Above photo of Dmitri and Kendra taken by Tiffany Barfield at the Cascade Raptor Center in Eugene, Oregon.
You belong here.
An earth-honoring worldview includes us in its expression of inherent wholeness, despite our fears, imperfections, or insecurities, despite all the ways we might try to keep ourselves separate and outside of its naturalness. Here the deep ecology of our bodies — the soil, wind, water, and spark — reminds us that we are nature embodied in human form.
As an acupuncturist and herbalist, I uphold a sacred container in which people are able to express and explore all of the layers of their lives: their bodies’ wise teachings, their heartaches, their celebrations, their soul’s longings, and the things they never tell other people.
The voice of our bodies reminds us that we can not close to heal. Like serpentine rivers, ancient forests, and endless galaxies, we are governed by a natural intelligence, a wild force that is always headed towards healing when given the opportunity.
It is only by expanding that we metabolize our unwanted experiences and traumas. We do not work these things through our systems by freezing, numbing, or locking the past into our somatic memory. It is by opening ourselves further, by coaxing, loving, and nurturing these closed down places that we find the best of a life we have not yet lived.
Kendra Ward, LAc., MAOM, (she/her) is a traditional East Asian medicine practitioner, herbalist, and land alchemist. Her primary teachers are the land and kin where she lives, her life-long meditation and spiritual practices, and the complex, honest, radiant human beings she has been fortunate to hold sacred space for in her healing practice.
Kendra’s first steps onto a path of health and spirituality began in 1998 when she completed the School for International Trainings’ Tibetan Studies Program in Tibet, Nepal, and India. She then went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and master’s degree in acupuncture from the New England School of Acupuncture in Boston. From 2003 to 2020, she co-owned the Whole Family Wellness Center in Portland, Oregon.
Ever curious about the fluid interfaces between the human body and land body, Kendra brings twenty years of experience practicing the nature-based system of acupuncture to her land alchemy work. She offers home and land clearings, blessing ceremonies, land altar installments, and mentorship in nature communication. In addition to her licensure in acupuncture and herbal medicine, she has advanced training in:
✧Plant Ally Medicine (including aroma acupoint therapy, therapeutic essential oils and flower essences)
✧Contemporary Shamanism (including energy clearing, energy mastery, shamanic journeying, shadow transformation)
✧Animist Psychology
✧Land Alchemy Practices
✧Stone Medicine, Land Altars and Grids
Kendra’s dao is to provide a bridge of reconciliation between the land and its humans. She explores themes such as ecological embodiment, intimacy with place, and how the land dreams us into being through her podcast, Woman Who Rubs the Mountain. The intent of the podcast (as well as her overarching life’s vision) is to diversify our sense of relational kinship, discover creative, disruptive ways of living beyond our human-centric tendencies, and make wide space for a new/old earth-honoring culture to re-emerge.
