A Bridge to the Future 

My Story

Healer, artist, scientist, educator, and guide, I use ancient wisdom and contemporary science to help people heal personal, intergenerational, and ancestral wounds from White-supremacy programming and colonization. I work with individuals, organizations, and companies. Included in my program is a curriculum and practices to guide people to identify, track, and heal internalized White-supremacy constructs that get passed down through intergenerational conditioning and epigenetic trauma. My work also includes plant-medicine prep and integration support.

I was born Tonya Kafi Rawlings. I was born a slave. A slave to thoughts that I thought, but that weren’t mine - thoughts created from the collective white supremacy consciousness. My parents gave me the name Kafi as a point of liberation. A point of remembrance - an African name hidden between a giant fairy queen and the mark of a slave. A hidden seed of freedom planted in the fertilizer of white supremacy. These were the nutrients that gave rise to who I was. I existed at the intersection of my personal epigenetics, ancestral trauma, subconscious programming, conscious mind, and the  collective conscious groove of white supremacy. 

Though my parents were consciously aware of and fighting against the white supremacy energetic outside of our home, assimilation kept white supremacy alive in my parent’s house and keeps it in the homes of many people of color in this country. We bring it into our homes and we make our nests with it. It has crept into our psyches masked with aliases. Sometimes it bears the name success, sometimes education, sometimes patriotism, sometimes manifest destiny. It fed me through commercials and TV programming, social media, news and most media forms, and education. It can masquerade as sovereignty as it imprisons the heart and mind. I mistook assimilation’s mask of service-to-self individualism for real sovereignty. In this case, I was still a slave to a master that was not my own. This was my life’s fractal pattern. Its self-similar pattern is present in every aspect, every scale of my life.

Assimilation kept me from my “knowing” of who I was so much so that I doubted my own dreams as impossible or trivial or one’s that had to be deferred. Assimilation kept me on the plantation, the plantation in my mind, the plantation that was mirrored by my everyday reality. It is the tool that imprisoned my parents and my parents parents and my parents parents parents, and it is the tool that I’m alchemizing into the gateway to my freedom.

Within my assimilation, I struggled to be free to define my own thoughts and my own reality. I found myself looking to find myself among the pages of J.Crew, Banana Republic, and Benetton catalogues even when my spirit craved the uniform of a revolutionary. My assimilated self decided that I would dismantle the system from the inside - a trick that kept me assimilated, that kept me literally on the plantation as I attended private school after private school that were literally on plantation lands. My deep knowing kept nagging at me to pay attention, but my colonized mind kept me from deeply exploring this aggravation.

I spent many years deep in the trenches of my colonized mind working as a scientist and science educator. I graduated from Cornell University cum laude in Biological Sciences, went onto University of Maryland for my Ph.D in Marine Ecology and Biotechnology, and then spent my postdoctoral fellowship in a medical lab at Stanford University, studying the bacteria that causes human cholera. Contemporary science’s arrogance and underlying racism nagged at me. So, I left benchtop science for education, spending almost 20 years teaching science to undergraduates, high school, and middle school students. This continued dissonance between my assimilated self and my knowing led me to the most powerful moment in my life - the catalyst to my liberation. 

Then my whole life changed after a powerful, two week Ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, pivoting me from my mind to the Heart. During this time, I began to heal my ancestral lineage, epigenetics, and personal traumas. Peru brought my awakening on like a tidal wave of light. It illuminated what I couldn't see, the depths of despair, shame, and anguish. It doctored my cells and provided me with a homecoming back to my body. It was a chance to move from my suffering to wellness. It was an invitation to cultivate inner peace, deep self-love, compassion, forgiveness, and self-mastery. Ayahuasca showed me how every moment in my life has been cultivated for my service to all beings and Mother Earth. I was compelled to leave formal teaching to create a program to help people move out of their colonized minds into the wisdom of the Heart. Along this journey, I’ve become a student of ancient Vedic Yoga as well as other ancient and indigenous wisdom streams. All of this, my experiences with plant medicine, wisdom traditions, science, and teaching have informed the medicine that I share with you. I am grateful to be in ceremony with you and in service of your healing and wellness.