As she says, the Method deepened her relationship with her ancestry. It opened the door to embracing diversity in all its forms. It made her, in her own words, more human and more egoless at the same time. She understands the training not as the acquisition of technique but as a process of becoming — a willingness to let go of who one has been in order to touch something more essential.
She sees the practitioner's path as one of composting the self: releasing what is no longer alive in order to become good soil — fertile ground for something the Earth needs to grow through us. This perspective shapes the training program she now leads as Director of the Romanowski Method in Brazil. To become a Romanowski practitioner, in Mariana's vision, is not to become an expert who holds the key to another person's healing. It is the opposite. It is to trust that every person already carries their own medicine — and that the deepest work of a practitioner is to create the conditions in which that medicine can finally surface.
Her approach to the training holds two worlds in the same hand: the anatomical and neuroscientific understanding of how the body stores and releases trauma — through fascia, through the nervous system, through the precise architecture of muscle, bone, and meningeal tissue — and the animistic, Earth-rooted wisdom that has always known what Western science is only beginning to name. Trauma, in this view, is not only a psychological event. It is a pattern held in connective tissue, in autonomic bracing, in the places where the body stopped trusting the world. And healing is not only a clinical process. It is a return — to the body, to the living Earth, to the intelligence that was never lost, only buried.
Her vision of the training draws from a wide constellation of voices, none of them Western alone. From Joseph Rael — Beautiful Painted Arrow, visionary healer of the Ute and Picuris Pueblo traditions and a foundational influence on Jeff Romanowski himself — she absorbed the understanding that every ceremony, every act of healing, is simultaneously personal and cosmic. From Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman and spokesman for the living Amazon, and from Ailton Krenak, philosopher and leader of the Krenak people of Brazil, she carries the conviction that we are not above nature managing it — we are inside it, accountable to it, participants in its intelligence.
From Tyson Yunkaporta, Aboriginal scholar and author of Sand Talk, she draws a way of thinking relationally — in spirals and stories rather than straight lines — that honors the knowledge held in place, in community, and in the body itself. And from her direct encounters with indigenous communities while teaching the Romanowski Method, she has received what no book alone can give: the lived experience of cultures that have never separated healing from belonging, or the body from the Earth. Alongside these, the voices of Joshua Schrei and Sophie Strand — who speak of becoming good soil, of composting the self in order to nourish what the world needs to grow — resonate deeply.
After the passing of Paula Gama, Mariana has been rediscovering her place within this healing lineage — not with grief alone, but with a deepening sense of calling. Everything she has been given — by glaciers and wild animals, by near-misses and close deaths, by the bodies that trusted her hands and the ecosystems that trusted her presence — she now brings forward. Not as credentials. As medicine.
Mariana holds degrees in psychology from UFPB and in ecopsychology from the International Ecopsychology Society, and is trained in the Wild Mind program at the Animas Valley Institute. She understands the Romanowski Method as transpersonal and ecopsychological in nature — a path toward the Essential: a connection to the body's wisdom, to the intelligence of the living world, and to the creative power of the cosmos that moves through all of it.