Our Team

Irene Bailey: Founder & Director, Facilitator, Forest Therapy Guide

Irene (she/her) is honored to design and facilitate nature connection offerings to support the remembering that we are intimately and inseparably connected to all life. Over the past 20 years, Irene has worked with numerous environmental and sustainability education programs as an educator, leader, mentor, and wilderness guide. She holds a MS in Leadership for Sustainability Education from Portland State University and is a certified Forest Therapy Guide with The Association for Nature and Forest Therapy. Irene trained with the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies as a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain and has been exploring meditation and body based spiritual practices for nearly a decade. Her foundation for sharing her gifts with the world is rooted in gratitude, connection, joy, and compassion.

Irene’s life journey has led her to support humans to flourish and re-discover their interconnectedness, self-worth, and sense of belonging so they can show up for themselves, and in turn for all life. She believes wholeheartedly in the transformation and deep healing that is possible when we allow the more than human world to be a wise teacher and cultivate a felt sense of interbeing. Irene supports the creation of safer spaces in the natural world so that others can get the healing and nourishment they deserve to live well.

Irene calls the Oregon coast home where she enjoys hiking, hanging out with big trees, surfing, practicing meditation, spending time in community, foraging and taking romps with her partner and pup. She brings her whole self to this work for the benefit of all beings.

Heather Burns: Facilitator, Forest Therapy Guide

Dr. Heather Burns (she/her) is the director of Alderroot Healing and Renewal, where she is a  holistic healing guide and intuitive mentor. She designs transformative experiences that invite whole person learning and healing, connecting people to their deepest selves, to each other, and to the living earth in meaningful ways. Heather holds space for reconnecting to ways of being that honor trust, wisdom, intuition, embodiment, joy, rest, and groundedness.

Heather has been a leader and tenured professor in higher education for many years and has taught and published extensively on many topics including: sustainability education, collaborative leadership, holistic self-care, self-compassion, eco-spiritual & transformative teaching and learning, ecological design, and deep ecology. Her new book, published in 2024, is Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Designing and facilitating eco-spiritual learning. Heather is also a Forest Therapy Guide, a Permaculture Designer, a Reiki Master and Tarot reader who enjoys supporting healing through intuition, energy work, and invitations that connect us to our more than human kin.

Misako Yamamoto: Facilitator, Traditional East Asian Medicine, Qigong

Misako’s grandparents and great grandparents were imprisoned at Tule Lake internment camp in northern California for two years during WW2; Her mother was born there in 1945.  She is the daughter of an “issei” or first generation Japanese immigrant on her father’s side; she was born in Japan and raised in Portland, Oregon. 

Misako grew up bilingual and bicultural. Navigating two cultures taught her to hold space for more than one perspective while giving her the freedom to create her own, continually evolving identity as a Japanese American-healer-mystic-visionary-athlete-artist.

As a practitioner of Traditional East Asian Medicine (TEAM) for 16 years, Misako has studied and incorporated the 4 foundations of this holistic medicine: Acupuncture, herbology, bodywork therapies, and Qigong/internal cultivation exercises into her private practice and daily life.  

Weaving in a lifelong passion as an athlete (gymnastics, trail running, rock climbing, Stand Up Paddle racing, surfing), Misako is called to stand at the intersection of fitness, ethnicity/race, traditional healing practices, and empowerment of the feminine as we transition into the next stage of our collective healing work.

Josephine Linden: Facilitator

Jo is an educator, facilitator, writer, meditation teacher, and naturalist who has been working with diverse groups for over a decade. She crafts experiences and creates spaces that meet the deep human need for connection and belonging and that help to heal the wounds of disconnection that are so pervasive in our world. She holds a Master’s of Science in Education and has studied impacts of and responses to developmental trauma through Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model. Jo trained with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach and is a certified mindfulness meditation teacher. Jo brings empathy, authenticity, and play to the brutal and beautiful work of being human together during these times.

Kate Fox: Surf & Health Coach

With a love of all things water Kate began competitive swimming at age 5 and her first job was as a lifeguard/ swim instructor. Graduating college with a degree in Marine Conservation and outdoor education, she moved to Hawaii and learned to surf. Kate has 15 years surf experience riding a wide variety of boards and waves. She is an ISA certified surf instructor and certified health coach with years of experience in both. 

Dancing, gardening, whole food alchemy, surf travel, and personal development are some of her other passions. Kate currently resides in Southern Oregon with her amazing daughter Madeleine and their tiny dog Nico. She is excited to be sharing her love of surf and healthy living, and desires to see us all living our most fulfilling lives.

Ceci Orozco: Mindfulness & Yoga

Ceci (she/her/Ella) was born and raised in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. She moved to Portland, OR in 2015. For Ceci, activating and connecting with her body through movement embodiment practices has allowed her to be with the ever-expansive experience of the self and to plug herself back to Source. As a facilitator of mindfulness and yoga-movement practices, Ceci seeks to create a welcoming, trauma-healing space for students to explore—with their full selves—the multiple benefits of these practices. Ceci holds a (200 hr) yoga instructor certification, (300 hr) Ayurvedic Clinical Foundations, and is a certified Postpartum Doula offering postpartum care rituals. She’s in the second year of her Master’s degree in Sustainability Education and Leadership at Portland State University. Outside of all these commitments and passions, Ceci currently teaches bilingual (Spanish-English) garden and food-based lessons at Lent School and prenatal yoga at The Bhakti Center. When she’s not in the classrooms, the garden, or at the studio teaching, you can find her and her family exploring the great outdoors of the PNW and tending to her self-care practices. 

