Welcome to SGT
I'm Lydia Violet.
I’m a bit of a modern-day renaissance woman—someone who loves weaving together scholarship, community-based learning, eco-adoration, spiritual practice, and music to create spaces that nourish both personal inspiration and community transformation. My passions for justice, education, and healing show up in the many programs, workshops, and performances I’m part of each year—whether collaborating with First Nations communities in Canada, herbalists in Costa Rica, prison activists in Scotland, or feminist hip-hop artists here in the U.S.
I’m also the founder and director of School for The Great Turning, an educational home grounded in my 17 years of study with eco-philosopher and activist Joanna Macy. Through the School, I facilitate spaces for learning, healing, and resilience for hundreds of students each year—both online and in person—supporting people who are ready to meet this planetary moment with courage, clarity, and care.
I’m an Iranian-Armenian-American citizen of Earth, alive right alongside you in this time of both promise and peril.. . 17 years ago, when I encountered Joanna Macy, I discovered a body of work that radically helped me not only orient to our planetary moment, but also find my ballast and illuminate my place, my work, and my offering in this time.
This body of work has been my guiding compass, offering tools for transforming overwhelm, despair, and disconnection into clarity, resilience, and meaningful participation in the healing of our world.
My life’s work lives at the intersection of ecological consciousness, community organizing, cultural healing, and community resilience. As someone raised within the Iranian-Armenian-American diasporic experience, I know deeply the ache of cultural severance and the longing for belonging. This has led me to generating vital practices of ancestral remembrance, song, and community ritual—supporting others in recovering their cultural lineages while tending to the Earth.
I founded School for The Great Turning to create a home for this work—a space where inner healing meets outer action. Here, we learn together how to metabolize the grief of our time, reclaim our cultural and ecological belonging, and strengthen the emotional and spiritual resilience needed for activism and community leadership. This is a place for those who are ready to engage—not only in personal transformation but in the collective work of culture repair, ecological stewardship, and social justice. Together, we step into the calling of this era: to help turn the tide toward a just, regenerative, and life-sustaining world.
SGT team & Facilitators
Bizou
School for the Great Turning Mascot
Lydia Violet
Founder
Hello, I’m Lydia Violet, and I’m so glad you’re here!
I’m the founder of School for The Great Turning, a learning community rooted in the lineage of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, and devoted to braiding practical capacities for leadership, movement-building, grief-to-action, and everyday community response with the ongoing work of personal healing, cultural remembering, and collective transformation in the midst of our planetary crisis.
My life has become a living apprenticeship to The Great Turning: the long, necessary work of helping shift our world toward a life-sustaining future. I have the deep privilege of walking alongside people who want nothing more than to offer something honest and reparative to their communities and to the Earth. I am committed to supporting this movement by catching us when we are tired or disoriented, and by cultivating spaces that help liberate courage, steadiness, and imagination. Whether through music, facilitation, or community-building, my deepest calling is to help people remember what becomes possible when we move together in service of life, and to recognize that this movement is already unfolding, quietly and boldly, across the world.
School for The Great Turning was born from an urgent need for places where inner transformation, cultural remembering, and collective action are held together. Emerging from my years of facilitating the Work That Reconnects, the school exists to support people in building the emotional resilience, clarity of purpose, and relational capacity needed to face the crises of our time, and to actively participate in the creation of a more just, regenerative, and life-affirming future.
This is a school for those longing to practice community care; to clarify their role, deepen their roots, and learn how to stay in the work for the long haul. It is for activists, artists, educators, organizers, and everyday people who feel the pull to meet this moment with both tenderness and resolve. Here, grief and beauty are welcomed as teachers, and belonging is understood as a practice we shape together.
You’re welcome here if you’re seeking steady ground in uncertain times. If you long for spaces where learning is alive, where grief and hope can sit side by side, and where the work of mending our relationship with the Earth and with one another is shared in good company. This is a place for those drawn to the slow, courageous work of tending to culture, to community, and to the future we are bringing into being.
