Photo by Catharina Lopes
Tobi Ayé
Educator, Facilitator, Ceremonialist and Artist working with grief and trauma through indigenous and vernacular ways of knowing.
Descendant of Nago/yoruba people of West Africa, currently based in Portugal.
About Me
I was born and raised in Benin where tales, proverbs, metaphors, mystery, and metaphysics were not separate from daily life.
Stories were a way of thinking, a way of learning, a way of relating to people, to the land, to ancestors and animals.
As a child, i was drawn to listening, to sitting with others’ stories, sensing what moved beneath words. Yet following the spiritual and ritual lineages of my father was not available to me. I watched my mother soften and hide her extraordinary gifts, marked by suspicion and fear, labelled as “witchcraft.” Those early interruptions of lineage, of permission, shaped how I came to understand loss, creativity and survival.
What could not be transmitted directly found other paths. In early adulthood, I moved through different creative practices, and through them, what had been muted began to resurface as a remembering shaped by my own language and time.
My facilitation, teaching and creative practices are inseparable. They move between listening, presence, material, and ritual. Creativity is not an accessory to the work; it’s a way of thinking, sensing, and staying in relationship with complexity, grief, and transformation.
I do not understand trauma as something to be fixed or resolved. The idea of “healing trauma” as repair toward a normative ideal belongs to a Eurocentric worldview. In other paradigms, trauma is not outside of life, it is danced with life, held collectively, given rhythm, gestures, and context. Grief, rupture, and creativity are not opposites; they are companions.
My work today is an invitation to return to these ways of knowing, to reindigenize our hearts and practices in a colonized world and how we relate to grief, trauma, death, the land, to human and non-human kin.
Photo by Catharina Lopes
I hold the view that nobody heals anyone. Rather, we invoke conditions in which something can move, settle, or reorient. I honor the bodies I accompany, as well as the visible and invisible forces that move through them, ancestors, memories, landscapes, and lineages alongside my own.
After teaching and guiding collective spaces, I return to quieter gestures. Much of my time is spent in my backyard dyeing textiles with indigo and other pigments, or listening to the wisdom of clay in my studio. These practices are how I stay in relationship with slowness, material, and the more-than-human world.
Kind Words
Trainings & Certifications
All the training courses and certificates listed below are based on a solid foundation of many years of learning and indigenous experience specific to my culture, which I value enormously.
Body as Healer with Peter A. Levine
Body Awareness with Idan Yoav
Bodywork: Sacred Art of Tai Yoga Body work with Ericka Bhavani
Breathwork with David Elliot
End-of-life Doula Training with INELDA
Essential breathing Module I (Down-regulation), II (Up-regulation) & III (Women & Children) with Rakel Sosa
Family & Systemic Constellation (On going)
Motherhood and parenting (2 humans and 2 pets)
Polyvagal Theory with Stephen Porges
Tao of Trauma informed by Somatic experiencing & Polyvagal theory with Alaine D. Duncan
Traumatic stress studies (on going) with Trauma research foundation
Transcending Trauma with Terry Marks-Tarlow & Leanne Domash
Virtual & in-person facilitation training with Virtilitation
Gratitude
I have found myself at many thresholds in my life, and each one has taught me to stay curious about myself, about the world and about the unseen forces that shape our becoming.
Thresholds have brought extraordinary beings and teachers int my path, and i stand where I stand because of all those who have held, guided, challenged and carried me.
I walk this journey thanks to my blood lineage: a lineage of teachers, traditional herbalists, vodoun practitioners, ceremonialists and artists. People who understood the world through intuition, craft, and ancestral and vernacular wisdom. I thank my family and ancestors for their tenacity, their character, and the ways they continue to shape my steps.
I praise Mom & Dad, my siblings, and my extended kin for their unwavering support in everything i do and everything I am becoming.
I honor all my teachers whose presence, rigor and generosity have opened new pathways in my life and work.
I remember my grandparents for the quiet strength and stories that still live in my bones.
To my children, my life-partner, and our our companions Luna and Ofélia, thank you for being my daily ground, my softness, my home.
And I offer gratitude to everyone i work with. Each person, each group, each encounter teaches me something new. I am shaped by communities i accompany, as much as I shape the spaces I create.
This work is not mine alone. It is woven from all those who came before me, walk beside me, and will come after.
Grateful for all the beings on this planet, who I am learning from in everyday life: Honoring : Forest, Animals, Mountains, Rivers, Ocean, Fire, Wood, Earth, Metal, Air, Water, Sun, Moon, East, West, North and South and the land I was born on and many other lands that support my growth and hold me and my family together… Asé.
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I write about grief, death, indigeneity, vernacular way of knowing and the thresholds we meet in our lives and work.
My emails are infrequent, thoughtful and meant to nourish.