Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. She uses the power of story to address physical, emotional, and spiritual crises.

She has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times? She teaches writing and trains and initiates healers.

She is also a breast cancer survivor. “Story”, she says, “is a form of knowing and healing” and the “organizing principle of our lives.”

In her words… "To follow story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is a living story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making."

She conducts training groups on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions. One focus is on uniting Western medical ways with indigenous medicine traditions.

With her husband, writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, she has introduced the concept of Daré, meaning Council, to North America.

The Topanga Daré relies on Council, alliance with Spirit and the natural world, ancestor work, indigenous and wisdom traditions and teachings, music healing, dream telling, divination, kinship, and story telling to achieve personal transformation, community healing and social change.

She is the author of many books, including most recently, the novel Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief Into Vision: A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces; A Sabbath Among the Ruins; Looking for the Faces of God and Writing For Your Life.

In these books, and in her work every day, Deena helps people wake up and ask, “What is Spirit asking of us?”

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