Music is a living thread in everything I offer. I fell in love with the fiddle when I was three years old, after my father brought me to a small instrument shop in Pasadena, California, and invited me to choose anything I wished. I pointed to the violin without hesitation, beginning a lifelong relationship with its voice, one that has shaped how I listen, how I teach, and how I belong.
Today, one of my greatest joys is touring with Singing the Bones, a diasporic musical project that lives at the intersection of cultural healing and collective song. Alongside my beloved bandmates, Kele Nitoto and M’Gilvry, we share music that invites people back into connection—with themselves, with ancestral memory, and with one another.
Joanna Macy
Foundational Teacher
Joanna Rogers Macy, Ph.D. (1929-2025), author & teacher, scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interwove her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism.
Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.
As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.
Based in Berkeley, California, close to her children and grandchildren, Joanna spent many years in other lands and cultures, viewing movements for social change and exploring their roots in religious thought and practice.
Since the early 1980’s her travel was governed by invitations to teach the group work that she and a growing number of colleagues were developing. Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna’s workshops and trainings. These methods, incorporated in the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, community centers, and grassroots organizing.
In the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, this work helps people transform despair and apathy into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world as our larger living body. This perspective frees us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.
Lydia Violet
Is an Iranian-Armenian-American facilitator, public speaker, and musician devoted to inner and outer ecological renewal and cultural healing. She is a scholar in Joanna Macy's work, with over 16 years of collaboration with Macy, facilitating The Work That Reconnects across many communities, weaving together systems thinking, deep ecology, and emotional resilience in the face of global crisis.
Lydia is the founder of the School for The Great Turning, a learning community where activism and spiritual practice meet. With training in community organizing and trauma-informed facilitation, she offers grounded emotional support to individuals and communities navigating burnout, grief, and the psychological weight of living in socio-ecological crises.
As a folk-soul musician, Lydia brings song and story into the heart of her teaching, believing that music is a vessel for both grief and joy, memory and emergence. She has collaborated with artists and thought leaders such as Leah Song of Rising Appalachia and Dr. Lyla June Johnston, offering immersive programs that explore the intersections of activism, ancestry, and belonging. In her performances, she weaves together her songwriting, folk standards, Iranian ballads, love of harmonies, fiddle, banjo, and collective singing into an altar of music to lay at our feet.
Adrián Villaseñor Galarza
Integral eco-psychologist
Is a Quebec-licensed psychotherapist, couple and family therapist, and drama therapist with over 23 years of experience facilitating the Work that Reconnects. A close student of the late Joanna Macy, she works at the intersection of climate psychology, trauma-informed practice, depth-oriented somatic psychotherapy, and creative approaches to community resilience.
He is an associate professor in the Department of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, an adjunct professor at Naropa University and Antioch University, and founder of the
Bioalchemy Institute and The Work That Reconnects Latin America
For close to 20 years, Adrián has been sharing the reconnective knowledge of the planetary grandmother, Joanna Macy, by integrating it with his own experience and that of his collaborators.
Rebekah Hart
Psychotherapist
Is a Quebec-licensed psychotherapist, couple and family therapist, and drama therapist with over 23 years of experience facilitating the Work that Reconnects. A close student of the late Joanna Macy, she works at the intersection of climate psychology, trauma-informed practice, depth-oriented somatic psychotherapy, and creative approaches to community resilience.
Rebekah is passionate about supporting educators, mental health practitioners, activists, families, and individuals experiencing climate distress, eco-anxiety, or burnout. A mother, poet, activist, and engaged member of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, she grounds her work in a long-term dedication to social and environmental justice, her belief in creativity as a healing force, and her love and respect for the natural world.
John Seed
Rainforest Activist/Environmental Philosopher
Is a long-time rainforest activist, environmental philosopher, and facilitator of Deep Ecology work whose life has been devoted to protecting Earth’s living systems and awakening ecological consciousness.
