Greetings, I’m Kaya
I see myself as a friend of land and beings alike. I facilitate rituals and ceremonies. I craft potions, lead journeys of inner and outer explorations, and teach what I love. The deepest intention behind my work is that of bringing more love into the world. My way of contributing to this intention is by supporting people in being who they are, and by guiding them in inter-species kinship and the interconnectedness of everything.
Cultivating relationships with beings other than human beings wasn’t always easy for me. After growing up away from the natural connection to my surroundings, I’ve had to show up, again and again, to practice and rekindle my devotion to that path.
To me magic is not about changing or altering an outcome, but instead about adorning life with presence and intention. It’s not so much about getting it all right, it’s more about exploring what is, and being in relationship with that. By being in communion, we co-create the life we partake in, so that we as a community of kin, can learn and grow and rest together.
Living as a Prayer of Love
This is what I aspire to do - to offer my life as a devotional prayer. Walking through life with the deep gratitude that comes from knowing in all of my being what a blessing it is to be alive and experience the world as it is. To me life is equally beautiful in its darkness and in its light. Yet I am often intimate with my own resistance. I’ve had phases of depression and lots of anxiety throughout my life. And have honestly always felt caught between being very well adapted and great at fitting in and being likeable on the one hand, and on having this irresistible pull towards provocative and rebellious behavior and the dark side of things on the other. I’m still here, exploring the community of parts that I am, trying my best to be real, and allowing my being to unfold petal by petal as a flower.
Love makes sense to me. Love is meaningful to me. Through my many years of studying and apprenticing with teachers in different forms, I’ve traveled through my own perception and projection so many times. So many peaks of feeling like I’ve arrived at some super complex understanding of how everything is put together, only to have it all crumble. Then I went through what I experienced as severe burnout. Even though I supported other spaceholders in prioritizing their own needs, I still held conditioning ‘to please’ and push myself beyond my capacity ‘to serve’. Finally I had to listen. Rebuilding myself after that, has been one of the most challenging processes of my life so far. And it’s also been one of the greatest blessings. Because through it I’ve begun befriending my body, and allowing my being to simply be. It’s a practice, yes. A practice that I dedicate myself to. And through it, the prayer of love is born. Because the one thing that made sense to me when everything else was stripped away was… LOVE!
Serving The Earth
One of the main ways I practice love is by loving the Earth. I began my spiritual search in India, where mountains, rivers, trees and people initiated me into life and magic in ways that I’d never dreamed of being real or possible. And I continued my search with Norse and animistic traditions in Scandinavia where I am from. I studied herbalism, nature therapy and different somatic modalities, while immersing myself in rituals and ceremonies and centering my life more and more around bringing these to my communities. I learned about animism and magic from amazing people and teachers, and yet at the time I felt like the actual tradition in my birth country Denmark had been broken by religion and witch-hunts somewhere down the line and that what was left of it was the pioneering work of stitching all the pieces together in a patchwork.
It drew me to look elsewhere for something that I perceived at the time to be more intact. So I went to Peru, to study with a Shipibo family, and ended up spending over 4 years living, learning and teaching. What drew me there, beyond their animistic worldview, and masterful healer skills, was the practice of Sama or dieta. Which in my own brief interpretation is a way of inviting a plant spirit to permanently co-inhabit your being so that you share your body, your mind, your soul, your heart - everything you are, with a plant spirit (much more to be said and felt about this!). The being that I have dieted with the most, whom I see as my main teacher, is a tree called Noya Rao. And what I receive again and again, from cultivating my relationship with Noya Rao, is the encouragement and guidance to turn towards - and redirect my life to serving - the Earth. Since 2023 I have lived back in Denmark, and am apprenticing with my ancestral lands, and ancestral ways. While singing with all of Earth as kin, I’m exploring holding sacred boundaries while washing away barriers. I’m rejoicing in it all being one simple sacred song. That all plants are visionary, and can be equally potent portals to the liminal, like anything else we open our beings too.
This is what I am called to offer through my work, my love of the mystery, expressing itself in service to the Earth, that we are all part of.
