Overview: From my perspective, participating in culturally attuned ceremony is one wing of the bird of solidarity. The other wing is an active commitment to being in right relations, based on unity and support for all Peoples. My submission is a radical invitation to reconnect to a reciprocal engagement with all living things, by exploring the intact land-based practices of the Latvians, who have survived over 800 years of occupation.

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It was many years ago, in Turaida, Latvia, with my fourteen-year-old daughter at my side, that I saw my first Latvian healer. She was giving cleansing treatments with a whisk of birch or oak branches to a long line of people waiting their turn, patient in a way I recognized in my own bones. Each person sat before her, and she whisked over their bodies as though clearing dust from their shoulders. I recognized the movement. I had participated in limpias, part of the curanderismo healing traditions of Mexico and Central America, and something in me unlocked. I remember the feeling of my heart being pulled from my chest — that particular ache of a body recognizing something the mind hasn’t caught up to yet. My daughter noticed it too — she got scared and told me she was going to call her father. I think she sensed, in that moment, that something in me might be strong enough to distract me from my role as her mother.

I came to my senses before I could run toward this unsuspecting woman. The discipline of a mother — of learning to wait to meet your own needs — pulled me back. But I told myself I would find a way, even if it took a long time. I carried that promise quietly, the way you carry something you aren’t ready to say out loud yet.

I am proud, and a little tender, to share that now, 10 years later, I am finally there — not visiting anymore, but training as a practitioner of this ancient tradition, under the direct guidance of my teachers, Anrijs and Aija.

I want to name the privilege plainly: I have the financial resources and the freedom to return to my motherlands, and I do not take that lightly. Nor do I take lightly what the Latvians have done to protect their cultural traditions against long odds. 

Why a sauna belongs in solidarity work

I want to say plainly why I’m bringing this story to you here, in this particular company. For years, my work has lived in matriarchal and Indigenous-led governance spaces — supporting the transition from hierarchical to relational models, following Native leadership rather than directing it, showing up as a guest and a settler on Turtle Island who tries to fund, follow, and remove obstacles rather than take up the front of the room. I believed, for a long time, that this work was purely outward-facing — that my job was to listen, to defer, to not center myself.

What I didn’t understand until I stood in front of that healer in Turaida is that I could not keep showing up empty-handed. Solidarity asks something more of us than good intentions and correct positioning. It asks us to bring our own ground. Recovering the ceremonies of my own lineage — the ones that were nearly lost to my own family, the ones I had to travel back across an ocean to relearn from Anrijs and Aija — has been the difference between assigned authority and recognized authority. No one can hand me a place inside someone else’s tradition. But my own, however faint the thread had become, was always mine to pick back up.

Learning the elements

This year, in 2026, I had the opportunity to deepen my practice with Anrijs and Aija over seven days in Gulbene, Latvia. Under their watch, I learned alongside my daughter, her friend, and others about the element of steam, gars, the same word as “spirit” — the conversion of water, air, and heat, and the alchemy that happens when it meets the human body. In the early days, my face screwed up with tension, trying so hard to be a good student, to get it right, to be worthy of what Anrijs and Aija were entrusting to me. By the end, I got out of my head and let my body do what it already knows how to do. Somewhere in those seven days, I stopped feeling like a guest borrowing someone else’s knowledge and started feeling like an apprentice of the steam, being welcomed by the gars, slowly and deliberately, into a lineage.

Across those days, Aija wove in the feminine — the sacred teachings of what it means to be a woman, the purpose of the womb, and how we invoke both tenderness and firmness in our practice, in our bodies, and with each other. It was a deeply enriching experience — the simplicity of a land that has everything life requires, and the ritual of the sauna, whether at home or in the community saunas every Saturday. A place to return to the womb. A place to return to community. A place to show up with other human beings, in humility; babies in the womb.

The grief underneath the grounding

I don’t think I can tell this story honestly without naming the grief in it. Recovering a lineage means admitting how much was let go of, or taken, or simply not passed down — by war, by displacement, by the slow erasure that happens when a family spends generations trying to assimilate into somewhere new. Standing in that line in Turaida, what moved through me first wasn’t curiosity. It was grief, and underneath the grief, recognition: my body had been carrying an absence I didn’t have a name for.

That grief turned out to be necessary work, not a detour from my solidarity work but a condition of it. It is very different to enter Indigenous-led spaces from a place of rootedness than from a place of hunger. When I am ungrounded in my own lineage, I have watched myself reach for belonging in places that were never mine to reach into — a kind of quiet extraction dressed up as devotion. Doing my own ancestral recovery, grief and all, has been how I learn to show up in relationship instead: present, accountable, and not looking to anyone else’s tradition to fill what only my own could.

Bringing it home

I am grateful that my teachers speak English, which accelerated my learning far beyond what my two years of Latvian and Google Translate could offer. I am grateful, too, to my daughter, for going with me again — both as companion and accountability partner. Her commitment meant I had to go. I might have gone alone eventually, but her company softened the profound awkwardness and vulnerability of delivering myself back to the land.

I continue to bring Anrijs and Aija’s teachings into our own space — a ten-year-old Costco sauna my husband and I bought on sale one January, long ago. We are tenderly building our own pirts. What I love most is how basic these practices are, at their root. As my Buddhist father would say: chop wood, carry water. Collecting plants for teas, salts, and the whisk. Traveling respectfully into the countryside to gather branches. Preparing my body. Decorating the interior of the sacred space. Filling the buckets. Washing the sauna after. All of it has become sacred to me — even the parts of my brain trained to be a high-performing, intense lawyer are dissolving their old compartments, relocating into the interconnectedness of our well-being, leaning into a technology far older and wiser than any book written by a disconnected human.

And here is the part I am proudest of. Over the last ten years that I have been a practitioner, I have had the honor of offering this practice — this small, steaming, ordinary-sacred thing — to my Indigenous and Native relations, to friends carrying non-European lineages of their own, and to fellow people of European descent still finding their way back, as I am. Each time, it has felt like the same exchange in a different key: not me teaching anyone what their own ancestors already know better than I do, but me finally having something of my own to bring to the fire. Reciprocity requires two full hands. This is how I am learning to fill mine.

Thanks to those who supported this trip — through contributions to our circles, to my teachers Anrijs and Aija, and to the aunties, elders, advisors, and mentors who have helped me find my way home. I don’t want to hold this practice alone, and I don’t think I’m meant to. We hope to complete our home pirts this winter, and we look forward to welcoming all — those who are called to join us in our community space — into the great remembering that is available to all of us, no matter our lineage, and no matter where we come from.

The work of composting what was inherited, rather than denying it, is what makes room for something more whole to grow. I didn’t have that language when I stood in line in Turaida many years ago. I only had the ache. But I recognize the ground they’re describing. I have been standing in it, barefoot, this whole time.

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