Hello! My name is Öykü Nur (she/her). I’m a queer, femme, mixed race SWANA/Middle Eastern, co-healer/therapist, born and raised in Turkey. I’m practicing from the unceded Tongva land. As an expressive artist, decolonial ethnographer, transformative justice facilitator, educator/student, and now a co-healer, I stay committed to turning (or returning) to our bodies, each other, and the land for care, steadiness, and inspiration towards healing and liberation.

While I frequently call in cultural relational, experiential, and expressive arts modalities, I center embodiment and body-based approaches. I envision bodies as sacred vessels that hold our stories, minds, and possibilities. I’m most aligned with politicized somatic lineages that recognize the historical and ongoing impact of oppressive, supremacist systems on our bodies and ways of connecting. And I invite us to stay curious to the otherwise, welcoming holistic and ancestral healing technologies as compass or companion.

To echo Prentis Hemphill, I view healing as “a process, often life-long, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.” My goal, as a co-healer, is to facilitate enough spaciousness for the capacities and experiences that you may want to restore, reawaken, or discover anew, both individually and relationally. I believe connection moves (and deepens) at the pace of trust and choice. “Co-healing” is another word for inviting you and me both to a collaborative space of curiosity, respect, care, and creativity.

I deeply enjoy creating with folks who identify as people of color/the Global Majority, queer, gender-expansive, and immigrant adults. I specifically welcome cultural workers, all creative humans, conflict transformers, organizers, and other care practitioners, including therapists. I am passionate about healing work with complex trauma --collective, generational, and developmental--, grief, loss, home and belonging, anxiety as well as creative expression, play, and joy.

I’m currently participating in the intermediate-level BIPOC Somatic Experiencing training (expected graduation next year). I’m trained in creative arts-focused EMDR. I continue to grow alongside the Practice Ground community at the Embodiment Institute.

My formal education includes a Masters in Clinical Social Work (MSW) as well a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with Gender &; Sexuality Studies certification. Informally and unceasingly, I am educated with/by the ancient strength of olive trees.

Throughout the week, I create nooks for drumming (darbuka) and movement, tending to herbs, sharing belly laughs with loved ones, dreaming with the ocean, and resting into & reciprocating the earth’s life-affirming touch.