The Village Aunties
Shea Bodine
I’m a mother, earth-praiser, song-holder, and community tender. My devotion is to helping youth access their innate wholeness, through connection to nature and holistic orientation to the scope of human emotion. For the past decade, I’ve served youth and families as a mentor and guide through a wide range of offerings—from nature-based education and one-on-one emotional-resilience coaching with Wise Mind Educational Services, to sacred space-holding for mothers and now rites-of-passage mentorship. The spaces I tend, offer meaningful connection with soul, nature, ritual, healing, and creative expression.
After working with youth and families for over a decade, and being a parent myself, I hold a flame to a vision that we can rebuild culture to honor and hold youth through their most important transitions in life, and that families are not left to tend that on their own, particularly in such disconnect times. We honor that there are many in-tact cultures offering village-style support to families and youth at these thresholds, and we also honor that many of us come from lineages that have been disconnected from that.
I hold a bilingual K–2 teaching license and have completed various somatic, trauma-informed, youth-yoga, and grief training, as well as the Rites of Passage Guide Training with EarthPath Education. I live in Oregon with my two sons and carry a steady heart-prayer for a more connected and healed world.
I'm a somatic psychotherapist (pre-licensed), storyteller, musician, and mindfulness teacher. My work weaves together training in Unified Mindfulness, Voice Dialogue Parts Work, Somatic Experiencing, and Rites of Passage Council along with two years living and training at a Zen Buddhist monastery. I am also a student of the Diamond Approach, a path of spiritual inquiry and embodied realization.
All of these threads meet in the spaces I tend—places of deep listening, creative emergence, and soul connection.
I’m lit by the inner flame of curiosity to know and love myself and the world beyond the stories of limitation and fear. The heat of this love is what brings me into this offering space. There is great joy in my being when I can support another human to see, feel, or know what hasn’t been available before—to taste the satisfaction of greater freedom, love, and creativity.
This flame was significantly stoked during my time of monastic Zen practice, where I learned to sit in the heat of myself without getting burned. There I began to plumb the depths of the present moment, and I bring that same quality of mindful presence to my group facilitation work.
The flame also shows up as a lifelong love of theater and the expressive play of the many “selves” that live within us. Through Voice Dialogue and somatic inquiry, I help these inner characters find their voice and place in the greater mandala of awareness, where contradiction can soften into wholeness.
Magnolia Medlin
We carry a shared devotion to re-member the sacred task of raising youth in community.
To be a Village Auntie is to walk beside, to tend the fire of curiosity, and to model the courage it takes to be human.
We hold that every girl and teen already contains the wisdom she needs — our role is to help her trust it.