Inessa O-Childs

In the southern reaches of Siberia lies the Altai, one of the oldest shamanic cradles on earth, where the roots run so deep they are simply called the ground. That is where I began, on a military base, in a land already shaping me long before I had language for what it was holding. I did not know that then. I know it now.

I make my home now in Napa, on the ancestral land of the Wappo and Patwin peoples, the first people of this valley. Between those two grounds lies most of what I have to offer.

I lived through the collapse of the USSR. I crossed into Silicon Valley and built inside it. Long before this work had a name, I was investing in and advocating for women in technology, placing them on boards of private companies, insisting they belonged at the center of power long before that was a common conversation. I learned what that costs, in the body, in the soul, in everything that never appears on a balance sheet. And I learned something I have carried forward ever since: a woman held properly can change everything in the room.

My husband Timothy and I now work together in food and regenerative agriculture across California and Texas, alongside indigenous communities, underserved farmers, and Māori investors who understand that the land is a relationship, not a resource. Being in their company changed me. It is still changing me.

The healing path did not arrive as a revelation. It arrived through leaving one world and not yet belonging to the next, through a body that eventually stopped asking and started insisting, through the particular loneliness of a woman who is capable of so much and supported in so little of what matters. I did not go looking for this work. It found the place in me that had long known it.

I followed my intuition wherever it led: into ceremony, dreaming, constellation work, the body as medicine, leaning on teachers and traditions across three continents who arrived when I needed them, not on any single lineage. One of them was Tumanako Wereta, a Māori elder, Chair of the Tuaropaki Trust, architect of a billion-dollar indigenous enterprise built on ancestral values. He blessed my marriage to Timothy on Māori land and called us the tip of the spear. I have never taken those words lightly. Through him and the teachers around him, I came to understand something about women I had been living without fully naming: that in Māori tradition, it is women who walk ahead, sent first across the threshold, to hold space before the warriors arrive, to make peace possible through presence alone. Not behind the scenes. At the front. I recognized that role in my own life: what it had taken to stand beside Timothy through the building of something real, to hold a partnership, a family, and a vision at once, to be the one who crossed first and made room. That recognition did not diminish what I had done. It named it.

For most of my life, I had been putting people first, building for others, advocating for others, holding space for others in work, in family, in every room I entered. Last year, I completed the three-year Arbor program in two years, under my teacher and mentor, Grandmother Sarah Maclean Bicknell, thirty years deep in ceremony, dreaming, and family constellation work. There I learned what it means to stand in ceremony and in service, to read what runs beneath a family system, to follow a dream as instruction rather than symbol. It was there, on vision quest, that I saw it plainly: my place is beside women in business who are standing between two worlds, helping each one find her own way through.

I walk beside her with the gifts I have spent a lifetime gathering so we can discover her own path together. I offer this work because I lived it myself first, all the way through.

What I lacked, through those thresholds, was a container: someone to hold space through the reinventions, the losses, the moments when everything built on the outside could no longer answer what was stirring within. I navigated that mostly alone. I found my way, but I know what it cost. And I know how many women quietly give up, not for lack of strength, but for lack of witness. A trusted one. Someone who has been there and will not flinch.

It took me a long time to build that container for myself. Rising from the Roots is what I built next, for women ready to stop navigating alone.

I have walked through fire. I have stood in the not-knowing. I have learned, slowly, in many languages, that what heals is not acquired.

It is remembered.