With a full-ride scholarship to study Dance Ethnology in college, Ashley became gripped by the innate healing and cultural transmission sparked through movement, song, and dance. Dancing with masters from North India, Haiti, Congo, Nigeria, Guinea, Cuba, and Brazil imprinted her with a sense of interconnectivity, self-mastery, transpersonal transmission, and the imperative of cultural diversity. Further, she was intimately introduced to the cross-cultural rituals and religion of Cuban Santeria and Mayan Shamanism which inspired her lifelong relationship with the power of the elementals and plant medicine. Knowing she wanted to be of service to others through the awakening of the body and mind in a collective, non-traditional modality, she went on to gain her degree in Dance Movement Therapy from Naropa University. With her hands in the dirt, self-employed by her landscaping business, she deepened her psychological understanding in a two year body-based psychology and Somatic Patterning Program; and then in a year long Hakomi-influenced program called Matrix Works: working with groups as a living system.
