Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley River
Ashley, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My path to serve the feminine and what she desires to birth began lifetimes ago, and this life has been a journey of remembering. I grew up witnessing, for witnessing life in all its cycles and how others interact in the realities we weave, in my opinion, is where we can extract the most profound teachings of this cosmic, creative human experience and remember who we are as artists of life. I have always felt connected to a higher knowing and purpose ever since I was a child. My creative light was nurtured by my mystical, free-spirited grandmother, who raised me on all things esoteric, art, and Venusian pleasures. When she passed, my whole world was shattered and reconfigured in a new way. Her death initiated me into my psychic and creative gifts and catapulted me onto a path of divination and the oracular healing arts alongside my art. It was then that I inherited some of the most pivotal tools for my path: my grandmother’s film cameras, a vintage tarot deck and astrology textbook, and her love forever imprinted in my heart.
After a couple of years of formal art school with a focus on design and illustration, I went on to spend a decade deepening my studies in various forms of divination, psychic mediumship, energy healing, breathwork, Quantum Healing Hypnosis, past life regression, ceremonial tattooing, and plant spirit communication/earth shamanism with teachers, mentors, and guides, both in form and unseen while simultaneously pursuing my career in film photography, design, and illustration. This path guided me to allow more and more of my authentic expression and how creation and the feminine force move through me in the most soul-aligned way. This led me to my unique medicine and to hear my soul’s song, letting this lead the way and teach me how my soul wishes to express life through me.
In 2014, I began hand-weaving what I understood as “light” tattoos, and in 2016, I channeled my Soul Tattoo® modality of alchemical ceremonial tattooing as a bridge between soul and embodiment. Soul Tattoos was the birth of a new lineage of light weaving that catapulted me into a level of expansion, devotion, and service beyond what I could imagine at the time. This led to facilitating, teaching, and sharing feminine transformation, creative liberation, and soul essence expression through tattoo alchemy with thousands of people worldwide. It also led to co-leading over 600 students and apprentices in the art of Sacred Tattooing through the School of the Sacred Arts, as well as passing the torch along to apprentices privately training with me in Soul Tattoos from the U.S. to New Zealand.
In 2019, I signed with Sounds True, wrote my book, Tending to the Sacred, and created my oracle deck, Messages from the Heart of the Divine, released in 2021.In 2022, I began writing my second book, which fiercely and radically shifted my creative path and life, opening me to a fuller expression of soul truth, desire, and divine artistry. I have been on an initiatory journey guided by this book and cannot wait to share it when it is fully cooked and ready to be born. I currently reside in Los Angeles, where I offer Soul Tattoo ceremonies in group ceremonies and immersions with 1:1 clients. I also offer Soul Regressions and Creative Mentorship (online and in person), and I lead a small online group apprentice container yearly to unveil the mysteries of feminine creation. Along my journey, I have transformed through a million deaths and rebirths as the feminine does to step into why I am here, following the voice of my soul to create, guide, and lead. I will continue to dream big, make art, follow my hunger, honor my prophecy, let my creative flame and desire lead, and dedicate my path to soul song liberation because what we can create is infinite and needed. I hope to inspire you along the way.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The journey has definitely been challenging, but learning to cultivate grace makes it smoother. Moving through big initiations of death and loss are the experiences that have brought me closer to my power, wisdom, and light: deaths, breakups, miscarriages, public humiliation, ostracization, karmic and ancestral healing, divorce, projections, and more. These initiations of death are also really a birthing and rebirth you into new realities. Awakening isn’t easy. Being squeezed through the birth canal of life isn’t easy. Grieving and heartbreak and loss aren’t easy. Stepping into why you are here isn’t easy. But this is life. This is how we grow. I have had a lot pushing against me in my life that made it challenging to grow. I have written about many of these experiences before and am saving many for my next book, but I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had to walk through the fire to be who they are. When we learn to respect and honor life’s cosmic and wild nature, we let it move us to where we belong.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am most know for my work as a Ceremonial Tattoo Artist as the creator of my modality “Soul Tattoos.” Soul Tattoo ceremonies are transformational initiations into your soul’s light, wisdom, truth, and divine expression of your unique soul gifts, medicine, and purpose. These markings carry the energetic signatures of your soul, channeled by your soul to support, attune, activate, and guide you to your highest evolution. This unique form of tattooing calls tattooing back to its magical, ancient, universal origins—thousands and thousands of years before the tattoo machine and the modernized tattoo industry—when tattoos were light activations and soul retrieval, spiritual amulets, spells, protection, priestess initiations, a map of the soul’s evolutionary journey, and badges of honor woven in light into the quantum field and sacred body form. Each dot, line, mark, and symbol contains intentional alchemy channeled by the wisest, more infinite, loving, powerful part of the soul I am sitting with, activating deep healing and transformation, and placed on the physical body in accordance with the meridians, organs, and energy centers within the body to align the design to the placement on the body that can best support your evolution. It is through the deeply illuminating and transformative process of intention/desire casting, past-life/soul regression journeying through the history of you, the channeling of your soul and sacred symbols and messages, plant alchemy, and ceremonial magic that we can harness the true nature of this mysterious, ancient, sacred healing art, and use it to heal and quantum leap into deeper alignment with your soul’s authentic expression and destiny path. These markings woven by hand act as portals of becoming, symbols of empowerment, initiatory experiences, and medicine that go much deeper than the art you see on the surface. In fact, the activation of a soul tattoo imprints your soul with a specific evolutionary healing that will be carried with you after you leave your present body form. Though a Soul Tattoo is a highly therapeutic, intentional healing experience of receiving a tattoo in modern times that is unique to each person, it is deep evolutionary soul medicine work that asks you to rise to alignment with who you truly are.
