About
AshEL
A lifelong student of ritual, relationship, and resonance.
Who I Am
A musician, ceremonialist, educator, researcher, and community organizer — exploring how ritual, performance, sound, contemplative practice, and relationship contribute to individual and collective transformation.
The work moves between scholarship and ceremony, ancestral wisdom and contemporary inquiry — inviting practices that cultivate deeper relationships with ourselves, one another, the Earth, and the unseen.
What Guides My Work
My work is rooted in a simple question.
How do shifts in consciousness, ritual, sound, and relationship participate in transforming not only people, but the communities and worlds we inhabit?
This inquiry has grown through decades of artistic practice, community organizing, contemplative traditions, and Indigenous learning — and is now being further developed through doctoral research in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
It has become the living framework I call Elemental Activism.
A Life in Practice
Places, teachers, thresholds.
A lifelong practice, unfolding across places, teachers, and questions.
A city of music, movement, and contradiction. My first teachers were the streets, the church choirs, and the sound of a family finding its way.
I studied how sound moves the mind — and how the mind moves the body. The instruments in my hands began asking questions the textbooks could not answer.
A quieter classroom. I learned that consciousness is not a private possession but a shared field — and that psychology, at its edge, becomes ceremony.
The Sacred Valley taught me to sit before I spoke. Elders offered the reminder I keep returning to: the land is a relative, not a resource.
Songs became ceremonies. Ceremonies became songs. The microphone and the medicine circle turned out to be the same room, entered through different doors.
Working alongside young people in Oakland, I learned that culture is the classroom — and that the most durable education happens through relationship.
Climate is not only a crisis of carbon. It is a crisis of imagination. I helped a generation find their voice inside the largest story of our time.
Circles inside classrooms. Children practicing the skills adults forget — how to listen, how to disagree, how to return to each other.
Standing with unhoused neighbors in West Oakland taught me that ceremony is only meaningful when it makes room for the people the world forgets.
Co-founding Esphera let the threads gather — food, medicine, ceremony, story, and community — into a single living body of practice.
Returning to the university, this time as a researcher, to give language and rigor to the practices that have been shaping me for decades.
The framework I now tend — Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Aether — a language for the way ritual, relationship, and resonance participate in transformation.
Today
Today my work lives through several interconnected expressions.
As a researcher, I continue developing Elemental Activism as a living framework. As Co-Founder and Co-Director of Esphera, I help cultivate initiatives supporting healing, ceremony, storytelling, and community regeneration. As an artist and facilitator, I create experiences where people gather to practice, listen, create, and remember together.
Looking Forward
We are living through a profound cultural transition.
The challenges before us invite not only new technologies and new policies, but new ways of relating — to ourselves, one another, the Earth, and the more-than-human world.
My hope is to continue creating spaces where those relationships can be practiced — through music, ritual, research, education, and community.
In closing
The body is where all relationships are practiced.
My life has been less a search for answers than a lifelong practice of learning how to listen — through music, ritual, relationship, community, and the living world.