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This is what I am called to offer through my work, my love of the mystery, expressing itself in service to the Earth, that we are all part of. 〰️
The Body Temple
My body is like any body is ~ a holy vessel. The container of my this life experience. My body is no doubt one of my greatest teachers - and my relationship to it - one of my most complicated. I remember as a child having this feeling of my skin being too tight for me. I had many phases of unexplainable pains and visits to the hospital before my family doctor concluded that I must be a hypochondriac. When my body started to mature everything changed. I was utterly confused about the mystery that I felt alive within me, in contrast to the dullness of the culture around me. Trying with much effort to navigate the complexity of being a sensitive, traumatized, privileged, insecure young growing human. I got sick. My skin, the perceived barrier between inner and outer, communicated to me in a language I had never learned to understand. I was diagnosed with a ‘chronic’ and ‘autoimmune’ disease.
My body led me to question the medical system, to study holistic and traditional systems of medicine, health and healing, to realize the gift that my menstrual cycle and cyclical nature is. And most importantly to take responsibility and not wait around for someone else to provide answers for me. Instead I found what I needed by listening. I apprentice with my body. She always knows. I’m the muse of her tides and a dweller in her caves. Sometimes I sparkle from being moved sensually through her weaving with life, other times I attempt with all effort to hide from what is and contract with the pain that brings. It’s a dance that moves me slowly then frantically, with an intense eye gaze, lots of sweating and prolonged silence ~ and I love it.
My body never gave up on me, the system did. My body guided me with eternal patience, towards magic, pleasure, animism, ritual and towards plants, the Earth and ultimately towards my own beingness.
Birth, Death &
the Liminal
On my journey of ‘self-development’, which I ignorantly threw myself into as a youngster, I learned about the importance of the time we spend in our mother’s womb, and our birth story. But it was only when I attended my dear friend’s first child’s birth by ‘co-incidence’, and shortly afterwards had a vivid experience of regressing to my own gestation that I suddenly recognized the importance of our becoming. My studies in pre and perinatal psychology and somatics have been instrumental for my own development and ability to live in present time. These studies have been a major influence on all of my work. We were all born. How we grew in our mother’s womb and how we entered this life have everything to do with how we experience ourselves and the world. It’s beautiful and fascinating and brings me so much hope to embark on this journey with others, of re-membering our stories, by infusing them with love. The births and deaths I’ve had the honor of being present at, are some of the dearest treasures I hold in my heart.
Death has always fascinated me, and I’ve felt most comfortable throughout my life in the in-between spaces. I have sought out pretty extreme shadow sides of both myself and niche communities to look for belonging. When I was present for my maternal grandmother’s passing, my relationship to death changed. The inevitability of death and the art of constant dying became a refuge for me in a way. Eventually I took an intensive course with a Mahayana Buddhist center about taking care of ourselves and others at the time of death. I return again and again to my own impermanence and there I find the essence that is eternal. Living with and through this contradiction is one reason why we as humans need rites of passage, ritual and ceremony to mark the thresholds we pass through, from beginning through to the end, and to the beginning once again in the universal spiral pattern. Witnessing each other, living symbolism and communing with whatever source is to you. We were all born - and we will all die. This is what binds us together. And together we are here. I believe that what we all long for is each other - the deep surrender that comes from recognizing that truly we are all family.
My service
I weave my service with the experience and wisdom from reconciling my own path and navigating life from my being and body, with all the connections and relationships I hold, with humans, plants and other beings. It all comes together in communion.
I've studied with many different teachers and traditions, I want to honor all of the traditional wisdom keepers, indigenous cultures, and people that have preserved the skills, wisdom and myths that I and so many others benefit from today.
I wish to particularity honor the Mahua-Lopez Shipibo lineage, The Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies, CWM (Center for Conscious Life and Death), The Andean Wachakuy Birth Tradition, School of Evolutionary Herbalism, School of Intuitive Herbalism, KieKari Somatic Education Center, Sister Morningstar, Birthing into Being, Ray Castellino and the Pre and Perinatal Psychology Center.