This week, Mystic Mag had the opportunity to interview Moriah Williams, a holistic practitioner, writer, and portal witch who offers private sessions and workshops.
Moriah practices Ortho-Bionomy®*, Cranial Sacral Therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique, Animal Communication, and q is a NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM®)-Informed Professional with an Embodied Social Justice Certificate. Moriah is a white autistic genderqueer person who has healed from chronic illness.
*Ortho-Bionomy® is a trademark of the Society of Ortho-Bionomy International, Inc., and is used with permission.
Your practice incorporates a wide range of modalities, from body-based distance healing to spirit and animal communication. How do you weave these diverse elements together to create a comprehensive and holistic approach for your clients?
The modalities I practice trust in our innate capacity for self-healing. They support clients in developing a more conscious relationship with their healing power and inner wisdom in all aspects of the interconnected layers of life.
We might work with any or all of the following: aliveness in our bodies and emotions, healing our inner conflicts, connecting with nature and spirit realms, navigating social structures, and finding our place in community. Our personal and collective healing are intertwined. Your healing matters to the world. Your healing power is part of the health of the cosmic web.
A range of approaches allows for many possible meeting places, rather than just fitting people into a program. We often suppress our potency and aliveness as we try to squeeze into culturally prescribed boxes.
To me an essential part of healing and liberation is being met with open curiosity about what is actually right for us and aligned with our hearts. Being held as we are opens us to growth and exploration, and gives us safety to diverge from norms. I actively support deconstruction of inner and outer expectations.
As we heal, we learn to trust that we can be with intensity and challenges. Multiplicity supports creativity. We do not have to abandon ourselves or flee from our lives. We can heal the shame and self-hatred we feel we have needed to survive. We can meet love, pain, risk, loss, and the unknown with heartfulness, because unconditional love is the sea we are swimming in.
How does your work support collective and planetary healing? What is the importance of addressing oppression and power dynamics in healing?
We all carry internalized messages of harm from colonial capitalist dominant culture, which affects our bodies, our imagination, and relationships. We have learned to discard vulnerability in ourselves and others. We also reject our own power, because we have experienced so much abuse of power. Dominant culture tries to split power and vulnerability, but they are the same, and they are ours to reclaim.
These voices are not paying rent to live inside us. Some of the role of clinical work is denormalizing these destructive patterns from white supremacy culture, patriarchy, ableism, etc., so we can open to freedom and presence in our lives and relationships. It’s also crucial to disrupt patterns of oppression and compliance in healing spaces in a continual learning process.
We can all see that the world is burning. There are multiple genocides being committed right now. The Global North is eating the Global South. People are drowning in medical debt while HMOs are getting rich. We feel this truth in our bodies, and this truth wants to speak. The vast majority of us want to create better systems. All life wants us to step into our healing capacities.
What kind of clients typically enjoy working with you?
My clients don’t fit into simple boxes. They tend to be autistic, neurodivergent, or navigating other trauma and oppression. People who have fallen through the cracks of more mainstream care because of their complexity and intensity. We tend to these wounds and explore what honors their needs and gifts.
I work with activists and organizers who want to root in what is life-giving. Many of my clients are helping professionals who want more liberatory, welcoming, embodied practices.
Some people come to me who have deep spiritual practices or tendencies. Many say they know they came here to do spirit work, but they were persecuted in another life for being a witch. Together we explore how they might joyfully engage in their calling.
Ortho-Bionomy, Cranial Sacral Therapy, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) are distinct methods. How do you determine which modality or combination of modalities is most appropriate for an individual, and what factors guide your decision-making process?
What we emphasize really depends on where you feel met. Some clients know they want to do EFT or spirit work, for example. We may also draw from multiple modalities in a session.
For clients who have a robust relationship with their bodies and the spirit world, we dive right into body-based spirit work. If that interests you but you haven’t really been supported in developing these relationships, we start with verbal and somatic explorations of your perceptions, boundaries, and responses.
This is especially important for marginalized clients who have been taught to appease and not take up space.
Identifying and asserting our Yes, No, Maybe, or Something Else is crucial to finding the right meeting places in any kind of relationship. This allows us to more easily access spirit realms, where signals can be subtle and the connections vaster.
The Something Else option is key, because it reminds us of our expansive imagination, and our power to ask for what we need that isn’t immediately offered, or maybe that doesn’t exist yet and is ours to create.
Can you explain the difference between the spirit work you do and giving readings?
I don’t have answers, I ask questions, and I support people in asking questions that help them feel empowered to embrace their lives. I think questions are some of the best tools we have for aligning with how the cosmos speaks through our hearts. Together we engage with the beings in an experience of healing and transformation.
Corroboration comes in many forms. We may experience the same thing in detail. Departed loved ones may show up with a favorite flower, evoke their favorite place, or say phrases they loved to repeat.
Frequently an animal shows up, and then the client tells me they have a tattoo of that animal, or that the animal has long been a special interest. To me this shows how intuitively connected we already are.
Shifts in your body, perceptions, or life patterns are significant signs of potency. Spirit work is not about escape, it is about arrival.
I rarely do one-offs aside from consults with colleagues. Instead I work with people who want to develop their own spiritual capacities and build a more conscious relationship with spirit.
What is a spirit work session like?
