Why I Practice Völva Stav: Finding an Unbroken Gift from My Northern and Eastern-European Roots

I’ve spent most of my adult life disentangling gifts that came wrapped in whiteness.Every European-sourced tradition I touched required a full gut-renovation—scraping away colonial mindsets, racial hierarchies, and the myth that whiteness is the default setting for spirituality. It was exhausting work, and as a mixed-race Black woman it often felt unsafe.

Then, in 2015, I met Kari Tauring and her embodied practice, Völva Stav.

What is Völva Stav?

Created by Kari Tauring in 2003, Völva Stav is a system of sacred body geometry and toning housed inside a Northern-European cultural frame. Runes, staff rhythm, and voice line your spine up with the World Tree of Norse cosmology. In practice it looks like:

• planting your stav and letting its rhythmic pulse travel up your bones;

• tracing rune shapes with your limbs until they hum;

• cultural dance and song to re-member

• sounding tones that settle the nervous system and open a clear channel to Spirit.

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This work is about healing öorlog—the ancestral and personal story we carry—and provides concrete tools for boundaries, communication, and ethical community life.

Why it matters to me

Völva Stav is the only gift from Europe I haven’t had to deconstruct to feel safe. Kari teaches it with fierce clarity around white supremacy and inherited cultural grief; the practice itself is built to surface those wounds and move them out of the body. Instead of shrinking myself to fit a Nordic box, I get to stand in the full width of my lineage—African, Northern, and Eastern-European—and use the stav with my own rhythm to drum under the floorboards of racism, loosening those boards up and showing that good black dirt below.

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The Völva Stav Guild

Today I’m a Guild Kone—one of six women who steward the teachings through daily practice, workshops, and community support. Our mission is simple:

Restore Northern-European root traditions and create spaces where individuals, families, and communities can heal inherited cultural grief.

Every song, breath, and thump of our stavs moves us closer.

Want to learn more?

• Visit Kari’s site at karitauring.com for background, music, and class listings.

• Visit VölvaStavguild.com for upcoming Guild events

• or reach out for one-on-one sessions where I weave Völva Stav into ancestor work and body-relief practices at Duafe House.

  
  

If you’ve wrestled with European ancestry—pulled toward it, wary of it, unsure how to hold it next to Black or other roots—know this: there are unbroken gifts waiting. Völva Stav was mine, and I’m honored to hold the stav for anyone ready to listen.