About Alisa
I am a healing arts practitioner, a creative, and a self-described traveling witch. With a Leo Sun, Gemini Moon and Rising, I’ve learned that my gifts live in many realms at once—in warmth, multiplicity, and the soft spaces between. My Scorpio placements pull me toward the thresholds, where life, death, and life dance in endless conversation.
My path has always been a spiral, full of twists, undoings, rebirths, and unexpected turns. As a child, labeled “highly sensitive,” I struggled to survive an overstimulating and disconnected world. Dissociation became my refuge, self-abandonment, a survival skill.
In 2017, after a traumatic event, I entered what I can only describe as my first true initiation into the underworld. The PTSD I carried home went untended for years, eventually crystallizing into chronic illness and a deep unraveling of everything I thought I knew about myself.
Desperate for relief and a sense of control, I turned to Western therapy and yoga. Wanting to place the tools in my own hands, I completed a 300-hour yoga teacher training and began my Master’s in Social Work. I spent years in non-profits, community work, and therapeutic settings—work I loved, work that mattered, yet work that asked far too much from me. The burnout, chronic health crises, and exploitation woven into Western, capitalist, colonial systems became impossible to ignore. I loved my clients, but I knew that I could never truly find liberation within those structures.
Still, I knew I belonged in the realm of healing. I just needed a path that honored my wholeness rather than consuming it.
In 2024, the spiral led me to a folk medicine apprenticeship with Escuela del Rio Cósmico, where I encountered the Wise Woman Tradition and the mythic teachings of ancestral healing. Here, I found language for a truth I’d always carried: that healing is not linear but cyclical, mirroring the life/death/life rhythm of all things. As Susun S. Weed teaches:
“To heal, to become whole, we turn again around the spiral of our life. We turn again around the spiral and enter the void, the great unknown, knowing only that our form is reformed, that our form is transformed, that rebirth inevitably follows death.”
Reading these teachings for the first time felt like finding the missing thread of my story. The Wise Woman path, Internal Family Systems, somatics, folk medicine, and Usui Reiki all echoed the same truth: nothing within us needs to be fixed. Instead, we are invited to tend to what has been forgotten—to nourish the many parts of ourselves with love, compassion, and devotion.
Entering both my folk medicine apprenticeship and the Usui Reiki lineage has been an act of re-membering, a stitching back together of what once felt fragmented. As a highly sensitive kid with what my dear friend lovingly calls “spooky gifts,” and as a descendant of land-tenders, witches, and wise women, this work has brought me home to ancestral knowing and inner truth.
I come from a mixed lineage—Mexican, Puerto Rican, Yankton Sioux, and Irish. Much of my people’s culture and teachings were severed by colonization and patriarchy, leaving me, for much of my life, feeling disjointed, belonging everywhere and nowhere all at once. What once felt like shame has become a source of fierce pride. My multitudes are my medicine. My spirituality is non-dual, living beyond binaries and borders. And at the center of it all is my tree body—holder of ancestral memory, vessel of Spirit, channel of earth-based mixta magick.
What a profound gift it is to re-member. To re-awaken.
And to walk beside others as they do the same.