Train with experienced practitioners rooted in ancestral medicine, ritual, and lived practice.
Lynsey Ayala Rinaldi
Julissa Contreras
Jerry Ortiz
Vicky Lee
Sabine Blaizin
Nicole Elodie
Vida Valdes
Nathalie
Bluemoon Flo
Sara Teresa Skolnick
Irka Mateo
Brandon Ruiz
Bianca Flores
Lynsey Ayala Rinaldi
Lynsey Ayala Rinaldi is a Boricua spiritual herbalist, educator, ceremonialist, and founder of Yabisi, a Bronx-born botanica and School of Remembrance rooted in ancestral healing traditions and earth-based practice. Her work centers the intersection of clinical and spiritual herbalism, African diasporic cosmologies, Curanderismo, ritual practice, and psychedelic integration.
For over a decade, Lynsey has guided individuals and communities through transformational work centered on remembrance, embodiment, and right relationship with spirit and land. Drawing from years of study with elders, plant teachers, therapists, and lineage holders across the Caribbean, Brazil, South America, and the United States, she creates containers that bridge ancestral technologies with trauma-informed, practitioner-centered care.
Through teaching, writing, ceremony, and medicine making, Lynsey supports practitioners, seekers, and emerging healers in deepening their relationship to the plants, the body, and the unseen. Her work invites people to reclaim ancestral ways of knowing while weaving those traditions into contemporary life with integrity, reverence, and responsibility.
Julissa Contreras
Julissa speaks truth to power, elevating necessary dialogue through reflective experiences and storytelling that create pathways for meaningful change. A writer, playwright, poet, performer, podcaster, creative director, educator, social impact strategist, and personal development coach, Julissa focuses on storytelling as a technology for societal shifts. Â Â
Julissa is the creator of Ladies Who Bronche, cofounder of StoryQuo, and creator of the YouTube hit “Shit Spanish Girls Say.” Her off-Broadway debut, Vámonos at INTAR theater (Spring 2023) boasted 3 extensions and record breaking firsts within the NYC theater community. Julissa is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers, sits on the board for INTAR Theatre, Culture Lime, and artistic advisory at The People’s Theater in NYC. In the past 15 years, Julissa’s work has been produced and commissioned across a number of festivals, workshops, and residencies throughout the country.Â
 In the spiritual and personal development space, Julissa co-founded Spira Cycles, the Rebirth Retreat with Vida Valdes of the Almighty Pineapple, and curates a variety of interactive experiences to guide people to root/uproot through the truth of their life’s narrative.Â
 For inquires around readings, divine creation sessions, and other spiritual partitioning, book a discovery call or send your inquiry at info@julissacontreras.com.
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Jerry Ortiz
Jerry Ortiz is a spiritual practitioner, healer, and community leader based in Queens, New York. Raised within a 21 Division spiritual center and baptized in his late teens, he has dedicated his life to spiritual development, ancestral connection, and service.
For the past 7 years, Jerry has led his own center, where he hosts ceremonies, feasts, and gatherings that guide individuals toward deeper alignment with God and their ancestors. His work blends traditional practices with modern healing approaches, including Reiki, meditation, and sound healing. creating a space for transformation, clarity, and spiritual growth.
 Jerry is committed to helping others reconnect with faith, purpose, and the unseen forces that guide their path.
Vicky Lee
Vicky Lee is the founder of Sister Soul Healing, a space devoted to helping people come back home to themselves.
Her work is rooted in the belief that healing happens when the body feels safe, the heart feels held, and the nervous system is supported. Through Reiki, intuitive guidance, somatic movement, breathwork, and sacred earth medicine, Vicky creates spaces where people can soften, release what feels heavy, and reconnect with their inner wisdom.
Sister Soul Healing is not about fixing or becoming someone new. It is about remembering who you already are and learning how to live from that place with more ease, clarity, and self-trust.
Every offering is an invitation to slow down, feel more, and come home to yourself.
Sabine Blaizin
Sabine Blaizin, DJ, Music Producer, and Event Curator, is a prominent DJ and cultural advocate focused on African diasporic music. Founder of Oyasound Productions which merges traditional rhythms with electronic music, she spins a diverse mix of Global Soul, including House, Afrotech, Afrobeat, and Haitian Roots.
With over 15 years in the music scene, she's had the great opportunity to spin nationally in the US in NYC, Atlanta, St. Louis, Memphis, Chicago, Omaha, Boston, New Orleans, Miami, LA/Oakland, NJ, Washington DC, Dallas, Denver and internationally in Canada, Senegal, Haiti, Cuba, London, Paris, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, & Mexico. Thus, she has made significant contributions that solidified her reputation as a key figure in the music industry. She is renowned for her innovative projects like Brooklyn Mecca, a monthly event celebrated as the home of "Grassroots Dance Culture”; Cumbancha, which features African-inspired rhythms in House, Soul, and Latin music; and Rekòlte: A Night of Haitian Roots & House. She also took part in residencies at notable venues like Le Bain (Standard Hotel), Soho House, and House of Yes NYC and music label Fania Records.
