Nikita Nelin works from both a somatic and creative perspective. He specializes in integrating the wide variety of expansive states (whether plant induced or simply lived) into an arc-of-life framework and the immediate felt experience of the body. He is trained in Hakomi Somatic Therapy, hands-on Temura method, and Compassionate Breathwork. He started out in the arts, having spent fifteen years as a writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and immersive journalism, and as a teacher having taught non-American narratives, the close-reading method, and narrative medicine for pre-med students. He holds a MFA from Brooklyn College, has done translation through Yale Press, research through the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and has been an associate fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Having once been designated as a “stateless” refugee, he brings an attunement to the ‘outsider’ perspective, the individual desire for belonging and its disappearance in the contemporary world.