ABOUT ME

Mariel is a full-time lecturer and fellow at Stanford's Life Design Lab, where she creates modules for and teaches the legendary Design Your Life and is co-creating the brand-new Design Your Spiritual Life class. She teaches undergrads and grad students, as well as other professional educators looking to integrate Life Design at their schools.

Outside of the Life Design Lab, she designs and guides communal rituals, coaches seekers through sabbaticals and career pivots, teaches playfighting, runs experiments in communal living, and facilitates immersive workshops.

She is devoted to designing the future of interfaith and non-denominational spiritual communities, and creating technologies and experiences that deepen (not replace) our embodied wisdom.

She has a past life as a scientist, has published research on fish biomimetics, and spent three years studying neural correlates of pain in a wet lab to help make better brain- and spine-computer interfaces. She has trained as a Chan Buddhist monastic, lived in anarchist creative community in pallet racks by the Salton Sea, and continues to run experiments in rich, intentional, and communal living. She has co-produced immersive multimedia installations drawing everywhere from 50 to 500 attendees. She speaks 5 languages, is the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, and is a joyful traveller of this enormous tiny planet.

She has worked with and for the magical teams at Wefunder, Sylva, and Parents are Human.

Above all else, she is an alchemist, storyteller, and agent of benevolent mischief.