Apothecary
Team
Sonali
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee is a proud mother, artist, organizer, facilitator, mindfulness / yoga instructor, and emerging health practitioner who works at the intersection of spirit, politics, belonging, equity, and deep transformative change. She is the founder of Our Bodhi Project, a spiritual and political project that supports healthy movement-building and organizing through deepening our critical analyses, centering the health of all living systems, and enlivening the connection between social and collectively spiritual wellness. She has recently founded SSoMA (Spiritual Social Medicinal Apothecary), a space that gathers and protects the medicines of our times, as well as the people and life that tend to such antidotes.
Sonali's life work has focused on bringing forward ideas and strategies that speak to wholeness, specifically calling for leading with multiple truths, perspectives, and wisdoms required for collective health. She moves as a deep, passionate, and spiritual-political carer and advocate for collective wellbeing and protection of thriving life. She has spent 13 years in U.S. local government, creating, leading, and managing social justice and racial equity initiatives. Her community organizing background has focused on youth development, environmental justice, racial justice, and HIV / AIDS-related advocacy and service. Her current advocacy focus is on resource mobilization for projects and initiatives that speak to the spiritual, social and ecological antidotes our world so desperately needs.
Sarah
Dr. Sarah Amsler is a queer eco-social researcher, educator, writer, editor and relational practitioner. Sarah studies how binary, hierarchical and extractivist ways of knowing and being shape our minds, bodies and relationships and what it takes to undo these injuries of colonization. As a researcher, she' studies how humans of modernity become separated from our being, each other, our nonhuman relations and metabolic life itself, and how we learn to heal. As a teacher, she works with ontological pedagogies that touch the deep, sedimented and normalized ways we sense, make sense, communicate, bear bodies, organize living together, and grieve and desire and love. As a writer, she apprentices with spiritual-political artistries of language that constellate realities pried apart, provide portals to queer nature, stimulate the senses to synthesize, and transmute dehydrated meaning into life’s erotic flow. As a relational practitioner, she tries to embody courageously queer life-promoting love with/in all my relations. Sees de-institutionalizing (re-rooting and re-routing) desire, expanding intimacies and fortifying more-than-human relational ecologies as essential for liveable futures and as art-life practices of cosmological care.
Sarah was a university professor of sociology for twenty-five years before moving into community and land-based eco-social and artistic scholarship, organizing and education. Her academic background is in critical, decolonial and queer theory; relational and transfeminist philosophies; the politics of knowledge, science and education; transdisciplinary research and radical pedagogy. She currently works at the intersections of queer decolonial onto-epistemology, queer and trans ecologies, queer metabolic intimacies and embodied politics, relational ontology, de-institutionalizing modern/colonial sensibility, somatic poetic practice and spiritual-political pedagogy.
Sarah is a member and Financial Director of the Oregon-based Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA), steward of SSoMA’s Queer Imagination and Liberation Lab (QUILL) and a member of the affiliated Our Bodhi Project. She is also an educator and mentor with the Beyond Form Creative Writing Collective. She collaborates and make home and community with Queerida, a queer and trans-led ecological community and living-learning land-based project located in a valley in the foothills of the Serra da Estrela mountains in central Portugal.