Apothecary Team
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee
founder & co-lead
Sonali (she/her) is a proud mother, artist, organizer, facilitator, mindfulness / yoga instructor, and emerging health practitioner who braids and works at the intersection of spiritual wisdoms, queerness, and ecological knowledges. Her life work grounds in joyfully studying and embodying her own lineage’s spiritual wisdoms, braiding with others’, and creatively bringing key learnings into a variety of forms.
She is the founder and co-lead of Spiritual Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA) and founder of Our Bodhi Project, spiritual-political projects that elevate the medicines of our times, focusing particularly on the medicines of spiritual practice, sacred inquiry, queerness, and ecological wisdoms. Building upon the wisdoms of the nonbinary, she embodies and guides project work with a quiet and fierce love both for the power of the Yin (receptive, cooling, slowing down, intuitive, water protection) and an active compassion for the wounded, Hyper-Yang (hyper-extended, -heated, -destructively productive, colonizing).
Sonali's life work has focused on strategies elevating wholeness, specifically calling for leading with multiple truths and perspectives required for collective wellbeing. She has spent 14 years in U.S. local government, creating and leading social justice and racial equity initiatives and broader community-driven policy. Her community organizing background has focused on youth development, environmental justice, racial justice, and HIV / AIDS-related advocacy and service. Through these various forms, Sonali elevates deeper braided and commonly-held ancient wisdoms and knowledges for thriving life. Her current advocacy focus is on resource mobilization for projects and initiatives that speak to the spiritual-through-the-political antidotes our world so desperately needs, paying particular attention to those that resource Indigenous sovereignty. Sonali has been a board member for Bioneers, an organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for people and planet.
She is in love with her current Apothecary work of studying and sharing the joy and eros found in Yin practice, elevating nursing as a vital healing field, centering the power of Sacred Activism, protecting ground- and river-waters, arts-making grounded in braided wisdoms, and being in service of land justice efforts.
Sonali is grounded in her Indian and Sri Lankan lineages, born in Wisconsin (US), and raised in East Chicago / NW Indiana (US) on the ancestral land of the Potawatomi. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest (US) on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Klickitat, Chinook and other first nations, and lovingly embraces the whole of her translanding roots.
Dr. Sam Amsler
co-lead
Sam (they/them) is an eco-social researcher, essayist, poet, editor, educator and land steward in training. They are co-lead of Spiritual Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA) and co-steward of the Beyond Form Creative Writing platform. Their work is devoted to opening perspectives that restore life-bearing ways of living and loving from within colonialism’s ruins, and to dismantling modern binaries, supremacies and separations across forms and scales: from how we relate with the elements to how we relate with each other; from the quantum to the cosmic and in the expressions of our brief existence in between.
For twenty-five years, Sam channeled this work through teaching, research and activist scholarship as a professor of critical and queer theory and education, committed to revealing and deconditioning modern/colonial systems of power within cultural institutions and ourselves. They held academic posts at a variety of universities between 1997 and 2023, and prior were busy with anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist, popular and cooperative education in early years, school, youth, museum, public and anarchist and autonomist settings.
Today, their independent scholarship and art-life practice orbit around bringing decolonial systems thinking, queer ways of knowing and land-based ecology together to facilitate processes of depth de-institutionalization and reanimation. Through applications of queer ecology to human relations and the development of ‘translanding’ practices, they invite deep diagnoses of the roots of colonial violence across scales, and propose strategies to undo and metabolize them in practice. In the summer of 2025, following two life-changing wildfires in their home territories, they embarked on a spiritual-political, scientific and practical apprenticeship with fire.
Sam’s contributions to the Apothecary draw equally from traditions of transdisciplinary social analysis engaged as a healing art, the politics of knowledge and language, a love for the imperfect magic of words, and lived experiments in queering love, kinship and commitment with both human and nonhuman beings. Beyond SSoMA, you can find them gossiping with their daughter and friends, losing themselves in labyrinths of etymology or soil, practicing the art of queer failure in natural building, accompanying their goat family who admirably refuse to be herded, or watching performances of Shibari artists they aspire to become.
Sam was born into a lineage of mixed white Anglo-European settler-colonial ancestry and grew up in Delaware (US) on the ancestral land of the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke peoples. They live transversally in Lisbon and the Alva Valley in Portugal, and can be found online at http://sarahamsler.com and @ssamsler.