To me spirit work is some of the most fun you can have. We begin by calling in the beings and expressing an intention about what you would like to explore–which can also be asking the spirits about their priorities. They bring a web or forest clearing or some other protected space. If you don’t already have a conscious connection with your guides, we gradually meet them over time.
Sessions are a continual asking. Something happens which changes the field, and then we ask again.
An ongoing query is, what is getting in the way of my intentions that might need care? All of the hesitations and so-called resistance we experience are portals that are full of good information and the seeds of our healing.
How each person perceives is unique. As with all of the other layers we might explore, it’s important to notice how we know things.
The beings are excited to communicate with us. They may talk in words or images, or through charades and metaphor. You might experience colors or emotional states. Some beings bring clear ideas in a beautiful web that takes its own time to wind or unwind. When we trust our guides, we can trust what they bring. Some of the most potent magic comes when we are willing to make room for what is beyond the edge of our understanding.
Frequently the beings offer support with body-based healing. Spirit work can be surprisingly physical. You might also notice shifts in your outlook, life patterns, or sense of connection or confidence.
They might suggest simple rituals (or ornate ones–depends what you’re into). If you offer a cup of water to a tree, the offering creates a portal where they can bring healing to the physical world. Or they might suggest an offering to ancestors, so they in turn can support you with more presence and coherence. They may ask if you are willing to help with healing historical traumas or the natural world.
You might connect with other lives or dimensions if those are relevant to healing the issue at hand. There can also be shapeshifting, journeying, transformation, magical osmosis of understanding, and also the spaciousness to decide what you do and don’t want.
Each session is a place to practice responding to what arises in the field. Opening ourselves to the sacred beauty of being held by the wild is full of delicious synergy and surprise.
Animal communication is a unique aspect of your offerings. Can you share insights into how communicating with animals contributes to healing, and are there specific cases where this form of communication has had a notable impact?
My animal sessions are similar to working with people. Like us, they are an integration of creature self and cosmic self.
I worked with a dog with severe cage trauma who many people experienced as scary. He trusted me immediately. On our fourth session, I initiated a thoracic inlet release–meaning I gave him a hug and compressed in a specific way around his shoulders so the structures had the support to shift if they wanted to. Then he did some goofy laps around the yard, drinking from the bird bath, and I felt sheepish that the session was so short. But thereafter he was a jolly, silly dog who would flop in your lap.
I did a single distance session with a dog to help her integrate into her new home. Years later, the dog’s human said the family harmony that emerged was “a small miracle.”
A cat client broke several ligaments in his knee and was not expected to put weight on the leg again, and he made a full recovery. The next time I saw him, he was much more excited to see me than before.
Animals are intimately aware of their own and others’ bodies, emotions, energies, and intentions, and they are also spiritually sensitive. Their sessions are short because they integrate quickly. They often assist in the session–especially if it’s hands-on–by going into a position that facilitates the release.
With both distance and hands-on work, I often invite their human to palpate different areas, and they can usually feel the changes and potency, as well as their animal’s responsiveness. I may suggest simple care routines.
Animals’ patterns are often an attempt to support their humans. If their human is willing, we can explore this for the benefit of both of them.
As a NARM®-Informed Practitioner, how does the NeuroAffective Relational Model inform your work, particularly in the context of your diverse modalities, and how do you ensure a trauma-informed approach in your practice?
NARM is one of the most elegant and effective approaches to complex trauma that I have come across. It shares similar principles with the other modalities I practice: curiosity, consent, spaciousness, and gentleness. The work honors the adaptations we have developed for the sake of survival, and explores what these patterns are trying to help us with.
Unconditional support without agenda is so important for people who have experienced trauma. We also do not have to relive our trauma to heal it.
NARM provides a clear, compassionate picture of unmet developmental needs, and what conflicts are produced by each kind of injury or environmental failure.
NARM acknowledges the potency and desires of each part of our inner conflicts. Rather than overriding one side, NARM invites us to hold them in relationship with each other, which opens us to emotional completion and more capacity for feeling and aliveness.
Left unexplored, these core needs shape our lenses and drive our behaviors. When we tend to these needs, we can release ourselves into a whole new way of being in relationship with ourselves and the world.
In addition to developmental healing, a liberatory approach asks that we explore ongoing dilemmas that marginalized people face, and political frameworks which cause injustice–these belong in clinical spaces, which are not morally neutral. There are also parts of NARM that I modify or turn on their head to meet neurodivergent people.
A lot of what NARM brings is vital for healthy movements and collective healing.
Can you share about your equity and healing work with organizations?
I work with organizations who want in-depth healing for themselves and how to best serve their communities. An organization I just did a series for said they were the loveliest workshops they have hosted for some time.
I facilitate workshops on a number of topics: care considerations for autistic people, healthy autistic boundaries, trans 101, Emotional Freedom Technique and variations for accessibility, intuition and magic, embodied self-care, inflammation and oppression, responding to the gaslighting of empire, human rights in Palestine, supporting marginalized people in community and clinical spaces, home-made homeopathic remedies for trees, making friends with death, letting go of agenda for caregivers, our personal and collective relationship with money, and more. I also create custom workshops.
We can all contribute to social healing, and we all benefit from it. We gravitate toward liberation. Given room to explore new frameworks and possibilities for empowerment, we can experience relief in our bodies from the shame, helplessness, and overwhelm we often feel in the face of social inequality. Together we can grow our receptors for healthy community.
Visit Moriah’s website at: moriahjwilliams.com
