Laila Gislason, Founder

Laila Gislason is a researcher, strategist, artist, and cultural bridge-builder devoted to the living wisdom of sacred song and ancestral healing traditions. Her work centers on how Latvian dainas (ancient poems), embodied sound, and sauna (pirts) rituals nurture emotional resilience, ecological belonging, and intergenerational memory - what she calls ancient technologies for remembering how to be fully human together.

Her emerging project, Sacred Sounds of Latvia, explores how vibration, myth, and landscape shape nervous-system regulation and collective identity within the Latvian diaspora. Through community-based inquiry, Laila investigates how song can become a form of social medicine, repairing relational bonds between people, place, and spirit in a time of widespread disconnection.

Laila is the founder of Baltic Wisdom, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving, revitalizing, and sharing the nature-based cultural, spiritual, and healing traditions of European ancestry. The organization is establishing a Baltic Wisdom School for sauna healing rituals in partnership with Latvian scholars and practitioners to train, support, and connect English-speaking healing arts practitioners worldwide.

A Certified Mindfulness & Meditation Teacher through The Awareness Training Institute and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center., Laila has spent more than two decades immersed in contemplative practice and awareness training. She is a longtime student of Tara Brach, Dr. John Churchill, Anam Thubten, and Loch Kelly, and has trained extensively in nondual approaches that emphasize direct, embodied realization, and, most of all has learned from her innate wisdom and her Baltic heritage. Having completed Internal Family Systems (IFS Level 1), she brings parts-based, trauma-sensitive awareness to her work. Laila now offers individual coaching and retreats that integrate mindfulness, nondual inquiry, relational presence, and, when appropriate, preparation and integration support for psychedelic experiences.

Laila holds a BFA in Industrial Design from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design and studied Scandinavian Furniture Design and Architecture at Denmark’s International Study Program (DIS). Her ecological and relational orientation is shaped by Fritjof Capra’s Systems View of Life, design thinking, and over 20 years of strategic marketing, culture change initiatives, and leadership within nonprofits, startups, and Fortune 100 companies.

Currently an MSW candidate at the University of Michigan, Laila weaves social work, anthropology, contemplative science, and Baltic heritage into a singular question: How might sacred song and relational ritual help communities remember their belonging to the living Earth and facilitate healing?

Beyond her professional life, she is most at home singing, tending gardens, learning from wild landscapes, traveling in search of living traditions, and teaching practices that cultivate deeper listening to self, community, and the more-than-human world.