We’re looking forward to introducing you to Dahlia Quintanilla. Check out our conversation below.
Dahlia, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
Thank you for having me. This is a fun one that paradoxically, brings up a moment of pain.
I recently had an intense overwhelm of fear and panic when I was visiting Chicago for work and realized that ICE agents were having a photo op down the street from where me and my husband were staying. We are both visibly Brown – I’m Mexican-Indigenous and my love is Colombian.
Unable to escape the plans the both of us had, we were extra careful and turned our already hypersensitive bodies into “head on a swivel” mode.
It was by divine scheduling that I had a body-work appointment with my go-to massage healer in Pilsen.
I expressed the fear body present for me and she tended to my mind, body, and spirit. She invited me into exploring my ancestral lineage and leaning on their wisdom, support, and resilience to move forward.
That night at the hotel I sat down to learn that my Indigenous ancestors are STILL ALIVE TODAY. The Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico are famously known for their otherworldly long-distance running – this ancestral endurance living in my very cells. I sat in the realization for hours with pride streaming through my blood.
So much felt alive in me and re-awakened. I wrote more about this experience on my substack: Liberated Body. We explore raw and vulnerable stories like this because the ripples of empathy and understanding? They’re medicine.
Aren’t we grateful for the people in our lives who nudge us toward our own inner wells of power?
Shoutout all the ancestors in the house rn. May we remember. And maybe this is your sign to learn more about your ancestral lineage <3
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Dahlia, founder of Liberated Learning, and I help people remember how we’re meant to learn together.
My work begins with a simple truth: humans are designed for community, curiosity, and connection – but most education systems teach the opposite. We’re taught to compete instead of collaborate, to perform instead of explore, to disconnect from our bodies, each other, and the earth.
Liberated Learning is my offering to the world – resources like the Somatic SEL workbook Check-in, Reflect, Connect, give young people and facilitators practical tools for emotional literacy, self-awareness, and authentic relating – the skills that matter most but get practiced the least.
The workbook is a seed. The vision is a forest.
I’m building the Lighthouse Learning ecosystem – a living, breathing model for education as village restoration.
Imagine learning spaces where nature and community are centered, where every person’s genius is honored, where intergenerational connection is the foundation, and where young people don’t just learn about the world – they actively participate in it. Where we remember that we’re not meant to do any of this alone.
The Lighthouse model is flexible, embodied, and rooted in ancient wisdom about how humans actually thrive together. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s a framework that adapts to each community’s unique needs while holding core values: self-accountability, compassion, curiosity, and unity.
This work found me through my own healing journey unlearning what the colonized education system embeds in our bodies: compliance over curioisity, separation over community, assimilation over authenticity.
Now I’m inviting others who feel this calling to build the new paradigm together. You can learn more at www.liberatedlearning.org/join
The village is rising. The lighthouses are forming. And if you care about the future of education, you’re invited 🙂
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
Before the world told me to be small, I was a child who could feel everything – the aliveness of trees, the web connecting all beings, the way learning happened naturally when I followed curiosity like a golden thread.
I was the kid who felt too deeply, who saw patterns and connections that others missed.
As a young person, I could feel connection beneath the surface divisions, oneness.
I felt the pain of fragmentation – in my family, my community, my classroom – and I instinctively wanted to weave things back together.
That’s why I became an educator.
To weave learning with students, practice cultivating the connection of humanness through learning.
I was bright and unboundaried in the most tragically beautiful way – I learned that my brightness threatened people and discovered that my sensitivity was “too much”.
I was the one who noticed when someone was hurting.
Who couldn’t unsee injustice and couldn’t stay quiet about it.
The world tries to tell us to be: polite, small, singular, simple, safe.
Yet we are born: powerful, expansive, multifaceted, complex, revolutionary, FREE.
After years of trying to fit, I’ve been loving choosing to embody the truth of who I’ve always been.
What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?
Healing my mother wound and father wound continues to profoundly shift the way I relate to the defining wounds of my life and take care of my emotional world.
Through body-centered practices, art-based somatic therapy, EMDR, healthy partnership, ritual, reflection (video journaling, writing, poems, etc), art making and more, I’ve been able to alchemize the energies of harm from the capital T trauma I experienced in my childhood.
My mother didn’t have the emotional availability to tend to her first daughter, me. We had an unstable relationship where I rarely felt accepted and cherished by her. I’ve come to see how this was because of her capacity, not my worth.
I’ve learned how to mother myself and witness how my connection to Mother Earth has stayed deeply present in me since I was a child. Somatic nurturing practices, affirming my beauty, intelligence, grace into a glass of water and then drinking it, and deep stretching all come to mind when I think of healing the mother wound.
My father carried out violent cycles of harm he learned from his very abusive father. Verbal, physical, emotional, psychological, my dad would snap at the smallest inconvenience, creating an home atmosphere of fear and worry.
My dad also sexually abused me multiple times when I was 10-12. This is the darkest, deepest wounding of my life. My body developed a fainting condition because of this extreme, disturbing violation from the man I was suppose to be able to trust the most.
For years, I dissociated from my body, suppressed my needs and became whatever other people wanted me to be.
I learned love = abuse and conditional. Healing has helped me unravel that lie and feel the expansiveness of unconditional, healthy, safe love.
I have been working on being able to offer understanding, compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness to my parents for the ways they transferred the harm that was given to them, to me.
To me, forgiveness isn’t about excusing harm – it’s about refusing to let that harm define my present. It’s choosing to process the emotion and be unburdened so I can live with presence, security, and agency to create a love-filled life.
This is why restorative justice has been such a central part of my work and offerings – learning to repair these cycles of harm is at the heart of my own personal healing journey.
The largest healing force has been re-connecting to my body through somatics – healing my fainting condition and reclaiming the embodied safety that was stolen from me. Now I guide others back to their bodies, to feel their own power to heal.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What’s a belief or project you’re committed to, no matter how long it takes?
I’m committed to restoring the village – the kind of learning and healing ecosystems our ancestors knew, where children grow in circles of care, where communities hold each other through transformation, where we remember how to be together.
The Lighthouse Learning model is my offering to generations of fractured education that severed us from our bodies, our lineages, our collective wisdom.
At the heart of my vision is healing-centered learning spaces where young people aren’t just ‘fixed’ but truly seen – where restorative justice, somatic practice, and Indigenous wisdom guide us back to right relationship.
This is generational work. And I’m inviting co-conspirators who feel the call to rebuild learning as an act of love.
Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. If you laid down your name, role, and possessions—what would remain?
Unconditional love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.liberatedlearning.org
- Instagram: @dahliaquintanilla
- Other: https://substack.com/@liberatedbody
https://bio.site/liberatedlearning
https://liberatedlearning.org/blog/
Image Credits
@maxrgustafson (instagram))