In the late 1970s, he co-founded the Rainforest Information Centre, helping to catalyze international efforts to defend tropical rainforests and Indigenous land rights. For decades, John has worked at the intersection of grassroots activism, systems thinking, and spiritual ecology, offering a fierce and loving response to ecological destruction grounded in reverence for the more-than-human world.
A close collaborator of Joanna Macy, John Seed is widely known for his role in developing and facilitating Deep Ecology practices, including the Council of All Beings, which invites participants to experience their interconnectedness with the Earth through ritual, imagination, and embodied knowing. His teaching emphasizes the shift from an ego-centered worldview to an eco-centered one, reminding us that environmental action flows most sustainably from a felt sense of belonging to the living planet. Through teaching, writing, and decades of frontline advocacy, John continues to inspire courage, humility, and devotion in service of life.
Jen Myzel
Artist, Educator, Mother
Is a Work that Reconnects facilitator, musician, elementary school teacher, and children’s book author. Jen’s three musical albums and children’s book ‘Yellow Lotus Flower’ are inspired by her nine years of study with Joanna Macy, founder of the Work that Reconnects. Jen aims to inspire compassionate action on behalf of all life through her songs, stories and facilitation. Jen is engaged in creating community and change through her spiritual lineage of Judaism and she facilitates for Wilderness Torah and Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action. Jen lives in the occupied Miwok and Southern Pomo territory of Sebastopol, CA with her husband and two year old.
Leilani Wong Navar
Mother, Acupuncturist, Herbalist, & Dreamworker
Leilani is a mother, acupuncturist, herbalist, and dreamworker. She hosts Turning Season Podcast, a series of conversations with people around the world who are rising to their own unique roles in this adventure story. Born into Chinese and Jewish families, she carries on her ancestors' holistic, poetic medical science, and their dedication to asking big questions. Leilani earned her B.A. at Evergreen State College, where she studied Political Economy and Holistic Health, and her Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine. She has been studying and practicing traditional Chinese healing and movement arts for 20 years. Leilani is in ongoing study and practice of caring for the landscape of the body, and the body of the Earth.
Sarah Nahar
M.Div., Ph.D.,
Organizer. Scholar. Activist. Mother. Traveler. Connector.
Is a nonviolent action trainer, WTR facilitator, and interspiritual theologian. An emerging expert of Excreta Infrastructure Technologies, her doctoral work centers on ecological regeneration, community cultivation, and discard studies. Previously, Sarah was a 2019 Rotary Peace Fellow and worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
She has been the Executive Director of Community Peacemaker Teams, an organization committed to building partnerships to transform violence and oppression worldwide. She attended Spelman College, majoring in Comparative Women’s Studies and International Studies, minoring in Spanish. She has an MDiv from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in her hometown.
Leah Song
Singer-Song Writer, Musician
Is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumental musician, storyteller, poet, and activist known for her role as front woman in Rising Appalachia, with her sister Chloe Smith, incorporating sultry vocals, rhythm, banjo, guitar, ballads, dance, spoken-word and storytelling into her work. Her music is based in the traditions of Southern soul and international roots music. Song engages in social activism and is involved with the environment, food justice, human rights and prisons.
She has studied and worked alongside some of the greatest teachers of our time…including Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Martin Shaw, Joanna Macy, Winona LaDuke, Sobunfu Some, and Rosemary Gladstar, gathering tools and teachings of resilience, mythology, grief work, creative ritual, and rewilding.
Lydia Violet
SGT founder
Lydia brings robust scholarship in cosmology, archetypal psychology, and group facilitation centered around personal and collective healing. Through compassionate, grounded leadership, she integrates intellectual study, somatic tending, and emotional mending.