I am most proud of letting this unique, wild, mystical medicine come through me at a time when this type of work was (and still is in some spaces) quite threatening and activating to the modern tattoo industry. I am proud of myself for trusting it and completely trusting the mystery of my soul. When I first started sharing this work publicly, I was only 24/25. And though I was courageous, bold, and felt very strongly in alignment with my soul, I was utterly naive to the shadows of the tattoo industry and collective consciousness in general and how others would react to me and my work. I was publicly shamed, criticized, made a parody, sent death threats, and just horribly projected upon by both tattoo artists and tattoo receivers. It was hurtful, but I persevered because I knew it was essential to keep going. Many years later, I have trained hundreds of tattoo artists along the path of this work. It has become normalized and more present in the collective consciousness, making it less of a threat and more welcomed and sought out over traditional forms of modern tattooing, especially among women. It has created a lot of change in the industry, and in so many ways I am only getting started, having only practiced this work for ten years. But I am very proud of young maiden me for having the courage to put herself out there in the public eye and keep going despite it all so that she could pave a wider path for intuitives with the call to step into the sacred ritual of intentional marking. When I began tattooing, you could count all the women practicing tattooing in a ceremonial way in the world on your two hands, but those who were public-facing and you could find on the internet, were extremely slim. I didn’t see another woman practicing similar work until I started doing press for Soul Tattoos, and then a couple of other artists reached out to me. We began to connect, travel to one another, and create a little network. But there were very few of us then. Then, I co-created the School of the Sacred Arts, a sacred tattooing school, with ceremonial tattooist and dear sister Rachel Christensen in 2019. Now, you can find a ceremonial tattooist practicing in their unique way in almost any state and country, and I know the ripple effect of our work had a lot to do with it. In our school directory alone, we had artists from 30 different countries. I’ve walked a very lonely and isolated path in my work to protect the sacredness of this modality, and I don’t share as much about it publicly anymore to honor the depth and intimacy of the work. Still, I will always continue to teach and invite more women who hear the soul call to carry the remembrance of this transformative work forward because it is needed in this world.
I am also an author, multi-media artist, photographer, poet, and this year released a two-part spoken-word sound project called Odes from a Seeress in Love, available on streaming platforms.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I have had a few core mentors and teachers along my path in the healing arts and many more in spirit. I actually think the most influential teachers are the people we weave this life with—lovers, partners, siblings, parents, etc. Ultimately, I think when we are open and ask the universe, all the support we need arrives in perfect divine timing. We don’t need to search; we just need to move through life with strong intentions and let our word be a magnet for our desires.
As for networking, I am very much an old mystic in the woods type of gal whose people have to drag her out of the house, but my clients have been this incredible network of wise women, priestesses, and keepers of medicine across the globe, and the web we have naturally created together has been a dream. That’s the beauty of this work that I wholeheartedly trust. The right people find me when they are meant to, and I am led to the right people when we are meant to share medicine. I can let go and trust that. The times when I have put too much energy into marketing, networking, and building online happen to reflect all the times that I have felt the sacredness and magic of my work die out a bit. So this is a big balance practice for me, knowing when to network and when to wait and let people come to me. Because of the feminine nature of my work, it’s not healthy for me to be in a space of push or force; it really will throw me out of alignment. So I ask, cultivate peace, be patient, let nature and my intentions weave, and let the web grow slowly and gracefully over time.
Pricing:
- Soul Tattoo Ceremonies – $900-$3,000
- Soul Regressions – $550
- Photoshoots – $900-$3000
- Group Tattoo Ceremonies – $300-600 pp
- Books and Courses – $20-$600
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Ashleyriver.co
- Instagram: @Iamashleyriver
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0JSkXgzzJl0uKqdOXtpj1M?si=Fw4BCuQ_T3OvqEvA12ConA&nd=1&dlsi=0a9175771d3542c6
