Your Host
Em Chiappinelli
Em (she/they) is your host and the person who designed the pathway, facilitates the calls, and sends out the prompts every week. Her background is in consciousness studies and social change work.
Em created Everyday Aliveness out of a desire for more opportunities to grapple with the impact the dominant culture's norms have on our awareness and ability to connect to the important things in life, in a playful container that's built to support each other and cheer each other on.
The program takes its inspiration from trainings in connecting with land, ancestors, the psychic realm, sacred sexuality, and workshops on multiculturalism and confronting white supremacy culture. Em holds the journey through Everyday Aliveness with a healthy balance of understanding, celebration, humor and hypocrisy.
Guest Hosts on the Calls
Occasionally the group will be joined by a guest host on one of the weekly calls: people whose life experiences and perspectives offer more depth to the theme for the week. They'll add to the group's conversation and guide the live practice on the call. They include:
Juan Robles-Gil Aleman
Guest host for week 3
Juan (he/him) is a licensed mental health counselor and music therapist from Mexico City, who specializes in healing PTSD, C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, grief and relationship/family issues.
Juan brings a vibrant aliveness and deep caring, tenderness, and compassion to our places of disconnection. As a guest host, Juan helps us to lovingly navigate disconnection using an Internal Family Systems (IFS) Framework.
Mikael Darmanie
Guest host for week 7
Mikael (he/him) is a multi-genre creative soul living in NYC and performing throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean. He's a pianist, improviser, conductor, chamber musician with his group W4RP - crossing between jazz to hip-hop, rock, fusion and electronic music. He DJs and teaches masterclasses and workshops to students of all levels.
As a guest host, Mikael invites us to explore the life inside of things we deem inanimate by opening to the messages communicated by music.
Julia Metzger-Traber
Guest host for week 5
Julia (she/her) is based in northern Virginia and works as a healing-centered racial justice facilitator, consultant and trainer, a somatic practitioner, performance artist, and mother. She brings people together through the asking of big questions, and recently launched the PRX podcast: Mother is a Question.
As a guest host, Julia helps us to slow down and feel the layers of self and other that are constantly at play together.
Kaamilah Muhammad
Guest host for week 10
Kaamilah (they/them) is an artist committed to embracing and elevating the meaning of our moment-to-moment living experience of the "mundane." They are based in central Virginia, at Stellar Roots: a collective of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people rooted in healing and in service of land based community living.
As a guest host, Kaamilah helps us grapple with the machinations of imagination, and inspires us to embrace our relationship to the invisible realms.