“Thank you for your attunement to spirit and the way it shines through you.” – Sufis Hawaii
Isa Maria
Connective Communication Specialist
Isa is clear, present, and available. –Dr. Latifa Amdur
Isa was a founding member of Kauai’s first Nonviolent Communication practice group, and since 2004 has been facilitating ongoing practice groups and providing counseling, mediation, and workshops in the community.
Her NVC teachers include Robert Gonzalez, Mary MacKenzie, Kelly Bryson, Jim and Jori Manske, Inbal Kashtan, Christa Morf, Bob Metz, and Ellen Shiro.
One of the things I love about your personality is this creative and courageous willingness to go for it. I’m feeling crazy amounts of gratitude for your presence in my life. –J.P. Allen, NVC facilitator and author
Isa is a mermaid, mother, painter, dancer, and drummer.
She is was born in Germany to an atheist intellectual father and spiritual seeker mother. The family immigrated to the U.S. when she was 3 years old. Attending alternative schools, free to roam the forest or swim or draw all day, she and her siblings were encouraged to question authority and follow their bliss.
Isa earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and dance at Antioch University. Then she fell in love, got married, and raised 3 children and a herd of milk goats on a farm in the Blue Ridge mountains. There she learned about herbal medicine, organic gardening, sacred dance, and African drumming.
When a nuclear waste company moved into the rural community, Isa became an environmental activist. Battered by the immensity of this work, she and her colleagues learned how to use circle ritual and earth spirituality to restore their energy and to keep the focus of all their actions on their motivation of love for the earth.
Trouble in the marriage led Isa to study and eventually teach Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling, a non-heirarchical counseling method in which everybody takes turns being both counselor and client. RC encourages physical discharge of held emotional pain, liberation from internalized oppression, and living without limits.
In 1997 Isa moved to Kauai and fulfilled the dream of painting as her primary work.
She also intensively studied, taught, and performed African drumming and dance.
Isa founded the women’s drum and dance group Love Tribe, and later the cultural exchange program Aloha Africa, hosting drummers and dancers from Ghana on the island of Kauai.
Nonviolent Communication continues to be the core of her spiritual practice, the medicine of her professional work, the power behind her service activities, and the magic in her intimate and community relationships.
