Meet the Founder

About Norah Holsten

Norah Holsten is the founder of Shamamama, a ministry devoted to nurturing the soul through grief, transition, and becoming. She is a grief guide, spiritual companion, community builder, death care practitioner, yoga teacher, photographer, and artist whose work lives at the intersection of healing, creativity, spirituality, and our relationship with the natural world.

Norah's path has been shaped by both dedicated study and the profound teachings of lived experience. Through loss, illness, trauma, recovery, and resilience, she has come to understand that healing is rarely a straight line and that becoming whole does not mean returning to who we once were. Sometimes, it means learning to meet ourselves anew. These experiences have cultivated an approach grounded in compassion, curiosity, and deep respect for each person's unfolding journey. Rather than offering easy answers or attempting to fix what is broken, Norah creates space for people to be witnessed, supported, and accompanied through life's most tender thresholds.

For more than two decades, Norah has explored the connections between mindfulness, spirituality, nature, creativity, and healing. Her educational lineage includes the Living Yoga Training Program at Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville, where she immersed herself in Integral Yoga, meditation, and selfless service. In December 2024, she completed her 200-hour Raja Yoga Teacher Training through Anuttara Yoga Shala, deepening her practice of yoga philosophy, breathwork, mindfulness, and embodied awareness.

In March 2026, Norah completed the Nine Keys School of Death Arts under the mentorship of death midwife, artist, and educator Narinder Bazen. This immersive apprenticeship explored conscious dying, grief tending, home funerals, green burial, end-of-life planning, ritual, ethics, and community death care, including exploring liminality through art making. The experience profoundly shaped Norah's understanding of death as both a sacred teacher and an integral part of living well.

Her learning extends far beyond formal training. Over the years, Norah has studied alongside healers, therapists, herbalists, spiritual teachers, elders, and practitioners from diverse traditions. Her ongoing inquiry encompasses contemplative practice, somatic healing, traditional plant medicine, ecological spirituality, ritual, and the many ways we learn to inhabit our bodies, tend our wounds, and reconnect with what gives life meaning. She approaches these traditions with humility, honoring their distinct lineages while cultivating a personal practice rooted in authenticity, compassion, and connection.

Before founding Shamamama, Norah spent more than two decades in the creative industries, developing extensive experience in leadership, organizational development, and collaborative production. Working in complex, high-pressure environments taught her how to bring people together, navigate uncertainty, and create a sense of calm amid complexity. Today, she brings those same skills to community building, grief support, workshops, retreats, and one-on-one spiritual companionship.

A lifelong photographer, artist, and storyteller, Norah sees creativity as a way of listening—to ourselves, to the world around us, and to the mysteries that cannot always be expressed in words. Through photography, writing, and visual storytelling, she invites others to slow down, notice what is often overlooked, and rediscover the extraordinary within the ordinary. Forests, rivers, mountains, wildlife, and the changing seasons are among her greatest teachers, continually reminding her of the wisdom of cycles, the necessity of rest, the inevitability of change, and the possibility of renewal.

Norah's work is also shaped by a deep reverence for the Earth and a desire to cultivate more meaningful ways of living, dying, and caring for one another. She believes that grief belongs not only to the individual but also to the collective—to our families, our communities, our ancestors, and the living world. When we create spaces where sorrow can be witnessed rather than hidden, where death can be discussed rather than feared, and where people can show up for one another without needing to have all the answers, something essential begins to return: our sense of belonging.

Through Shamamama, Norah is cultivating more than a healing practice. She is nurturing a sanctuary, a community, and a growing collective of people devoted to tending the thresholds of life with greater presence, tenderness, and care. Her vision encompasses grief circles, spiritual companionship, educational programs, retreats, community rituals, creative collaboration, environmental stewardship, green burial advocacy, and death education. At its heart is a desire to help create a culture in which grief is honored, death is approached with reverence, creativity is welcomed as a form of healing, and no one has to navigate life's most profound transitions entirely alone.

Shamamama is an ongoing act of becoming—an invitation to gather at the edges of what we know, to honor what has been lost, to make room for what is emerging, and to find our way toward one another.

At the heart of everything Norah offers is a simple belief:

Healing happens in relationship—with ourselves, with one another, with those who came before us, and with the Earth that holds us all.

Even in our deepest grief, beauty remains. Connection can be rediscovered. Meaning can take new form. And somewhere within the uncertainty of every ending, there is the possibility of becoming more fully alive.

Welcome to Shamamama. A place to grieve, to grow, to remember, and to become.