ancestral roots and spiritual believes. My people come from Europe, and both experienced and caused traumatic severance from the land. I began to study with Lara Irene Vesta, and participated in several learning experiences with her, including “Healing the Witch Wound” (Summer 2020), “Animist Ancestral Connection” (Winter 2020), and “Wild Soul Runes Gnosis Group” (2021-2022). In 2023, I completed a six-month training in Embodied Ancestral Inquiry, a “body-based approach to understanding and resolving the intergenerational wounds that contribute to white supremacy,” led by Marika Heinrichs and Stevie J. Guiol. I continue to practice with peer practitioners.

Since 2023, I’ve engaged in trauma-informed grief training and mentorship with Shauna Janz and the Visionary Alchemy container with Gabriela de Golia, integrating skills in grief, ritual, and embodied practice. In addition, I have completed a brief training with Hospice of the Piedmont-Virginia on accompanying the dying.

Storied Rites

My most formative experience on my path of ritual was the “Dark Goddess Year of Ceremony” (2021-2023), led by Lara Vesta. This experience, beyond any other, taught me about the power of marking a period of time as a ritual, and tending my relationship with myself, land, and ancestors through slowing down and rewriting stories. Since completing the Dark Goddess Rite of Passage, I have been in a process of deep integration — calling back of the parts of me that I’ve lost with over the years, through the devastation of whiteness, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, colonization, ableism, and so much more.

I also want to acknowledge how deeply inspired I am by a well of embodiment practitioners, researchers, and storytellers including all named above as well as Bayo Akomolafe, Prentis Hemphill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Josh Schrei, Sophie Strand, Danica Boyce, Blair Mikaela Franklin and others.