A living story of healing and remembrance, where sacred arts guide us back to the Source of all life.
This is not just a series of images. It is a homecoming. A prayer in motion. A journey through the sacred arts of healing as we return to Source, to breath, to body, to land, to the Mother who has always held us.
Through the lens of ecosomatic healing, we begin to notice what is quiet yet alive. Ecosomatic wellness recognizes the deep, living relationship between body, mind, spirit, and the natural world. The nervous system mirrors the forest. Breath moves like wind over mountains. The heartbeat echoes the drum. In this remembering, the body is no longer separate from Earth. It is Earth, listening to itself.
Practices such as mindfulness, sylvotherapy, somatic movement, bodywork, ritual art, plant-based sensory healing, and earth-centered prayer reconnect us to our original belonging. Through creative and immersive experiences, these practices become bridges between ancestral wisdom and modern healing pathways. They restore not only balance and resilience, but relationship between human and soil, memory and muscle, spirit and bone.
In this ceremony, healing unfolds where bodywork meets prayer, where science meets spirit, and where ancestral wisdom speaks to contemporary care. Touch, movement, ritual, and song flow together like rivers in confluence, carrying us back into wholeness.
We witness practices of body and land and integrative healing pathways that weave plant consciousness and Filipino lineages with modern trauma care, mental health, and well-being. Counseling, somatic work, herbal plants, and energy healing move together as one. Healing does not divide. It unites, remembering that true care is always relational.
Ritual becomes a language of remembering. We begin with breath and fire, cleanse with herbs and song, share cacao to soften the heart, drum to call the spirit home, and pour libations to the land in gratitude. Water, earth, air, and fire are not symbols here. They are living teachers. Through movement, chant, prayer, and rest, we cross the bridge between worlds. Each ritual becomes a doorway back to presence, back to wholeness, back to Creator.
To heal is to remember. To remember is to rematriate, to return to a Mother-rooted way of being, where care, reciprocity, vulnerability, and Earth stewardship lead the way. Rematriation is the turning of our faces toward the soil, the returning of stories to the rivers, and the restoring of culture to communities that keep it alive. It is the living promise that the future belongs to both children and land.
In this integrative space, pain is not a flaw but a threshold. Conversations around mental health, trauma, and recovery are held with tenderness for what longs to be seen. We walk slowly. We soften. We practice coherence, body, heart, and Earth remembering one another, until the unseen becomes felt and the felt becomes whole.
At the heart of this remembering are the Babaylan, the Baylan, the Filipino healers, seers, ritual keepers, and culture bearers who have always known that healing is communal, ecological, and spiritual. Filipino healing practices never went away. They were carried in bodies, in prayers, in plants, and in quiet lineages of remembering. What we are recalling now is not something new. It is something ancient returning.
We have come to realize that our culture’s failure to honor ancestry and deep family stories has left many of us with a sense of disconnection. As Stephen Jenkinson writes, “What we suffer from most is culture failure, amnesia of ancestry and deep family story, sham rites of passage, and no instruction on how to live with the world around us, with our dead, or with our history.” This forgetting lives not only in the mind, but in the body, in the nervous system, and in the way we no longer know how to grieve, how to belong, or how to listen to the land.
This work is a remembering of that contract.
As Kay Louise Aldred writes in Somatic Shamanism, “The purpose of Somatic Shamanism is for you to access your fleshy knowing and in doing so, release blocked energy, emotion, and sensation, and so improve all aspects of your health and wellbeing. The added benefit is that through this you also gift liberation to, and improve the wellness of, your ancestral lines. As traditional shamanic teaching suggests, what you resolve for yourself you do for seven generations before and seven generations ahead. You no longer repeat, and instead you repair.”
This documentary walks that path of repair.
Guided by shamanic principles and ancestral memory, the journey moves in four directions, beginning with the East Star, toward reconciliation, re-storying, and re-imagining our relationship with soul, spirit, culture, and nature. It is a return to roots. A recalling of our roots, the living, breathing origins that still move through us.
To truly know who we are, we must know where we come from. Our intangible heritage is not something we archive. It is something we live. Philippine culture lives not only in what we wear, but in what we plant, chant, and protect. It lives in the blessings of elders, in hands meeting soil, and in gatherings where we witness one another’s return to life.
This is more than remembrance. It is a call to protect what was entrusted to us, so the songs, stories, and prayers of our people can endure. May we walk with humility, open our hearts, and become living vessels of culture, carrying this legacy forward for generations yet to come.
As Talajica holds space with reverence and Sitio Arya carries the stories with dignity, we walk beside culture bearers and guardians of tradition, amplifying their voices with respect. Guided by the spirit of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (RA 8371), we honor that preservation is not only memory. It is justice, responsibility, and relationship. Here, storytelling becomes Seva, a selfless offering to humanity, to culture, and to the living Earth.
This documentary is a threshold. It asks us to slow down, to feel, to root, and to remember. Healing arrives as both light and shadow, in stillness and in song, in the quiet of standing barefoot in the rain and realizing we were never separate.
Ecosomatic: A Documentary of the Unseen is a return to Source, a rematriation of belonging, and a reweaving of culture with Earth. It is a ceremony of the ancestral cycle of life, calling us to walk with humility, listen deeply, and become vessels of remembrance, so that the songs, stories, and prayers of our people endure, and the Mother is honored in all we create.
Honoring the Spring Equinox reminds us that balance is sacred. As day and night find equality, we are called to reflect on harmony within ourselves—between work and rest, giving and receiving, action and reflection. The Earth awakens, and so do we. This is a time to plant intentions, nurture growth, and embrace the natural rhythm of change. Just as seeds begin to sprout, so too can our hearts and lives bloom with new possibilities.
In this sacred transition, we are reminded: balance creates harmony, stillness cultivates growth, and as the light grows stronger, so does our capacity for healing, love, and transformation. May we honor the cycles of nature, our ancestors, and the Mother in all that we do.
Back to the Roots: Rematriation Ceremony 2025
