Emma Kelzenberg
I am here as a Midwife of the Spirit - to tend to the thresholds each of us pass through in our unique experiences of embodiment. I orient to the simplicity of a wholesome, capitavting life, deeply immersed in the elements and the plants, exploration of the wild feminine and continual rebirth.
I facilitate the Spiritual rites of birth, death, marriage, purification, plant attunement, plant ceremony, body prayer, healing, among other ceremonies and rites as they occur. My interest and inspiration in these thresholds is to return to the slow pulse of the Earth. The speed in which she turns is the speed in which we heal, birth, die and rebirth. When space is held in this way for someone, their process has the opportunity to be experienced fully as designed in this incredible human experience.
I am an animist, believing that everything has perspective, everything has Spirit. The plants and the elements are just as much participants in this experience as any of us. They are us, they are our ancestors, and we are theirs. You will hear me speak of them as living entities, as though they have personality. I believe that magic occurs in animism, and practice depth of relationship in this way.
The work I do is a reclamation of the ways of connection and attunement with the plants, our own bodies, the elements and with nature that have been often been lost or overlooked in a fast-paced way of living. It has been my journey in the past decade to experience this reclamation firsthand, through my own initiations back into the wild. Through deep study with the plants and with the land, I am able to hold others' transformation from lived experience and integrity.
My work is sovereign in that I intentionally do not work under any regulating or governing institutions or agencies. I am fully in the interest of healing and in relationship with the plants, Spirit, and every beloved I encounter.
My story...
I grew up in a small, southern Minnesota town. I was a mystic, creative, joyful child. I remember feeling and sensing spirits from a young age, quite aware of energies around me and unable to vocalize my experiences. I always had a sense of being curiously different than most, trying hard to like what others liked and learning to people please the world around me in an attempt to fit in or somehow be the same as those around me. I had a deep longing to be chosen for a unique calling, a hero's journey. I remember as a young child saying I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, but knowing inside it wasn't a medical doctor. I secretly idolized figures like Rafiki and Pocahontas' Grandmother, the wise ones and Medicine people (despite having no exposure to these types of people in real life). I remember thinking about the vast rainforest (never having been there!) and having an understanding of the depth of medicine that existed on the Earth.
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I attended Catholic elementary, middle and high school, learning of the church through obedience, conviction and ideology. My family of origin took these teachings seriously, the elders in my life reading, studying and speaking in a scholarly way. My early experiences learning the bible and the catechism built a foundation of faith within me that I now understand as a pivotal part of my initiations into the Spirit realms. I learned by example what a life of devotion meant, which has always been second nature to me. It is who I am.
Through these formative years, I navigated concepts within my family home of complex mental health, trauma, neurodivergence and abuse. From a young age, I learned compassionate caretaking through life experience. As an adult, I would later explore my upbringing through a wider lens. I explored plant medicine, therapy, and various methods of somatic healing to heal from my earlier days, all while cultivating depth of understanding and empathic capacity through the things I had experienced as a young child.
In my high school years, I felt a deep magnetism in my body to be with Lake Superior. I sifted through the years with anticipation to be in the presence of this great water. After graduation, I moved to Duluth to expand and set this calling into motion. Almost immediately upon entering the world as a young adult on my own, my belief system all but dissolved. I was seeking nothing but myself.
These hazy college years were an exploration of freedom and retrieval of the parts of self I buried so deeply. They were carefree and chaotic, exploring altered states of consciousness, joy, expansion and depth in new ways. During this time, my familial unit dissolved as well. The upheaval was necessary, difficult and vastly liberating. I found solace in my community of soul-level friends, my hobbies, my freedom and my new-found self-worth and love of life. I met my husband and life companion in 2012, beginning my life studies in Sacred Union and the creational blueprint.
After college I worked as a child counselor at a diagnostic clinical mental health facility. I experienced life through the eyes of our most vulnerable population. Through the years in this job, it became clear to me that I was not designed for this type of work, and I believed the children deserved to be served in a greater way. Again, I felt a deeper calling within. I knew healing existed, and at this point, I was determined to find it.
In 2015, I followed my life-long dream to leave Minnesota. My husband and I moved West to Colorado, where we enjoyed newly-found space and re-created ourselves in a new place. I spent the first year studying Reiki with Carie Cagnina and The Reiki Project. I immersed in the energies of a new way and took in the mountains and as much live music as I could! Shortly after that, I found my next teacher, where I began to learn the basics of ceremony, Spirit and ancestral medicine. Nataline and her community at Strawberry Moon embraced my youth and naivety, making space for my exploration of what it mean to be on a mystic path, teaching me important lessons on inclusion, accessibility, and strength.