Mahsa Vahdat
Vocalist, Composer
Is an internationally acclaimed Iranian vocalist, composer, and cultural bearer whose work is devoted to preserving and re-imagining the rich traditions of Persian vocal music.
Born and trained in Iran, she is a master of classical and regional Persian song forms, known for her extraordinary vocal nuance, emotional depth, and deep relationship to poetry. Drawing from centuries-old lineages while speaking to contemporary struggles, Mahsa’s voice carries both the intimacy of longing and the strength of resilience.
As a woman artist working under restrictions on female solo singing in Iran, Mahsa Vahdat’s music is also an act of quiet resistance and cultural continuity. She has collaborated widely with musicians across traditions and geographies, bringing Persian poetry and song into dialogue with global musical languages. Through her performances, recordings, and teaching, Mahsa offers music as a vessel for memory, dignity, and freedom—inviting listeners into a deeper relationship with culture, voice, and the enduring human capacity to sing truth into the world.
Manchan Magan
Writer, Broadcaster, & Storyteller
Was an Irish writer, broadcaster, and storyteller whose work explored language, place, folklore, and the deep cultural memory embedded in landscapes.
Known for his poetic intelligence and sharp wit, Manchán brought ancestral knowledge into conversation with contemporary life, inviting people to rediscover what had been overlooked, forgotten, or quietly carried forward. His work was grounded in a lifelong devotion to how culture shapes belonging—and how attention to land, language, and tradition can reorient us in times of uncertainty.
Through books, radio, television, and live talks, Manchán Magan became a beloved cultural guide, illuminating themes of indigeneity, myth, etymology, and embodied knowledge with both rigor and playfulness. He was especially known for his exploration of the Irish language and its intimate relationship with landscape, revealing how words themselves carry ecological and cultural wisdom. With warmth, humor, and provocation, his work encouraged a slower, more attentive way of inhabiting the world—one rooted in place, story, and the living intelligence of tradition. His voice continues to resonate through the many people he inspired to listen more closely to the lands and languages that shape them.
Amikaeyla Gaston
Vocalist, Composer, Song Carrier, & Teacher
Is a powerhouse vocalist, composer, song carrier, and teacher devoted to the healing power of voice as a bridge between spirit, culture, and community.
Proclaimed by National Public Radio as one of the “purest contemporary voices,” and described by MTV as “like listening to a velvet waterfall,” Amikaeyla’s music embraces a wide spectrum of influences—rooted in African and African-diasporic traditions, jazz, soul, ceremonial song, and original composition. Her voice carries both technical brilliance and deep emotional resonance, inviting listeners into remembrance, connection, and embodied truth.
Amikaeyla has received national recognition and numerous awards, including Best Jazz Vocalist, Best Urban Contemporary Vocalist, Best World Music Vocalist, Best Debut Artist, and multiple honors as Washington, DC’s Best Female Composer for excellence in original composition. She has performed, recorded, and toured internationally with acclaimed artists such as Take 6, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Babatunde Olatunji, Mickey Hart, Pete Seeger, Esperanza Spalding, and Sheila E. Beyond the stage, she is the founder and executive director of the International Cultural Arts & Healing Sciences Institute, dedicated to music-centered healing, reconciliation, and cultural restoration. She also served as a cultural ambassador for the United States Department of State, sharing music as a language of diplomacy, resilience, and shared humanity. Across all her work, Amikaeyla offers song as living medicine—strengthening personal voice while tending the deeper bonds that hold communities together.
Alexandre Jodun
Psychotherapist / Facilitator / Ceremonialist
Alexandre Jodun is a psychotherapist, facilitator, ritualist and ceremonialist with a creole-diasporic ancestral heritage.
Through a decade of training within integrative and process-oriented, as well as earth-based, animist and shamanic paradigms, his sacred activism involves tending the fertile edges of human-becoming and bridging worlds.