Heidi Schmidgall: Facilitator & Somatics Coach

Heidi is drawn to facilitate the work of Earth Connection, Embodying Adventure and Introspection because of the healing, insight, and empowerment they have provided her. She believes all beings are created equal and worthy of love and that with adequate care and resources they can live joyful lives. The passions that weave throughout her life include place-based learning, yoga, adventures that get her deep in the wilderness (skiing, kayaking, climbing), community engagement, and personal empowerment work.

Heidi has worked in environmental and adventure-based programming for over a decade, with extensive experience facilitating groups on social-emotional learning and group development. She holds a MS in Leadership for Sustainability Education from Portland State University, which infused her leadership style with connection and purpose. She received a Mindfulness Teacher Training Certificate from Peace in Schools and is a certified Yoga Teacher. She integrates these trainings with the wisdom of Mother Earth-her greatest teacher.  

Heidi is mama to her daughter, Lazulynne Sky and son, Abie Warren. She finds herself in deep reverence to the birthing process and the sacrifice mamas make to create life. She offers the question: What would the state of our world be if ALL beings felt a sense of love and belonging in their first few years of life?

Kelly Potts: Pro-Surfer & Mentor

Kelly Potts’ exuberance for life can be contagious -- all thanks to her life-long participation in sports. As a teen she formed a passionate relationship with nature when she took up surfing, marrying sport with the outdoors, and since then has centered her life around adventure and wave hunting. It is with no surprise that Kelly decided to share the great gifts she gained through surfing with her Maui community by providing free surfing clinics and retreats for indigenous families in the Pacific Northwest.

Khalila Gillett: Meditation & Yoga

Khalila (she/ they) is a meditation and yoga teacher with 20+ years of personal practice. Introduced to yoga and meditation in her teen years, she has attended many silent meditation retreats and several month-long retreats. Her background includes over a decade as a wilderness educator leading multi-day expeditions for a variety of educational organizations, as well as teaching interdisciplinary curriculum in formal classroom settings and beyond. She holds a B.A. in Adventure-based Environmental Education from Prescott College and over 500 hr Yoga Teacher Training hours. Khalila teaches meditation retreats for all ages through Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme) in both residential settings and remote wilderness environments. Her teaching is grounded in nature awareness and connection, mindfulness meditation as a means for insight, care, and well-being, and social justice praxis that recognizes our interdependence and collective need for freedom.

Amita Swadhin: Healer & Organizer

Amita (they/them) is a nationally-recognized activist who has learned to alchemize their wounds as a survivor of childhood rape by their father into fuel for their work to create a world without child sexual abuse, a world beyond rape culture. They identify as a non-binary, queer, femme woman of color (their parents are immigrants from India). For the past twenty years, they have been a storyteller, organizer and healer who has shared their work in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on stages in front of thousands of policymakers and advocates, and in countless healing circles in high school classrooms and grassroots social justice organizations. Amita’s commitment is to bring an intersectional approach into work to heal and end sexual trauma by focusing on the collective, cultural and institutional nature of rape culture that affects us all, whether or not we have been personally violated. They are the Director of Mirror Memoirs, a national storytelling and organizing project centering the healing and leadership of LGBTQ+ people of color who survived child sexual abuse, and are in the process of completing a 200 hour yoga teacher training course. Amita lives in Los Angeles with their partner Patricio and pitbull pup, Ginkgo.

Anna Greenberg: Kayaking / Backpacking Guide & Chef

Anna grew up in Washington, DC but comes from a large California family and has spent every summer of her life exploring her beloved Sierra Nevada. Between childhood holidays seeking alpine lakes and a few formative years at a nature awareness camp in West Virginia, she developed a passion for wild and beautiful places, outdoor adventure, and conservation. After completing her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies, she was burning to adventure and set off on a “stint” of traveling and seasonal work. That stint turned into a decade of exploring and guiding in the great outdoors, including leading canoe expeditions on desert rivers, teaching kids to snorkel and kayak on Catalina Island, and working with underserved teens in the Sierra Nevada. Interested in all things having to do with healthy communities, including clean air and water, connection to nature, food access, sustainable transportation, Anna decided to return to school in 2017 for a masters degree in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Oregon. This new chapter has continued to open her mind as to how people shape and are shaped by their environments. These years have also given her ample opportunity to explore the Pacific Northwest, including kayak guiding in the San Juan Islands and innumerable exploratory missions in this wonderful landscape. When not working, Anna tries to spend as much time as possible outdoors, traveling, and connecting with friends and family. Passionate about sustainable living, she has studied, resided in, and helped build a number of natural buildings and eco-communities. She also enjoys cooking, art, running, costume parties, and singing with her band, Cactus Alert.