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About
RiverStar
The Name I Carry
My name is Emily Peterson. RiverStar is the name I carry in my healing, ceremonial, and spiritual work.
The name was given to me during my shamanic training. It did not feel like a title or a new identity, but like a remembrance. A recognition of a way I had always moved through the world: listening across the visible and unseen while remaining rooted in the body, the Earth, and a life of service.
RiverStar names the bridge my work inhabits: body and soul, Earth and sky, the human heart and the greater living field.
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The Path That Brought Me Here
As a child, I experienced horses, water, trees, and animals as presences rather than scenery. I felt at home in the quiet intelligence of nature and in forms of communication that did not depend upon words.
My path was not a straight one. My life has included trauma, eating disorder, addiction, depression, self-injury, and a near-fatal suicide attempt. I do not name these experiences as qualifications, nor do I believe suffering must be made sacred to have meaning. I name them because they shaped my humility, my compassion, and my respect for the extraordinary intelligence of the body and nervous system.
Healing, for me, was not about transcending my humanity. It was a gradual return to it: learning to inhabit my body, trust my inner knowing, receive love, experience joy, and participate in life again.
After many years away from horses, returning to them brought me back into an early language of relationship. They reminded me that healing does not have to be forced. It can arise through presence, consent, reciprocity, and the experience of belonging.
The Work I Do Now
For more than twenty years, I have worked at the intersection of embodied healing, trauma-responsive education, meditation, yoga, and spiritual practice. My experience has included facilitating trauma-healing programs, training professionals, developing a somatic public-health intervention, teaching groups, and accompanying individuals through intimate periods of healing and transformation.
Today, my work is rooted in shamanic healing and may include voice, soul retrieval, ceremonial fieldwork, Water Spirit healing, heart-coherence healing, light language, depossession, breathwork, and somatic spirit counseling. I also accompany people through grief, initiation, profound life transitions, and the dying process.
My role is not to fix another person or tell them who they are. I create conditions in which the body can soften, the heart can become audible, and people can remember their own relationship with soul, Spirit, and the living world.
The Living Streams of My Work
I created New Paradigm Yin - The Way of the Waters as an embodied and spiritually rooted approach to Yin Yoga. Each shape becomes a portal through which body and soul can listen, remember, and respond to one another. Stillness is not withdrawal from life; it is a living field of reception, integration, and transformation.
My work with horses takes form through 3H - Human • Horse • Harmonics, a relational approach to healing with horses, land, and the living field. We enter as guests, honoring horses as sovereign partners rather than instruments of human healing. The work is grounded in relationship before technique and reciprocity before extraction.
Across every form of my work, the deeper movement is the same: restoring relationship between body and soul, human and Earth, the visible and unseen.
What I Believe About Healing
I believe healing restores relationship.
Life has been participating with us all along. Healing helps us become available to that relationship and to be able to participate consciously in return.
It is not only the repair of what has been wounded. It is also the return of aliveness and our capacity for joy, curiosity, pleasure, creativity, wonder, and play.
I believe the body has wisdom, the heart has intelligence, and the living world is not separate from us. When we become more fully present within ourselves, we can meet one another and the Earth with greater coherence, compassion, sovereignty, and care.
Beyond the Work
I live in Jamaica Plain with my partner, Marc, and our two pups. I am happiest near water, among horses and trees, writing at the edge of something I do not yet understand, dancing to live music, or tending my small garden.
I think of myself less as an artist than as a weaver. Someone who listens for the relationships among things that appear separate and helps bring those relationships into form.
Training and Experience
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Mistress of the Craft — The Way of the Heart Shamanism
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Shamanic Reiki Master Teacher — Holy Fire® III Karuna®
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500-hour Registered Yoga Teacher
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Former Lead Trainer, Trauma-Responsive Innovations/TIMBo
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Seed creator of the somatic movement public health intervention developed through the Mandela Yoga Project
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Creator of New Paradigm Yin — The Way of the Waters
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Creator of 3H — Human • Horse • Harmonics
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B.A. in Applied Psychology, University of Illinois Chicago
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Graduate study in Government at Harvard University
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My formal training is one part of the story. I have also spent decades learning through practice, relationship, recovery, the body, the natural world, and teachers and healers from many walks of life. I remain a student of the mystery at the center of this work.