About

Rooted in the Architecture of Belonging

My work lives at the intersection of the clay studio, the movement floor, and an Anti-Oppressive Clinical Framework. As a Mixed Heritage Xicana and transracial adoptee, I have spent my life navigating the "spaces between"—learning to listen to the silent stories held in the body, the archive, and the land.

A 25-Year Apprenticeship to Presence
Long before I earned my MSW at Portland State University, I was a student of the fire and the page. My practice is grounded in over a quarter-century of devotion to craft. During a formative apprenticeship in the studio of world-renowned master potter Otto Heino, I learned the "slow medicine" of functional craft—the discipline of staying present with the material as it transforms. At the Oregon College of Art and Craft (BFA), I deepened this inquiry into Book Arts, exploring the tactile ways we bind our histories, the weight of the pages we’ve lost, and the beauty of where our narratives must be tended and witnessed using our many senses and wordless intelligences.

Narrative Repair & Communal Witnessing
As a lyricist and singer in Moon Tiger and Atheist Baby, I moved these stories from the private studio to the public stage. In the resonance of performance, I saw how art functions as a sanctuary for the grief of cultural loss enabling our capacity for communal repair—a place where the unspeakable can be witnessed, metabolized, and transformed through the medicine of collective storytelling, rhythm and shared sound.

The Body as the Primary Site of Resurgence
For over two decades, I have served as a Mindful Movement teacher, trainer, and corporate wellness architect. From designing programs for Amazon Web Services Elemental and Vevo Music Video Network, to facilitating intimate community groups, my focus has been the same: using co-regulation as a tool for equity. I facilitate play and connection not as a distraction, but as a vital nervous-system resource that allows us to stay connected, soft and malleable in a rigid world.

Today, my clinical practice is deeply informed by five years of intensive study in Somatic Abolitionism under the mentorship of Resmaa Menakem and Jennifer Lee Koble. This lineage has equipped me to move beyond Eurocentric "wellness" and into the "reps" of embodied cultural glue—the deep, relational labor required to mend the ruptures of systemic trauma.

Collective Tending & Relational Accountability
I believe that healing is not just personal; it is a collective tending. Following the guidance of my mentors, I work to help us build the "Moorings" (the safety, the connection, the ritual) that allow us to stay anchored even when the structures around us shift.

Whether through embodied movement practices, or arts-based intervention, I facilitate the messy and sacred labor of practicing our relational accountability: a returning to our shared history and an honoring of our unbreakable belonging to ourselves, our ancestors, the land, and our people.

All Photos by Alicia J. Rose