At the Heart of this Work
Founded by writer and myth-keeper Nikki Lizares, Wild Woman Rising is a literary and ecological community offering online circles, nature-held retreats, and shared explorations through story, memory, and the living rhythms that shape a human life.
Here, we gather in relationship with story and place to remember what it means to belong to a living world. We listen closely to the thresholds of experience: birth and loss, grief and renewal, endings and beginnings, trusting that each carries its own form of intelligence.
Our work is a practice of gentle attention: to the Earth, to one another, and to the cultural and ancestral threads that shape how we live and imagine.
We hold that stories, when engaged with care, are not only reflections of life but companions within it—opening ways of seeing, relating, and participating more fully in the world we are part of.
We gather around story, Earth, and imagination to remember how to belong.
FOUNDER BIO
Training, Lineage & Ways of Practice
Formal Grounding
• M.Ed. in Education for Sustainability
• Graduate Certificate in Applied Mythology
• Yoga Medicine 500-hour training (in progress)
Fields of Study
My work is informed by ongoing study in ecology, narrative traditions, somatic awareness, depth psychology, and ecological education.
I continue to learn with teachers, texts, and lineages that engage myth, story, and the living world as sources of cultural memory and relational intelligence.
Ways of Practice
My practice is shaped through work in facilitation, narrative inquiry, ecological education, ritual and reflective practice, and embodied awareness.
Across these fields, I am interested in how attention is trained, how stories shape perception, and how relational ways of living are cultivated over time.
Ethical Grounding
My work is rooted in decolonial awareness, feminist ecological thought, and an ongoing commitment to care, reciprocity, and responsibility in how we relate to land, story, and community.
Nikki Lizares is a Filipina writer, ecologist, and cultural practitioner whose work explores the meeting place of story, ecology, and relational belonging.
She is the founder of Wild Woman Rising, a literary and ecological community offering circles, retreats, and shared practices of reading, reflection, and cultural remembering.
Her background spans over a decade in conservation and climate work, alongside ongoing study in depth psychology, narrative traditions, and embodied practice. She is a trauma-informed yoga teacher, with a focus on nervous system awareness and the relationship between body, attention, and lived experience.
At the heart of her work is a belief that stories, bodies, and landscapes are part of one continuous field of relationship—and that how we learn to listen shapes how we learn to live.
As a companion in life’s thresholds, she works with moments of change, loss, and becoming, offering spaces for reflection, presence, and deeper attunement to the questions we carry.
Across writing, circles, retreats, and 1:1 work, Nikki invites people into slower ways of paying attention to themselves, to one another, and to the living world they are part of.
Influences & Lineages of Learning
This work is shaped by deep gratitude for the writers, teachers, and living traditions that have informed my understanding of story, ecology, embodiment, and relational life.
I am influenced by the ecological imagination and systems thinking of Joanna Macy, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters, and the broader fields of regenerative and ecological thought. Their work continues to shape how I understand interdependence, care, and our responsibilities within a living world.
My relationship with story and myth has been deeply informed by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Martin Shaw, Bayo Akomolafe, Mary Oliver, Jennifer Ackerman, Sy Montgomery, and others who have tended language, attention, and imagination as sacred and necessary practices in a changing world.
I am continually learning with teachers and practitioners including Maria Souza, Joanna Gardner, Megan Watterson, and Ana Otero, whose work has shaped my understanding of myth, embodiment, ritual, and the feminine psyche.
I also carry deep gratitude for Filipino elders, healers, and cultural lineages of listening, tending, and relational knowing, which continue to inform my understanding of land, body, and community in ways that cannot be separated from place.
What I carry is not ownership of these influences, but gratitude for the ways they continue to shape how I listen, write, and practice presence in a changing world.
As with water, what moves through this work is never static. It gathers, diverges, and returns in new forms, always in relationship with what it meets.
Water teaches us that nothing lives alone.
A letter to the women who find their way here
Dear one,
This space began as a quiet spark—a longing to gather, to remember, to return to what is innately wise within us. For years, I moved between many worlds: the scientific and the spiritual, the ecological and the mythic, the outer landscapes of forest and sea and the inner landscapes of story, intuition, and dreams. Everywhere, I sensed the same truth: women carry an ancient knowing that the world has taught us to forget.
Wild Woman Rising began during a period of my life when I longed to heal in community. It started with a handful of us reading stories together, following the threads of myth and memory. But as we gathered, something in the collective stirred. Women arrived with their questions, their griefs and longings; their desire for a more rooted, cyclical, soul-honoring way of living. What emerged was a living ecosystem shaped by curiosity, care, and the quiet courage of coming home to ourselves.
My own path has been shaped by landscapes as much as by mentors. Some of my favorite memories include scrambling through the Amazon rainforest to translate scientific research into stories ordinary people could hold, and diving along broken reefs in rural Cambodia to help build the case for marine protected areas. These encounters with the more-than-human world continue to guide me, reminding me that wisdom has texture, rhythm, and breath.
These days, you’re more likely to find me in a semi-rural corner of the Philippines, trying to identify and keep track of the birds in my neighborhood, tending to the simplest of daily rituals alongside my husband, our young daughter, and two adopted dogs. This current season has taught me that wildness is in everything around us, and that it can arrive as tenderness, slowness, or the choice to pay attention.
If you’re here, I trust it’s because something in you is ready to soften, to unravel, to re-WILD; but most of all, to remember, and to reimagine. I’m honored to walk alongside you, woman to woman, story to story, season to season, as we tend this luminous, necessary work together.
With warmth and wild grace,
Nikki
My work is shaped by forests, oceans, stories, and the fierce courage of women remembering who they are. My writing has been published in The Deep Times Journal, Naware, Where the Leaves Fall, Peru Nature, and Explore magazine, among others.