She continues to influence the scene with her creative vision and dedication to cultural advocacy. As an activist, Sabine continuously celebrates and elevates the cultural heritage and artistic evolution of the African Diaspora. In this capacity, she is the Deputy Director & Head of Programs at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. Sabine ultimately seeks to create new scholarship through the African and Haitian diasporic lens of music, culture and spirituality.
Nicole Elodie
Nicole is a psychic medium, shamanic healer, and somatic healing practitioner with over seven years of experience guiding people back to themselves through the wisdom of the body, the ancestors, and the spirit world. Her work weaves together energy medicine, soul retrieval, and nervous system regulation into a unified path of healing grounded in the understanding that the body itself is the instrument of perception and transformation. She is the creator of Spirit Medicine with Nicole, where she teaches, holds space, and walks alongside a global community on the journey of healing and awakening.
Vida Valdes
Spiritual Medium, Ordained Minister, and Ancestral Practitioner with 38 years of experience. Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, Cosmic Sexuality Practitioner, and Life Coach. Apetebi, Curandera, and 5th-generation hereditary witch, serving as an elder within multiple ATR & Pagan traditions.
I specialize in working with the deeper, often avoided aspects of spirituality—guiding those who are ready to break generational patterns, heal abandonment and intimacy wounds, trust their intuition, and reclaim their power. I don’t offer quick fixes, predictions, or ego-driven work—only grounded, transformative results that actually stick.
Nathalie Bluemoon Flo
Nathalie Bluemoon Flo is an afro-indigenous writer, diviner, facilitator, espiritista and earthworker from the Bronx. They are a medicine woman, herbalist, and lover of the land, merging written medicines with ones born of her hands. flo has run Frequenci, her virtual botanica, since 2015. She is the mind behind Botanica De Palabras podcast and transmissions from the bluemoon. She hones interdisciplinary storytelling, tenderness, vision and raw earnest as tools of reconfiguring what it means to be a modern human from an ancestral world. You might find her reading in a queer cafe, catching the spirit on the dancefloor, or cackling one of her 24 strange laughs at the perfect tone to soothe your heart.
Sara Teresa Skolnick
Sara Teresa Skolnick is a first-generation, Ecuadorian-Lithuanian death doula and sound artist.
As the founder of White Horse Death Doula, she provides present and attuned spiritual, emotional, and logistical accompaniment at every threshold throughout the living and dying process. Sara specializes in honoring the crossroads of sound and death work, grounded in respect for ancestral veneration, bone-deep listening, and presence with seen and unseen worlds.
Her offerings include psychopomp services, end-of-life planning, life review & legacy projects, co-creation of ritual for the dying process, grief, and continued bonds, accompaniment & sitting vigil, celebration of life planning, sound healing, and more.Â
Sara gives infinite thanks to her teachers on this path, including Claudia Barfoot, Irma StarSpirit Turtle Woman, and Going with Grace’s End of Life Doula certification program.
Irka Mateo
Irka Mateo — Akutu — is a TaĂno elder, cultural and spiritual bearer, and ceremonialist rooted in the TaĂno and Afro-Indigenous traditions of Kiskeya. Her life is shaped by ancestral lineage, decades of research, and a calling to renew TaĂno spiritual memory in our time. For ten years, she served as the TaĂno Lead Teacher at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Her archival work in ceremonial music has been supported by the Grammy Foundation, preserved in the National General Archives of the Dominican Republic, and honored with Grammy album consideration.
Irka’s work moves through many channels — healing, ceremony, teachings, music, and ceramic art — each nourishing the other and carrying the voice and living memory of our ancestors. Her healing is guided by intuition and divination — an intimate dialogue with spirit . She offers shamanic divination, power animal retrieval, and pattern-breaking journeys to those called to explore their path of connection and restoration. Irka is currently welcome one-on-one clients to experience these practices in a personal, guided way.
Brandon Ruiz
Brandon Ruiz (he/him) is a Boricua community herbalist, farmer, educator and culture bearer based on the East Coast of Turtle Island (North America). He runs Yucayeke Farms, a farming and herbalism project dedicated to preserving Caribbean culture through food, plant medicine and storytelling. He is a writer, upcoming author and teaches for international conferences, herbal schools around the country and individual programs on Turtle Island and the Caribbean. His work aims to reconnect the Caribbean community to traditional practices through educational experiences, art and community, in and outside of the Caribbean.
Bianca Flores
Dr. Bianca Flores is a neuroscientist and card reader of Mexican descent, with roots in Apache and Comanche lineage. Much of her understanding of ancestral and metaphysical practice was passed down through her grandmother and parents — a living tradition that she holds alongside her academic training in neuroscience. She holds a PhD from Vanderbilt University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins. Her work invites healers and practitioners to trust what they've always known, with a physical understanding of how it works.
