Meet your guide, Lila Edwards
How do we reconcile who we are with where we call home?
For more than twenty years, I have lived with this question across the places I call home. With ancestry and family in the British Isles, I was born in Berkeley, California, on the ancestral lands of the Ohlone. I later educated myself, worked hard, made chosen families & found home in both Southeast Alaska and Hawaiʻi before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2025.
A lyric from Brandi Carlile's Returning to Myself captures something essential for me: "There is no wandering in a pilgrimage." Looking back, I see that each place made me. Returning home after the death of my mother is not simply another move or molting. It is an opportunity to bring those lessons home again and place them in service of the landscapes that first shaped me. I can see my mother in the natural world, path dream, honor a mountain, make a fire in the rain, and gather fresh water.
As an Ecopsychology Strategist with MKThink, I supported statewide initiatives for the Hawaiʻi Department of Education for 8 years, coordinated field teams across six islands, and contributed to the Education Specifications for Oakland Unified School District supporting Living School Yards. Working alongside educators, planners, architects, engineers, cultural practitioners and local communities strengthened my commitment to cultural humility, collaboration, mutual causality and systems thinking.
Earlier in my career, I worked as a naturalist in the Tongass National Forest, an interpretive ranger with Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, a kayak guide in Misty Fjords National Monument, a teacher and truancy officer in alternative high schools, and a program and volunteer specialist with Girl Scouts of Alaska, where I designed and executed leadership programs, events, and curriculum.
I hold a Master of Arts in Ecopsychology from Naropa University and have completed more than 500 hours of professional training in acupressure from the Berkeley Acupressure Institute. My continuing education includes Shin Somatics from East-West Somatics, contemplative education, and am currently studying mantic arts. I also served as Vice President of the Hawaiʻi Association of International Buddhists from 2017 to 2020 in Oahu.
Can We Rehydrate the West?
Collaboration and Planning is underway. Updates coming soon. For now check in with Rehydrate California Initiative Here: https://www.rehydratecalifornia.org/
A Dedication to My Mentors
Direct Encounter exists because others took the time to mentor me. Although I have had many incredible teachers, professors, role models, friends, family, and influences along the way, I need to acknowledge my mentors.
MorningStar Borzoni
MorningStar was my piano teacher from the age of five. She taught me to listen. Through music I began to understand rhythm, resonance, vibration, and the spaces between notes. She quietly challenged the idea that reality was as fixed and material as I was being taught in school, opening an imagination that would later become central to my work.
Renee Beck
Renee Beck introduced me to applied divination or tarot through the lens of transpersonal psychology and family systems rather than prediction or fortune telling. Working alongside her at Holden High School 20 years ago profoundly influenced my own path toward becoming an Ecopsychologist.
Aʻiaʻi Bello
Aʻiaʻi Bello rooted me in Ho'oulu Ho'okahi—the Expanding Convergence—and welcomed me into eleven years of Papa Oli practice and women's circles that transformed my understanding of friendship, community, and cultural responsibility. She embodied a way of living where prayer, place, ancestry, and action were inseparable. She was also a steadfast protector of sacred places, including Kukaniloko and Maunakea.
After her passing in May 2026, her legacy continues through Pilina Kūpuna LLC, a Native Hawaiian-led organization founded by Kealani Makaiwi that perpetuates ancestral knowledge (ʻike Hawaiʻi), cultural practice, ceremony, and relationship to land. The name pilina means relationship, reminding us that knowledge lives through the bonds we cultivate with one another, our ancestors, and place.