Emily Rossell is a kirtan leader, yoga teacher, storyteller, and guide devoted to creating spaces where people feel safe to remember their wholeness. For more than thirteen years, she has shared the ecstatic practice of Kirtan, witnessing its remarkable ability to quiet the mind, open the heart, and bring the body, mind and spirit into deeper alignment. For Emily, mantra is more than a practice—it is a living transmission that awakens presence, connection, and the innate wisdom within us.
Alongside her work as a kirtan leader, Emily offers embodied one-on-one voice work, supporting others in discovering the freedom, authenticity, and healing that emerge when we reclaim our own voice. Her approach is rooted in the understanding that every voice carries a unique expression of the soul, and that giving voice to our truth is itself a transformative practice.
Emily received her yoga teacher training through the Sattva Yoga tradition, an integrative tantric lineage that weaves together asana, pranayama, kriya, meditation, mantra, and intuitive movement. Her classes are thoughtfully crafted as immersive journeys that extend beyond physical practice, inviting students into a direct experience of presence, vitality, and inner remembrance.
Her years as a caregiver and mother have profoundly shaped her work, deepening her capacity to hold compassionate space for others through times of growth, transition, and healing. This experience continues to affirm a truth that guides everything she offers: that love is the most powerful medicine, and that healing unfolds most naturally when we feel deeply seen, supported, and connected.
Whether through movement, music, story, or silence, Emily’s greatest intention is to help others remember their true nature and reconnect with the wisdom that lives within themselves, one another, and the living world.
Akacia has always possessed an insatiable curiosity about what it means to be human—and an equally insatiable appetite for life. Her path has been shaped by a love of learning, a willingness to venture into the unknown, and an enduring question: What does it take to truly heal?
Her exploration began early. At thirteen, her first experience with Rolfing sparked a fascination with the human body that led her, at nineteen, to become a certified Rolfer. She discovered both an innate aptitude for understanding the body and a mind that delighted in making sense of its complexity.
At twenty-four, a life-changing spinal injury brought her Rolfing practice—and life as she knew it—to an end. What followed was not only a healing journey, but an extraordinary education in being human. While navigating chronic pain and complex health challenges, her life was also expanding in remarkable ways—through learning, exploration, creativity, travel, music, community, and an ever-deepening willingness to say yes to life.
Her search for deeper understanding led her to Ayurveda. She completed more than 4,000 hours of formal training under Ayurvedic Doctor Alakananda Ma, becoming one of the first practitioners in the United States to graduate as an Ayurvedic Doctor. She has spent the past decade in clinical practice and has taught Ayurveda at both the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism and Alandi Ayurveda Gurukula.
But life itself has remained one of her greatest teachers. Her own healing led her far beyond any single system of medicine and taught her that healing asks for discipline and discernment, but also tenderness, humor, courage, forgiveness, pleasure, and grace.
Her work is, in many ways, the alchemy of all she has lived: transforming experience into wisdom, and wisdom into offering.
And perhaps most importantly, her years devoted to healing have taught her that healing was never the destination. Life is.
Today, the question that animates her is larger:
What becomes possible when healing gives way to something more—the experience of thriving, of being fully, vitally alive?