about
rachel mann, founder and owner
I am a teacher, healer, scholar, trainer, & activist who strives to bring loving kindness, knowledge, creativity and vision to my work with others.
My personal search for healing was rooted in an intergenerational legacy of mental illness in my family which showed up in my mother who likely suffered from Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders and Munchausen Disorder. Until her death in 2001, she caused much suffering to herself and her family. As I tried over 20 years to understand her paradoxically creative and destructive life and its impact on me, I delved into many western- and non-western healing modalities, including Jungian analysis, various forms of bodywork, and the healing practices of the Q’ero people of the Peruvian Andes.
While engaged in the early years of this search, I earned an M.A. in Soviet Studies and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures with an emphasis in folklore and anthropology. Eventually, the cumulative experience of delving into the deep recesses of my own pain and suffering led me to apply the understandings of the dynamics of personal and transgenerational, familial trauma to understanding collective cycles of violence and trauma from war, authoritarian regimes, interracial conflict, and gender violence, among others.
In the meantime, my academic career led me into working as an administrator in the field of teaching technologies. In this capacity, I supported other faculty in the creative use of technology in the classroom. 
The practical challenges and concerns of managing employees, testing and implementing new technologies, developing and running programs and services, and carrying forward a departmental and institutional vision and agenda gave me insights into the challenges facing all of us in today’s hectic and stressful working world. While I took care of my mother on and off in the last decade of her life and faced many other personal and familial challenges in ensuing years, I grappled personally with how incredibly difficult in this time it is to balance work and family life and how this often feels like an insidious and not-so-subtle form of violence in and of itself.
Throughout these years working in two major universities, I remained strongly connected to my desire to have an impact on addressing in constructive ways the sometimes subtle tensions and misunderstandings which arise out of a perception of “otherness”. In my mind, these are not dissimilar from the psychological challenge of meeting the shadow in oneself and one’s family. Among other activities, at James Madison University, I founded the Women’s Issues Network. At the University of Virginia, I was one of the co-founders and co-facilitators of the Ad hoc Faculty Committee on Diversity and also spearheaded the first Faculty Sustained Dialogue initiative–a program bringing people of diverse backgrounds together to share personal stories and challenges resulting from differences in race, nationality, sexual preference, gender, and others.
My upbringing by my parents in the Episcopal and Unitarian Universalist churches alongside the practices of Buddhism by my mother informed my longing to foster peace in the world and to find constructive responses to violence. Yet even in my spiritual life, I came up against many external and internal barriers. As I grew more and more into merging the spirit of Christianity into my practice of Buddhism and eventually studying with a Cherokee teacher in the nineties, I became like many people in this day and age who are practitioners of a new spirituality that does not fit within the definitions of mainstream religions and whose spirituality is often misunderstood, trivialized and marginalized. I came to understand this as another manifestation of and a causal factor in trauma in our world and developed a desire to help people find respectful ways to integrate and share their spiritual lives and personal belief systems and values with others in community life, work, and home.
My ongoing academic research on the effects of trauma on whole groups and cultures rested in particular around the argument about whether Native Americans should share their religions and spiritual practices with non-Natives due to the centuries long oppression and suppression of their cultures by whites. I struggled with a conflicted awareness of the multiple streams of violence that underlie every prayer I said. Because I was one of the white people to whom the Native American teacher, the Ven. Dhyani Ywahoo had generously gifted her teachings and wisdom against opposition by some in her culture, I wanted to play a role in healing this transgenerational wound in all of us. Further, my ongoing recovery from the physical, psychological, and spiritual effects of family trauma led me to a desire to help others. Thus, I started to seek out professional training in the techniques of psychodrama for survivors of trauma and as a healer in non-traditional, integrative healing modalities called shamanism, a process I continue today as a student in the Healing the Light Body school of the Four Winds Society.
These diverse streams in my life–spirituality, the personal search for healing, my years of experience working in the world of academic administration, teaching and research, and my work in an activist capacity on the problems of violence–began to merge in dynamic ways in my teaching at the University of Virginia. Over a decade, I developed and taught three innovative undergraduate courses dealing with the problems of interracial conflict and gender violence, and a practicum course in which students were encouraged to explore through the lens of how to be an effective instructional technology advisor the shadow side of our technology-driven culture. These courses were informed by the theories and methods of the best of the Western sciences and the disciplines of the humanities and the wisdom and experiences of the Cherokee and other Native North American religions that I had studied.
Eventually, I developed a desire to broaden my outreach beyond the halls of the western university system. I wanted to bring my methods and knowledge derived from these rich and multiple sources and experiences to others. In particular, because of my own work grappling with the effects of violence on my life, on the lives of my students and colleagues, and on the world around us, I came to want to help organizations who are committed to helping others. I wanted to help them help themselves and to have the same deep and robust set of tools and knowledge that I myself have in working with others.
This work for me includes the non-human species in our troubled world. I am an animal lover who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with my Great Pyrenees puppy, Tea and Sympathy, “Sym” for short, and my little rescue Pug named Wee. Because of my love of the furry ones in our world (and the feathered, scaled, shelled, and smooth) and my concern for the ways they are also victims of human abandonment, neglect, violence, and abuse, I seek to support those who are brave and hardy enough to work with animals in need, as well.
To pursue this big vision, I took the leap and “retired” from a 20-year academic career in higher education in which I held a tenured position to start MettaKnowledge for Peace, LLC. By doing this work in service of the well being of all of us on Mother Earth, I honor the lessons and love given to me by many teachers and mentors, from human to non-human throughout my life. May we all find peace.