His eclectic work is in service to the remembering of essential wisdoms, practices, and initiatory processes for ripening into mature adulthood, such that living culture may emerge to carry the future ones.He is an advisory circle member and facilitator of the Soulful Life community (alongside Francis Weller, Holly Truhlar, Erin Geesaman Rabke & Carl Rabke), and currently coordinates training of new psychotherapists for the Metavision Institute. He also serves on the admissions team for AWE (NGO) and their upcoming 3-year Ecstatic Mysticism training program.
Alexandre practices vegetelismo and is in an avid apprenticeship with Master Plant Teachers, particularly Tobaco (Nicotiana Rustica) and various Amazonian trees, under the Mamancunawa lineage – which deeply informs his work and life. He lives in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru.
Leilani Wong Navar
Assistant Director, Chinese Medicine Practitioner, Educator
Leilani is dedicated to growing the momentum of the Great Turning here at SGT as Assistant Director, as a holistic healthcare provider, and as a mother. She helps with the design and administration of our programs, and facilitates some of our Work that Reconnects gatherings and our Somatic Practice and Support Circles.
She helps with the design and administration of our programs, and facilitates some of our Work that Reconnects gatherings and our Somatic Practice and Support Circles.
Leilani is also a mom of two and a Licensed Acupuncturist and dreamworker. In her clinical practice, she supports people dealing with pain, disease, infertility, and stress, using acupuncture, traditional Chinese herbal medicine, modern functional medicine, and dreamwork. With groups, she facilitates the Work that Reconnects and teaches courses on practical wisdom from Chinese Medicine.
Leilani attended Evergreen State College, where she earned a B.A. with a focus on Political Economy and Holistic Health, and the National University of Natural Medicine, where she graduated with a Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine. You can hear more from Leilani on Turning Season Podcast, a series of conversations she hosts with people around the world about how and why they’re rising to their own unique roles in the Great Turning.
Morgan Vanderpool
LICSW
Is a queer, non-binary, neurospicy, ecologically and intersectionally grounded: collective neuropractor, neuro-sensitive movement specialist, regenerative practice facilitator, choreographer and community builder- with 15+ years serving experience as a global complex trauma specialist.
They're dedicated to facilitating inclusive, accessible, mycelially-grounded and somatically abolitionist, restorative embodiment practices- that strengthen our collective capacity to healthfully, pleasurably, & soulfully move with every layer of our badass survivor selves. So we may co-build thriving nervous and eco-systems- ONE BREATH AT A TIME.
In their workshops you get to experiment with a playful mix of: body-based mechanical downloads, choice-based movement and breath practices, and creative opportunities to be wowed by the wisdom of our collective survivorship.
Morgan is the the founder/creator of MorganicMovement & co-founder of Mycelial Movement Network, and is an accomplice to the Black-lead liberation work of Holistic Resistance. You can listen to their musings on collective mental wellness, queerness, pleasure & co-liberation on their co-hosted podcast Queerly Forward.
Erin Geesaman Rabke
Embodiment Mentor, Writer
Is a Somatic Naturalist and Embodiment Mentor, a writer, and a teacher. Professionally trained as a Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner, an Embodied Life Teacher, a Work That Reconnects Facilitator, and a Community Grief Tender, she weaves all of these lineages into her work.
Over the past 30 years, she’s been training in many somatics lineages as well as in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions of Dzogchen and Lojong. Along with her husband, Carl, she hosts the Embodiment Matters Podcast and the online course Weaving Glimpses. They live in Salt Lake City, Utah, with their 14-year old son, many wily animals, and a wild garden.
Carl Rabke
Somatic Naturalist, Embodiment Teacher
Is a Somatic Naturalist, Embodiment teacher, and a tender of soul and living culture.
For the last 25 years, he has practiced and taught where the streams of somatics, soul-work, and a deep love of this living Earth meet. He is a Feldenkrais Practitioner and Rolfer, and loves to support people in returning to, and remembering our natural, inherent intelligence in movement, meditation, ritual, song, rhythm and community.
