facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki
Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki is a psychotherapist offering alternative forms of preventative health care and holistic healing to adult and adolescent women and their impoverished communities in northern Brazil.
Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki trained as a teacher at Changombe TTC in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania before joining Maryknoll in August, 1990. She was assigned to Brazil in 1993 with a Mission Unit comprised of the different entities of the Maryknoll family of Sisters, Priests and Brothers and Lay Missioners.
Sister Efu, together with Sister Connie Pospisil and a Brazilian woman leader, Maria du Lyrdes Gomes, established the holistic health center AFYA, meaning ‘health’ in Swahili, the language spoken in Tanzania and parts of East Africa. AFYA offers alternative forms of preventative health care and holistic healing to adult and adolescent women and their impoverished communities in northern Brazil.
AFYA has a particularly empowering effect in that those who have participated in the healing process are encouraged to give of their own time to the center as volunteers. In this way, those who have leadership skills often devote themselves to helping others.
In 2011, Sister Efu spent a month in Haiti to help people overcome trauma following a massive earthquake there that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

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The Wild Feminine
The voice of the feminine in its diverse forms and expressions is rising and being heard again.

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Reimagining Women & Power
How can we reclaim and reimagine power to create new cultures grounded in interdependence and liberation?

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Bodyfulness
What if we were able to get to the root of cultural crises? What if we were able to transform cultures by transforming the ways in which we inhabited our bodies? When we understand that lying at the root of behaviours that cause harm is often embedded trauma we can start to relate to each other a lot more compassionately and understand that ideas/actions don't arise out of a vacuum. Somatics and physical self-awareness is essential to breaking free from oppressive systems and stories that are either internal or external to ourselves.

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A Journey Home
A unique learning journey with leading hearts and minds of our time. Learn new and adaptive ways of being that allow us to navigate these times of transition with resilience and creativity.