What Mariana brings to the training is precisely this dual heritage—the animistic rawness of her ancestry, which has never been separated from the earth, and the precision of someone who has studied the nervous system, fascia, trauma, and interoception, and understands the body as living architecture. For her, these two ways of knowing do not contradict each other. They complement each other. Science names what ecosystems had already manifested.
Her view of the training program is that becoming a therapist is not about acquiring a technique to use on others. It is a process of becoming good earth—of composting what no longer serves a purpose, of creating internal conditions so that something more essential can emerge. Every person who arrives for the training carries their own medicine. The therapist’s work is to create the space where that medicine can finally reveal itself.
This perspective is nourished by voices from many territories—Joseph Rael, whose influence reached us directly through Jeff Romanowski; Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, who articulate in contemporary language what Indigenous cultures have always known about belonging and healing; Bill Plotkin, whose work offers a cartography of the soul deeply rooted in the living world; and by somatic neuroscience, polyvagal theory, and fascial research—what contemporary science is discovering about what the body holds and how it releases it.
It is from this convergence that Mariana guides the development of the Romanowski Method in Brazil—with technical rigor, sensitivity to the living world, and the natural confidence of someone who has known since childhood that the body and the earth speak the same language.