Willow Brook

Willow Brook is the co-founder of Wild Heart and has worked with Mirabai Starr since 2021. Willow is an earth loving educator, spiritual seeker, artist, and friend on fire for love, truth, and embodied liberation. With a lifetime of experience on an inter-spiritual path and a background in art education, yoga, and spiritual companionship, Willow is a never-ending student and an enthusiastic lover of life. Willow's training in the Universal Sufi lineage of Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan is at the heart of her life. Her practice is based on the framework of deep listening and honoring the inherent sovereignty and wisdom within each being. Trained in coaching, spiritual direction, inter-spiritual practice, traditional Tantra, Yoga, Sufism, and steeped in grief companionship and the sacred rhythms of the earth, Willow offers practices of presence for whatever arises.

Monika Denise Burkholder

I, Monika Denise, initially began a career as a board-certified art therapist and trauma therapist, with a focus on grief and attachment. However, after the sudden death of a close friend, something in me that was staying small in the boxes of my life cried out for freedom. So, leaving my career and life as I knew it, I crossed the threshold into an intentional soul journey, which turned into a Dark Night of the Soul.

While much of my journey included a dissolving of what I knew and a releasing of foundations that kept me safe, Mirabai Starr’s work (including Wild Mercy: A fierce and tender wisdom of the feminine mystics and workshops at Lama Foundation) was the spiderweb of wisdom I could fall into. In that gossamer place of death and creation, I found myself held in a bigger story than the tightly defined boxes of my youth. I remember Mirabai telling me that while we did not have to “let go” of the past, we could make a loving “offering to Beloved Ma,” creating space for the new to emerge. In this world Mirabai opened up for me, I found I could trust my body and intuition, that my broken-open heart was strength, that being with my grief was honoring life, and that an embodied spirituality was holy, interconnected, and encouraged me to trust my discernment as wise.

The medicine I have to offer the world also went through a transformation as I have integrated embodied and sacred practices into my medicine bundle that the clinical therapy world often excludes. I now offer 1:1 soul medicine sessions for the souljourner. If you are someone experiencing a major life transition that occurs with grief and loss, whether it was a “chosen” transition or an initiation that comes through tragedy, remember that we are not meant to go through these times alone. As a Medicine Woman of the Soul, I’ve been called a “special kind of doula” that is here to midwife you through your own rebirth. In 1:1 sessions, we navigate your soul journey with support from therapeutic art practices; Inner Relationship Focusing (gentle body-based listening); and sacred practices such as: drumming/chanting, self-created ceremony, nature-based wanders, and imaginal journeys. 

Adriana Rizzolo

Adriana Rizzolo is a somatic healer, humble servant of God as Love and transformation spiritual guide. She has been walking this miraculous, at times rocky, path of the feminine since the passing of her father. Burying him on her 25th birthday was a massive initiation that would take years to unfold, but one that left her living in deep devotion and service to healing and unconditional love. She has studied many traditions and forms of healing—traditional Tantra, mysticism and energy healing. She guides others in taking their role as leaders in the feminine healing arts, which Mirabai has been a massive inspiration and teacher for her in. Her recent trainings have focused on somatics, the nervous system and the body. It is an honor to hold space and be a gentle guide to others on their paths of grief, rebirth and aliveness. Her way of working with grief is through physical and energetic anatomy. Nervous system regulation, and learning ways to help oneself feel safe to love again.

Rev Dr. Michael Petrow

Rev. Dr. Michael Petrow currently works as a spiritual director and with The Center for Action and Contemplation as the Director of the Department of Formation, Faculty Relations, and Theological Foundations. Holding degrees in religious studies, mythology and psychology, he has worked as the guide of several spiritual communities, a teacher, a theater chaplain, and a counselor with at risk youth. A certified grief and trauma counselor, as well as a graduate of The Guild for Spiritual Guidance—for whom he now teaches—and The Living School, he started his education in religious studies at Moravian College and received his doctorate from Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he explored how transformation occurs within sacred traditions the world over. 

Michael considers Mirabai a friend, and a mentor. After years of being a student of her books, translations, and live teachings, he especially appreciates how she expertly draws on the perennial conversation taking place between and within Wisdom Traditions to guide us into the full spirituality of gratitude and grief, sorrow and celebration, and loss informing and inflaming our love of life.