Meet the Founder

Photo by: Tityana Shuqom

Asha Kohli is a ceremonialist, folk medicine practitioner, and artist, and the founder of Way of Nitarā. She guides women home to the body, the mother line, and the living Earth through private journeys and intimate gatherings, holding only a few women each season in work that is slow, devoted, and deeply personal.

A daughter of Punjabi and Colombian immigrants, Asha comes from a lineage of artists, writers, activists, and spiritual seekers. She came of age in the Bay Area as a journalist and organizer, documenting the ways our systems sever us from our histories, our communities, and the land beneath our feet. In time she came to feel that same severance living in the body, and her path turned toward its most intimate form: the slow, radical act of returning to the body and reclaiming what was never meant to be taken from us.

For nearly a decade she has apprenticed in her ancestral lineages of Andean and Amazonian folk medicine under Curandera Francisca Santibanez, alongside a lifelong path with Ayurveda. The plants have taught her that our most potent creative power rises from a rooted, knowing place within, and that this power is an inheritance belonging to all of us.

Her work weaves ceremony, plant spirit medicine, somatic movement, and ancestral healing into an experience as beautiful as it is transformative. A photojournalist, dancer, and creative director before she was a medicine woman, Asha brings an artist’s eye to every detail, from the altar and the handcrafted ritual kit to the way each woman is welcomed through the door.

Asha lives in Sonoma County, where she hosts her in-person work and roots her practice in daily relationship with land, lineage, and ceremony.

I believe we already carry everything we need inside us. My work is to create the conditions — the ceremony, the beauty, the steady holding — for a woman to remember it, and to rise from that knowing into the life she came here to live.

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This path is not mine alone. It is a braid, a sacred weaving, of earth, lineage, and spirit, held with humility and great care.

I live and practice on the ancestral lands of the Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples, land that continues to teach me through her winds, her waters, her lush and wild wonder.

I bow to the original stewards of this place and to the lineages that have held rituals, ceremonies, stewardship, and earth connection as sacred since time immemorial.

I give deepest thanks to the Indigenous Lakota, Andean, Amazonian, and Indian teachers who have shaped me
— human and more-than-human — and to the ancient lineage holders who carry memory in their bones.

Through the body, may we listen.

Through the earth, may we remember.

Through the cosmos, may we return.

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CERTIFICATIONS & LINEAGE STUDIES

Madhya Way School of Ayurveda (2025-2026)

Mentored by Anjali Deva

600-Hour Comprehensive Integrative Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor Training

A trauma-informed, integrative approach to Ayurveda, focusing on traditional

study while incorporating western herbalism, meditation, yoga, and self-

compassion practices.

Plant Spirit Talk Apprenticeship & Plant Spirit Initiation Clinical Practicum (2018–2026)

Mentored by Francisca Santibanez

Study, apprenticeship, and certification in South American Folk Medicine, Plant

Spirit Initiations (Dietas), Limpias, Peruvian Vegetalismo, and Andean Cosmology.

Satya Collective 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training (2021-2022)

Mentored by Lakshmi Nair

Colorado, USA

The Womb School: Somatic Womb Practitioner Certification (2023-2024)

Mentored by Jeevan Singh

Nine-month immersion in womb cycles, TCM, and Ayurvedic frameworks for

holistic healing.

Each thread in my path has taught me how to listen more deeply—to my body,

to the land, to my ancestors, and to the spirit of the future that lives in

each of us, waiting to be midwifed into form.

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For more, visit my Instagram: @way.of.nitara & subscribe to my

Substack: Notes from the Nido.

Contact: asha.kohlibri@gmail.com