Lena Krystyna-Tishkovskaya Wiley is a multidimensional creative with a love for visually capturing the interrelating beauty of nature and the female form in addition to bringing holistic wellness and ancestral veneration to the forefront of her work. Lena was born in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, and adopted into a diverse family and community of helpers, healers, and social activists in the Bay Area, California, which greatly shaped her passion for holistic wellness and social work.

In 2020, she launched her online integrative Botánica that combines wellness offerings infused with her ancestral connection to indigenous-rooted healing practices, herbalism, and Afro-diasporic spirituality. In 2021, she began offering tarot readings publicly, a skill found in her younger years that she has since further developed via ancestral rootwork, mentorship, and intuitive development.

Lena’s deep connection to esoteric and indigenous forms of healing, in combination with her intuitive, clairvoyant/clairsentient/ clairaudient, and empathic capacity, influences her efforts to promote messages of mystical harmony with nature, femininity, sensuality, love, and oneness with Spirit. She seeks to continue to balance her clinical background in trauma-informed therapy with her alternative, de-colonized, anti-patriarchal approach to holistic health and artistic expression.

Education and Spiritual Development

Lena achieved her Bachelor’s in Sociology in 2020 and Master’s in Social Work with a concentration in Community Mental Health in May of 2022. During her recent studies, she began combining her “alternative” approaches to wellness with her mainstream education and training. She deepened her experiential knowledge and practice of clinical, trauma-informed, somatic, art-infused, and dialectical therapy for primarily brown and black communities in both Spanish and English, which remains a steady element of her current work.

Lena began deepening her lifelong spiritual journey upon uncovering more about her ancestral connection to Western Africa and the Caribbean in 2020. She is currently a student/devotee of Ifa divination and spiritual practice that was developed by her Yoruban ancestors. With the combined mentorship and instruction of Chief Sékou Alaje, she is learning how to further fuel much of her purpose and life work to the decolonization, de-stigmatization, and preservation of African-rooted spirituality.