After a few years, we bought a home in the mountains and thus began my true initiation back to the wild. Our home was small and quiet. We were spared the noise and artificial lights of the city, and rewired ourselves to the sounds of the trees and the birds. My body decompressed from life in a city and I grew to hear within the silence. My experience quickly shifted to a different layer of experiencing. I could hear the electrical grid. I could feel the electricity in the walls. It was a dissolution of many parts of self. It was a deep hermitude, where my sensitivies expanded greatly. My ability to find easy and simple work was no longer and I released my career, knowing not what lied ahead, only that I was where I needed to be. I slowly descended through the layers of myself, releasing stories and even much of my path thus far.
In January 2020, I gave birth to my Son; a threshold that shifted my track forever. He is my greatest teacher and the joy of my life. My son's energy and the learning curve involved with becoming his Mother catapulted me onto my path of healing and facilitation. I needed it in a different way now. There was no going back.
Later that year, my beloved friend and Medicine Woman, Eliza Maora, offered me a place in her school, Song of Sophia. At the time I was a new mother and quite lost in a world changing and adapting as a new and massively fracturing sickness descended upon it. Eliza’s medicine came forward in important and Divine timing. It was magic in it's purest form. In a moment, I answered the call I had been sensing my entire life. The next 2.5 years spent in study under Eliza were a threshold of unwinding, of rebirthing, of death and of becoming. My studies included birth doula work, death doula work, ceremonial healing, plant relationship, womb-wise attunement,Sophianic Wave bodywork, elemental healing, sisterhood, Sacred Union, Mother healing, and so much more. Each pillar was an opportunity to say "yes." To go deeper, to stay the course. It was deeply challenging and exponentially rewarding.
I owe my dedication to the plants, to my medicine and to accepting my calling fully and truthfully to Eliza. This was the missing piece I had felt all along. Eliza saw me before I ever did. She saw me as a wise, capable, medicine keeper and lovingly held my hand as I descended further into the fragmented parts of myself I could not access, the returning me time and again to what is real and true. It was through this journey that I was able to gather and restore the parts of myself necessary to answer my life's calling. It is an honor to practice within Eliza’s lineage as a pilgrim of Song of Sophia as a Ceremonial Healing Practitioner carrying the lineage of the Sophianic Wave.
In 2023, after my initial studies and practicum with Song of Sophia were complete, my family returned to Duluth, Minnesota. Once again, the Great Lake Superior called me back home. We arrived with greater and wider needs and capacities. It is my greatest privilege to bring the medicine I've learned and cultivated back to Duluth -- back to Lake Superior, back to the land, and to those who would be best served by my practice.
Education and Experience
January 2021-July 2023
March 2021
September 2016-March 2020
February 2024
May 2012
May 2012
Ceremonial Healing Practitioner and Sophianic Wave Facilitator
Song of Sophia School, with Eliza Maora
Holistic Birth Doula with Whapio: The Matrona
Kapulli: Ancestral Healing & Sacred Teachings
Strawberry Moon Energetics, with Nataline R. Cruz
Methods in Cranial Sacral Therapy and Myofascial Release
Dynamic Body Balancing, Practitioner Level 1
B.A.S. in Psychology, Minor in Sociology
University of Minnesota Duluth
Certificate in Autism Spectrum Disorders
University of Minnesota Duluth
Additional Trainings
"The Art and Science of Mindfulness," by Lora Matz, LCSW
"There's No Such Thing as a Bad Kid" by Charles Applestein, MSW
Basics of Applied Behavior Analysis
Basics of Trauma-Informed Care
Cultural Diversity
Developmental Assets
Developing Competence with LGBT Youth
HIPPAA
Sexually Reactive Children
Therapeutic RecreationYouth and Family Services
Anxiety Disorders
Art Therapy
Cognitive Development
Therapeutic Milieu
Conduct Disorder
Contracting & Incentive Systems
Development Disorders
Developmental Model and Assets
Discipline and Behavior Management
DSM IV
Family Assessments
Mood Disturbances
Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Personality Disorders
Psychotic Disorders
Social/Emotianol Deveopment
Suicide Prevention
System Perspective of the Family
To work with Emma
A great way to get a feel for the way that I work is to attend an event. You can see current event listings here.
To schedule a 1:1 session, reach out to me directly
by phone at (952)451-8422
or by email at emma@earthmotherembodiment.com