Why are we called Mother Bear?
Our intention is to protect and honor animals and each other—in the way a mother bear protects her cubs. How we treat the least among us registers in our psyches and nervous systems. When we make a choice to protect and honor the sacredness of life within ourselves, others, and animals we re-remember our inherent worth and intrinsic interconnectedness.
Current research shows that interactions between humans and other creatures increase physiological health, social competence, and learning opportunities for children and the elderly. Mother Bear Sanctuary brings these experiences to these populations to effect a positive, healing change.
Thank you for supporting this mission.
Co-founders of Mother Bear Sanctuary + Retreat Center
Barbra White, M.A., Di.Hom., TCTSY 200RYT, Ph.D. Candidate
Ecopsychologist • Nature Mystic • Author • Labor-Trafficking Survivor • Co-founder of Mother Bear Sanctuary
Barbra White is an ecopsychologist, nature mystic, author, trauma-informed educator, labor-trafficking survivor, and co-founder and Executive Director of Mother Bear Sanctuary in Michigan. For more than 25 years, her work has explored a central question: How do we restore our belonging, to ourselves, one another, the Earth, and the Divine. Barbra’s work is inseparable from her lived experience. A near-death experience at age four left her with an embodied knowing that Love is larger than the circumstances we endure. Growing up amid profound violence, she discovered very young that nature could become a place of refuge, relationship, and spiritual guidance.
Nature became her first teacher. She practiced Qi Gong beside a childhood pond, learned stillness and presence from cranes and other animals, and experienced the living Earth not as scenery, but as relationship. These early experiences became the roots of what she would later study formally as ecopsychology, the understanding that human well-being cannot ultimately be separated from our relationship with the more-than-human world (land, animals, nature)
In her twenties, Barbra devoted herself to spiritual practice and service, spending thousands of hours listening to and working intimately with people navigating trauma, shame, spirituality, relationships, and transformation. Those encounters eventually gave rise to the Self Acceptance Process® and her books on self-acceptance, trauma, spirituality, and healing. After sixteen years of professional practice, she pursued graduate study in Transpersonal Psychology and Ecopsychology at Naropa University. She later deepened her training in somatic attachment work, polyvagal-informed approaches, equine gestalt healing, and Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga.
A visionary encounter with a Mother Bear eventually called Barbra toward the creation of Mother Bear Sanctuary, a nonprofit animal sanctuary and ecotherapy center founded on a simple understanding: We rescue animals who help rescue people. Today, Mother Bear Sanctuary provides nature- and animal-assisted trauma-healing experiences, including free programming for survivors of human trafficking, and other marginalized and trauma-impacted communities. Barbra’s work brings together nervous-system regulation, somatic practice, radical self-acceptance, animal-assisted healing, spiritual practice, community, and direct relationship with the living Earth.
Rather than viewing trauma solely as something happening inside an individual, Barbra understands trauma as also involving ruptures in relationship and belonging. Healing, therefore, can include restoring relationship: with the body, community, animals, land, Spirit, and the larger web of life. This understanding is now at the center of her doctoral research at Prescott College. Her dissertation explores a Multi-Modality Ecopsychology Approach to Healing Trauma, with the goal of developing a replicable framework that therapists, trauma programs, and healing communities can adapt to bring nature, embodiment, compassion, and relational belonging more fully into trauma recovery.
Barbra is the author of multiple books, including Why Self Acceptance Is So Powerful, Self Acceptance Process, Finding the One, Magnificent You, Trauma Can Be the Fertilizer to Your Bloom, and Becoming a Nature Mystic. She has appeared on national programs, including The Sound of Transformation with Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith, and has interviewed leading authors and spiritual teachers through her podcast Beautiful Earth.
She has also contributed to human-trafficking prevention and survivor advocacy efforts in Michigan and brings the perspective of both a practitioner and a survivor of labor trafficking to this work.
Through all of these roles, survivor, mystic, researcher, teacher, activist, and sanctuary founder, the thread remains the same: Healing is not simply becoming better adjusted to a disconnected world. It is remembering that we belong to our bodies, one another, the Earth.
Barbra lives and works at Mother Bear Sanctuary with her beloved partner, Dave Tuscany, their animal family ( Mother Bear’s Healing Herd) and continuing to explore what becomes possible when humans remember that the more than human world (nature), humans, and the divine are NOT separate.
Dave Tuscany
Dave is a true Servant Leader who focuses on helping men to “wake up and step up” to become examples of the Mature Masculine.
Dave has been an Owner/Broker of a Successful Real Estate Company in Metro Detroit, Michigan for the past 30 years. He has introduced a program called “The Inside Circle Experiment” showing salespeople how to be embodied, open-hearted, and mindful in the real estate business. Although mindfulness has been practiced for millennia, the concept is new to the sales industry.
Dave is a Certified Co-Leader of the ManKind Project, which teaches men emotional intelligence and maturity while focusing on integrity and accountability—core values he lives in his own life. Dave is a certified Life Coach with a niche in Shadow Awareness and Sexual Shadow Healing for men. He truly lives his passion—to make a difference in the world so our children and grandchildren will be safer and live in a more healed world.
