Jon Rousseau

Jon Rousseau holds a Masters of Social Work and has been facilitating groups for over twenty years in a wide variety of settings. Following his passion has led him into wilderness therapy with at-risk youth, residential treatment with troubled teens, naturalist and expedition programs for camps and schools, leading vision quests, story-telling, ancestral earth skills, drumming, ritual and rites of passage. He is a practitioner of ritual healing, divination and talismanic medicine. Assisting others in cultivating more intimate and purposeful relationships with their ancestors is at the core of his medicine work.

In the early and mid 1990’s Jon traveled to the Hopi and Northern Cheyenne reservations in Arizona and Montana, living with traditional-based families and was invited to share in their rich traditions and ceremonies. Those journeys marked the beginning of a personal quest for rediscovering the fundamental, but often forgotten value of indigenous cosmologies and traditions.

Eventually he crossed paths with Malidoma Some’, initiated elder and shaman of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, West Africa and has been working, studying and apprenticing with him for the past decade. Jon’s appreciation for the healing power of ritual, both personal and communal, has deepened tremendously as he continues to work with the ancient traditions of ritual healing. Jon remains committed to assisting others on their path of personal healing and the reclamation of their original purpose in this life.

Jon is currently a board member of Journeymen Asheville, a non-profit mentoring organization for teenage boys that provides ongoing mentoring circles and rites of passage experiences for male youth ages 12-18. He has led ritual and rites of passage ceremonies for this organization and sees the return of such formal coming of age experiences as a fundamental element for creating genuine community and the remaking of conscious culture.