At that time she knew she was also being called to become a Worldweaver – revealing how words can weave a new world. And so began a career helping leaders understand how their words could create cultures and communities of harmonic integrity.

It was shortly after the birth of her first child, that the dormant intergenerational trauma erupted, and Stefania began a spiritual and psychoanalytic quest to bring her lineages’ lost children back to ‘living land’. She created her own practice called TrueStory, and began to receive and codify her work of Soulweaving through Storytelling.

Since then, Stefania has worked with women to help them remember their Soul’s purpose and retrieve the gifts borne through motherlines of ancestral pain. In a process that includes trauma-informed story sharing, journal writing, dreamwork, ceremony, art therapy, forest bathing and compassionate enquiry, she walks women back to their deepest truth – to begin again vividly living and ardently expressing it.

Her helping ancestors, both of blood and milk, have been blessedly many, and each is cherished in her heart. She knows that her work has come through her babcias, her grandmothers, who never crossed the ocean, and through this land known as Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. She thanks Saints Michael and Francis, Catherine and Teresa and Joan. She thanks her two beloved teachers, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Carl Jung – their Raft helping her cross perilous oceans. She honours Rumi and Hafez, Shakespeare, Thomas Traherne, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings* and so many other artists, mystics and writers who helped her understand how poetry transmutes pain.

Her Tūrangawaewae, her place to stand, is on Beacon Hill, Wellington – New Zealand’s capital city – on the Whetū Kairangi ridge, overlooking the Pacific Ocean that carried her parents to safety, and also under dark sky in the small Wairarapa community, Te Ngahere Whetū, the Forest of Stars, that she and her partner founded with a vision of regeneration – of both people and trees, birds and bees, and a mighty River and Her wetland. Together in community there, they are ‘commoner gardeners’, tending soil and soul.

Stefania resonates with women who know they were born with a Story to live and a story to tell. Her greatest joy is to witness those she works with come to live and write and share their deepest truth. She knows this is how we heal wounded generations, weaving a new world together with our Ancestors, Guides, Gaia and each other, making of this “gay great happening illimitably earth”, our bountiful, sacred and shared home.