Open Quiet is a space for exploring how natures wisdom can inform modern life.
About Us
Across cultures and throughout history, human societies developed practices that cultivated awareness, emotional maturity, compassion, and a deep relationship with the natural world. Meditation, ritual, storytelling, song, and time in nature were not luxuries, they were ways communities carried wisdom across generations and supported the conditions for human flourishing.
Many of these traditions hold practical knowledge about awareness, healing, belonging, and human development that modern culture is only beginning to rediscover.
Open Quiet creates environments where these insights can be explored in thoughtful, experiential ways.
Who We Are
This exploration unfolds through several forms of practice and inquiry:
Retreats and gatherings that bring people together for shared reflection, dialogue, and nature-based experience
Awareness training that cultivates attention, emotional regulation, and contemplative practice
Coaching and mentorship that supports personal and professional development through deeper awareness
Collaborative inquiry with artists, scholars, practitioners, and cultural thinkers
Organizational dialogue and advisory for groups seeking deeper reflection, relational intelligence, and collective clarity
Our Approach
The work of Open Quiet draws from a wide range of traditions and disciplines, including:
contemplative and meditation traditions
healing traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems
psychology and human development
mythology and cultural storytelling
ecological thinking and relationship with the living world
What unites these perspectives is a shared understanding that wisdom often emerges through attention, relationship, and dialogue.
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.
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 feels most at home in nondual approaches that emphasize direct, embodied realization. Most of all, she has been guided by long-passed sages, her innate wisdom, and her Baltic heritage. Laila offers individual coaching and retreats that integrate mindfulness, nondual inquiry, relational presence, Internal Family Systems (IFS Level 1 completion), somatic integration, 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 across nonprofits, startups, and Fortune 100 companies.
Currently an MSW candidate at the University of Michigan, Laila weaves clinical 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?
Laila 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.