Hi, I'm Maria Talero

As a young girl leaping barefoot from rock to rock, I learned that I didn't fall in the creek when I trusted my body. Deliberate thinking wasn't necessary – in my endless hours of exploring my neighborhood creek with my little dog, my body would effortlessly find footholds and handholds in the rocks and boulders. My bare feet knew intuitively where to go.

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Later, as a PhD student in philosophy, I gravitated to the formal study of that phenomenon unfolding between my body and the creek: I entered the world of phenomenology. Then, as a professional philosopher, I specialized in a radical interdisciplinary area called Embodied Cognition that overturns the centuries-old Western notion that the mind and body are two separate things. Instead, it argues, the mind IS the body – or more precisely, the mind is the body-world relationship. Our bodies are in an ongoing, dynamic interaction, like a conversation, with the world around us that either limits or enhances our capacity to think and act.

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I left academia to apply my understanding of this body-world relationship to public engagement on climate change. As an educator and community organizer for 10 years, I drew on social psychology to create high-trust learning environments in which participants could overcome their psychological barriers to climate engagement. But I hit a wall: the voluntaristic theory of change of many liberal climate activists. The way out of the crisis was "simple" – everyone should just wake up, understand how much trouble we're in, and take action. But I saw this wasn't enough.

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In organizational consulting, I realized that unacknowledged power dynamics were like the rocks and boulders in my childhood creek – shaping people's behavior more than any values or principles. To access real change in teams, I needed to gently awaken interconnectedness and trust. But it was painful to see how these deeper shifts would then threaten the status quo, which often requires people to suppress their true feelings and conform.

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Finally, I stopped shifting gears and sat down face to face with myself. It took 1.5 years of somatic trauma healing work to bring me into contact with the incredible flow of moment-by-moment truth-telling inside my body – things I used to ignore, like the clenching of my stomach muscles or the way I would hold my breath when stressed. These somatic sensations were my body talking to me, and listening to them was completely transformative. Once I discovered this, I couldn’t stop – I took a deep dive into practitioner training, and here I am.

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I didn’t land on this work by following a straight line. My path has been shaped by a long process of turning toward what’s real. I started in academia, drawn to philosophy and the study of embodied cognition - how our minds emerge from the body’s relationship with the world. Then I spent years facilitating climate engagement and organizational change, trying to help people connect with what matters most. But over and over, I hit the same wall: the surface-level answers weren’t enough. Real transformation only happened when people were able to feel what was really going on in their bodies - and be met there without shame. That’s what brought me to this work. I stopped trying to fix systems and started listening more closely to the intelligence of the body. Everything I do now comes from that shift.​​​​