Carl has studied at Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesongs School and is a Musica do Circulo practitioner. Carl has mentored with and taught alongside Francis Weller, and he also hosts the Embodiment Matters Podcast with his beloved wife, Erin.
Ma Muse
Artist, Educator, Healer
MaMuse was born out of a collaboration between songwriters Karisha Longaker and Sarah Nutting.
2008 was a year of great alchemy. Fires erupted in Northern California, a great wind of inspiration blew through, catalyzing a series of songs written from the soil and rivers, ash and heat of Chico where these two musicians met.
In the early days these troubadours toted instruments around town by bicycle and shared their songs at farmers markets, community gatherings, small cafes and festivals. Not too long after, these two voices became iconic to the Chico community, representing idyllic values of friendship, community, love for nature and care for Self and World. The love spread, sisterhood held strong through 14 years of LIFE: children, relationships arriving and dissolving, making home in many new places.
Mamuse songs such as “We Shall Be Known” and “Hallelujah” have sprouted wings and are now sung at the bed sides of birthing mothers, round campfires, at weddings and funerals... All places where people are gathered to celebrate and to mourn. These are songs born of the Folk lineage; songs for all of us.
KJ SONG
Musician
(They/them) is the queer, kinky queen of a cappella body-Gospel. A seasoned songcatcher and Voice Doula, KJ deeply understands the eroticism of singing and the harmonics of a life of devotion.
Defying stereotypes and belting through dogmatic Christian norms, KJ is at the forefront of inclusive Praise and Worship music. KJ is a proud member of the City of Refuge UCC Praise Ensemble, founder of the Queer Praise Choir and former co-director of WildChoir in Oakland. CA.
Let's get one thing queer... KJ is here to pray.
Shireen Amini
Musician
(they/them) is a queer, trans masculine, Puerto Rican-Iranian American, earth-loving song creator, rhythm maker, and community facilitator based in Portland, Oregon.
As a human, they carry a deep commitment to their own liberation path and vision of a more just world. As an artist, they believe strongly in music’s power to propel cultural revolution. Shireen blends pop, rock, hip hop, latin, and roots sensibilities with socially-conscious themes as a singer-songwriter and creates modern medicine music for community singing. In song circles, they hold transformational space, leading joyful, groove-based songs, evoking tenderness, and often engaging participants in the rhythm and ceremony of it all. Stay tuned for Shireen’s first community song album in-the-works, tentatively titled “Gather Your Resilience: Medicine Songs for Liberation."
Kele Nitoto
Multi-Generational Percussionist
Is a second generation African-American percussionist and singer.
Born and raised in the Oakland Dance Culture, Kele Has studied with masters of many styles, becoming proficient in West-African, Congolese, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Haitian traditional musics. Over the last 25 years, Kele has performed throughout the world in dance companies, bands, and teaching workshops and classes, summer camps, spiritual and workplace retreats, and for countless ceremonies and celebrations.Playing with such artists as Lydia Violet and the Thrive Choir, Kele has performed and recorded with the likes of MaMuse, Climbing Poetry, Rising Appalachia, Melanie DeMore, and Esperanza Spaulding. He is currently spearheading Oakland Hand Drums, an organization focused on rhythmic education and performance through a cultural and creative lens.
Te Martin
Song Keeper, Ritual Artist
Is a song-keeper and ritual artist. They were born on Ramaytush Ohlone land in san francisco and have been shaped by Ocean, Redwoods, circus arts, and theater games. They facilitate oral tradition singing classes and workshops that focus on song as a tool for collective liberation, somatic regulation, and ancestral connection. Te served as co-organizer of Thrive Street Choir in the san francisco bay area for six years, is a student of the Irish bodhrán drum, released their first professional music video and EP of original songs, "Water & Bones", in 2021, and launched “Murmuration: A Sebastopol Community Choir” in the spring of 2024.
