BLACK CENTERED. QUEER SEEDED. NEURO-EXPANSIVE.
What if liberation is a practice, not a destination? What if freedom is something we cultivate daily through how we heal, create, work, parent, and love?
Woods Collective is a living pedagogy where healing becomes liberation, and liberation becomes a way of life.
Woods Collective offers therapeutic ritual and land-based nervous system support for liberatory living. We curate ancestral care, somatic rhythms, neurodivergent wisdom, and intuitive structure to help people move through systems & time with more tenderness and choice.
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Beyond Pathology
We do not believe that healing is about fixing a broken person. Healing is remembering and integrating wholeness in a broken system. By moving beyond pathology we can notice and honor what is trying to unfold. In systems that work to diminish us, healing can open us to the unknown inner universe we carry, and often abandon to survive.
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Our Body
Together, we understand how the body holds history, builds protection, and carries the capacity for joy. We work with the nervous system, sensation, fascia, movement, and breath to liberate our cells from past harm, in order to make friends with the unknown bright future. As we evolve our own body, we begin see it in right relationship with the human, plant, animal and earth body around us.
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Our Lineage
One of the first survival strategies we learn as children is to make ourselves the enemy. Our internal critic distorts our memory with shame and guilt. Naming how systems — racism, colonialism, homophobia, capitalism — imprint on the nervous system across generations can help us externalize and eradicate our oppressor. We learn to interact with our inheritance from a place of safety and compassionate love.
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Our Relationship
We all need love. Relationships are the sacred spaces where we can expand into becoming. Due to the realities of collective trauma, they are also the places where we experience violence. Together we explore how early bonds, ruptures, and longings shape present experiences, and how new patterns of intimacy, trust, and repair become possible.
MEET THE COLLECTIVE/FAM
OUR FOUNDER AND LEAD PRACTITIONER
LaVoya, “V” Woods, MSW (ve/ver)
Hi, I'm V Woods, I study and practice black womanist care, liberation psychology, neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and decolonial education, all within a queer afro-diasporic cosmology. I apply what I learn to my own life and to help others curate the life of their dreams. I do not believe that we can find safety and joy by assigning ourselves to the confines and torture of white supremacy culture. I want to live outside of that imagination and the people I serve want that for themselves to.
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We cannot and will not heal in a vacuum. Individual healing is best scaffolded when it runs parallel to interpersonal healing as we gain more insight and capacity.
Black people and other folks of the global majority need our healing to be as expansive and ancestrally rooted as we are.
The wounds we are healing from are multi-dimensional and so are we.
We never learned how to have boundaries, grieve in the tradition of our people, and hold ourselves accountable with unconditional love. It is never too late to learn.
We have a direct line to ancestral wisdom that colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery could not erase.
We are actively in a global awakening that is unlocking deconstruction and healing on many levels: psychological, intellectual, somatic, ancestral, political, spiritual, and emotional, to name a few.
Western psychology is a helpful tool and must be critically engaged through a decolonial lens to ensure ongoing safey and cultural sovereignty
We have everything we need to heal. You are the medicine.
Black Women and queer non-binary folks really are the moment, in, through, and across time.
I am a conduit, I am here to lovingly disrupt what needs disruption and support you in amplifying what is aligned.
We need to be able to ground our healing work in nature, in the cities and spaces that birthed us, on the soil and in the water of our ancestors
V Woods was born on unceded Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land (Queens, NY), and returned about a decade ago to southern ancestral lands in Lumbee, Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, Cheraw, Occaneechi, Shakori, Mánu: Yį Įsuwą (Catawba) territory (Durham, NC). You can find ver at local spots, giving speeches, shakin ass, and hiking river trails. Diasporic soul place: South Africa
OUR STEWARDSHIP TEAM
Lovie Woods (she/her) Client Care Administrative Lead
Lovie is a social work student at an HBCU women's college and a daughter of the collective. She brings warmth, community, and deep attention to detail to every client interaction. A baker, retail manager, and former production lead at Bright Black Candles, Lovie has always known how to hold people with care. North Carolina's trees, rivers, and mountains have been an important part of her own healing. She knows what it means to find restoration in the land.
Diasporic soul place: Belize
Kayla Niesy Woods (she/her) Client Care Administrative Assistant
Kayla is an education student at an HBCU women's college and a daughter of the collective. Responsible, caring, and deeply ambitious, she has been a mini-teacher's assistant since she was just four years old. Kayla comes to this work with a heart for social justice and the belief that safe, compassionate learning can help us build a better world for our descendants.
Diasporic soul place: Italy
