Today we’d like to introduce you to Nikole Rosaria-Manieri.
Nikole, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Since I can remember, I’ve walked in the world with a sensitized, empathetic, and wonder-filled embrace. I had a need to make sense of, and to contribute to the healing of the fractured world I felt around me. I found refuge in writing, song, dance, nature, and spiritual devotion, with a deep curiosity about the imaginal worlds of my vivid dreamscape.
When I was 18-19, I delayed college study and spent time traveling in Bulgaria, the UK, and South Africa. The exposure to other lifeways and languages was exhilarating for me. I returned to my family in Ohio and in university studied Cultural Anthropology, Spanish and Communications. I worked in the campus Multicultural Center, developing educational programming that showcased diverse cultures from across the globe – music, cuisine, folklore, and wisdom traditions. I especially spent those years volunteering with and learning from the local Miami Valley Council for Native Americans. The Native Elders in this community gave me new understandings in how to relate to my dreams, my connection to Nature, and my social position in colonial white America. This, along with Anthropology gave me a cultural-historical lens to view social norms and constructs with a critical eye. My interest in healing and feminism found a home in classes such as Anthropology of Women’s Health, with immersive research in menstrual practices across cultures, across time. This was complimented by living stories told by Grandmothers of the Native traditional practices of this land here.
After graduation, I joined Americorps*VISTA with Ohio Campus Compact on Antioch College’s Campus in Yellow Springs, Ohio. My work there as a VISTA grew into employment with the Antioch College Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom (CSKC). With the CSKC, I was organizing educational programming in cultural humility, anti-racism, and community engagement. During my four years at Antioch, I was also studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in NYC to become a Holistic Health Coach. Again, a theme of cultural diversity education and health arts.
In 2008, I became a wife and a mother, and in my new family life, I efforted to apply the values I established in my studies through embodied lifeways. My son’s father and I were committed to a values-based, visionary experiment from the soil up – Growing food, medicinal plants, natural health, homebirth, attachment parenting, unschooling, alternative economics in community-based networks of mutual care. I also co-founded a women’s Red Tent healing circle space. This family container and women’s circle container would be my sustained dedicated effort for the next 12 years. These efforts in family and community – to live an embedded, reciprocal relationship with Place and community; to re-imagine and practice alternatives to colonial-capitalistic consumptive lifeways; to recover embodied knowing and heal my feminine soul – was supremely creative and exhausting, and it forged me into who I am now.
In 2019, I was called into my next layer of healing and personal soul retrieval, through unearthing more of my ancestral stories, and engaging in international travel again. I deepened my focus on my studies in the traditional music of my Sicilian family, the Tarantellas. A community music tradition that includes the tambourine, voice, dance, and circle, with healing and devotional roots. Immersing myself in this meant diving into Mediterranean feminist history, archaeology, myth, and family stories. In 2022, I returned for the first time to Sicily and found my second home! I felt the land embrace me in a way that words could never explain. In 2022, I also started working for Alliance for the Earth, a global, sacred activism nonprofit. The work included facilitating global, virtual practice groups in meditation and council, organizing pilgrimage to different international sites, and connecting them like a web across Mother Earth. Again, a theme of cultural exchange and healing arts.
Today, after having now finished my Master’s degree in Applied Ethnomusicology and Decolonial Arts Praxis, I dedicate myself to facilitating community-based practice spaces for transformative healing and creativity, and also offer individualized soul-centered coaching. I actively tend my rooted belonging here on this land in Springfield, Ohio and also in Sicily, through water prayers, plant medicine, song, and poetic dreaming. I’m dedicated to my family and as a Mother and Auntie, uplifting the next generations in these turbulent times!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Some of my greatest struggles have been the disappointment and discouragement I experience when my vision and ideals are so far ahead of what I myself and my collaborations are actually capable of. I’ve had to learn to find acceptance, to make hard choices when I need to let something go, and to authentically pace the efforts based in the reality of where and who we are in this moment. There is no skipping ahead to the beauty of the vision. Working towards a vision, the process of getting from here to there, is inherently a transformative process and must be arrived at honestly. This takes true presence with what is, persistent tending of what is becoming. and kindness towards how vulnerable it is to risk the attempt, over and over again. In midlife now, I am cultivating capacity for authentic, steady, and truly generational work. I will only get so far in my lifetime.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Just last month I finished my Master’s degree in Applied Ethnomusicology and Decolonial Arts Praxis. I see myself as an arts-based educator and healing arts practitioner. I dedicate myself to facilitating community-based practice spaces for transformative healing and creativity. For instance, I facilitate community music spaces in the oral tradition. All cultures across time have engaged the sacred technology of rhythm, movement, song in circle. It’s a timeless cultural (and neurobiological) technology, that can help us move and transmute bound up tensions, find our voice, calm our nerves, and find our place of belonging in the circle.
Along with community music practice, I also work with individuals one-on-one, offering soul-centered support through transformative change through a program I call Chrysalis.
In regard to my Ancestral music practice, I teach traditional Southern Italian &Sicilian drum, song and dance, known as the Tarantellas. I offer online lessons mostly to descendants of the Southern Italian & Sicilian diaspora in the US. We have a music learning collective called ‘Macaroni Music’, and get together for Festas around the calendar year. I take seriously what it means to respectfully engage cultural stewardship of this deeply rooted and evolving tradition.
As a whole, I lead spaces with a compassionate, critical consciousness of how systemic oppression impacts individuals in the circle differently. I believe collective healing and bridge-building across difference requires us to turn to face difficult histories together. What we call ‘history’ is a stream of living memory alive within us, and we have the power to be instruments for repair here and now when difficult moments arise. Tending to this healing now is how we make room for a future with new possibilities, disrupting harmful patterns. My heartfelt desire for my life is to help make way for these possible futures where everyone can flourish.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
My mom, who has always been at my back and by my side, seeing me, supporting me, believing in me.
Gabriel, my son, for bringing me to the Waters, and for helping me find the quiet place in myself where calm communion with the world around me is possible. I cherish this place we meet in together.
Marybeth Wolf, Laurie Dreamspinner, and Amy Burkett, my Red Tent Co-leads helped me learn trauma-informed somatics, horizontal leadership, group agreements for safety in healing spaces, feminist empowerment, how to build community care networks, and support for natural homebirth and attachment parenting, and how to raise wise and kind children respectfully.
Andrew Manieri, my co-parent, and co-creator in the earth-tending, creatively-driven, values-based life. Your vision, authentic dedication and the poetics of your determination have always inspired me.
Guy Jones has been an important Native Elder, helping me form a critical consciousness, beginning when I was 18, and beyond.
Dr. G and Dr, Kinzer at Antioch University Self-Design. For helping me find language for my ‘Living Praxis’, and for seeing me and encouraging me to keep going.
Cynthia Jurs, Rick Jansen, and Rasul Bravo at Alliance for the Earth for the depth of our transformative healing work together across latitudes.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mandorlahive.net
