Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. She is the author of many books, including most recently, From Grief into Vision: A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces, A Sabbath Among the Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God and Writing For Your Life.

Never in history has there been such a critical need for personal and planetary transformation in order to secure a viable future for all beings. All Deena's work with individuals and community is directed toward this goal. From grief into vision is the trajectory of the work.

Deena works with individuals and in group settings primarily in Los Angeles, occasionally leading retreats nationally and internationally. She has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?

She conducts training and supervision groups for healers and medical and health professionals -- from physicians to shamanic practitioners -- on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions. One focus is on uniting western medicine with indigenous medicine traditions.

With her husband, writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, she has introduced the concept of Daré to North America. Daré, meaning Council in the Shona language of Zimbabwe, is a creative form of personal and community healing and cohesion, based upon Council, vision, indigenous knowledge and spiritual practice. The Los Angeles Daré, devoted to supporting individual and community healing on behalf of the future, relies on council, alliance with spirit and the natural world, ancestor work, indigenous and wisdom traditions and teachings, music healing, dream telling, divination, kinship, story telling to achieve personal transformation and social change. She has two sons, is married to Michael Ortiz Hill. They live at the end of the road with the wolves, Cherokee, Tsche Wa-Yah and Shoonaq'.