What I do

EMBODIED SUSTAINABLE WISDOM

INTRODUCTION

Norka Ayllón is a Licensed Professional Counselor who has worked in the mental health field since 2007, and an initiated Medicine Woman in the traditions she was born into. She lives and practices on Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute territory, currently known as Denver, Colorado, and travels to teach. She also holds a Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies.

She was born in Lima, Peru, into a family that quietly carried ancestral ways of living. What they carried had begun long before them. It continued through Andean and Amazonian Elders, who taught her directly, on their own terms and at their own pace, and later initiated her as a Medicine Woman. She continues that work today under her honored Teacher and Mentor, who belongs to the Andean and Amazonian communities of Peru.

She graduated with honors with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Counseling, and has spent nearly two decades accompanying people through trauma, healing, and change, including ten years in the nonprofit sector and ten in her own private practice. Her clinical training gave her another language for things she had known in a different language all her life.

In her counseling and in her trainings she brings both, teaching Andean Cosmovision and embodied, decolonized leadership practices so that people can do demanding work without being consumed by it.

For most of her career, those two ways of knowing stayed in separate rooms. Her book, Before the Medicine: Ancestral Wisdom, Right Relationship, and the Way Home, is the first place she has put them on the same page.