Dr. Kelsey Moss is a scholar, writer, and visionary practitioner devoted to multidimensional healing, the expansion of consciousness, and systemic change.
As the founder of Soul Architecture, she stewards a living body of work that bridges ancestral wisdom, energy medicine, spiritual ecology, and decolonial research to support the healing and evolution of individuals, communities, and culture.
Kelsey holds the position of Visiting Professor in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California, where she teaches on Africana spiritual traditions, ancestral memory, and the sacred dimensions of history and healing. Beyond academia, she works as a mentor, facilitator, and systems architect—guiding visionary leaders, healers, and organizations through transformative processes of remembrance, restoration, and design.
Her offerings support deep personal healing, soul purpose alignment, and the emergence of new, coherence-based paradigms for living, leading, and relating.
Story & Healing Journey
Dr. Kelsey Moss’ professional and spiritual path has unfolded at the intersection of scholarship, healing, and lived initiation. Her journey has been shaped by a rigorous academic career, an immersive engagement with ancestral and indigenous wisdom traditions, and over a decade of dedicated personal healing and transformation.
With advanced degrees from Stanford and Princeton and an academic focus on African Diasporic religions, collective trauma, and the spiritual legacies of colonialism, Dr. Moss built a respected foundation as a scholar of religion. Yet through her research pursuits, she was drawn into a deeper exploration and remembering—one that revealed how the very histories she studied were also alive in her own body, lineage, and lived experience.
As a descendant of enslaved Africans, British colonizers, and displaced Indigenous peoples, she came to understand how ancestral trauma, spiritual fragmentation, and relational imprints were not only subjects of study, but personal inheritances calling for resolution. This recognition catalyzed a transformative decade of healing, training, and initiation across multiple lineages and modalities.
Dr. Moss studied and practiced energy medicine, somatic therapy, ritual arts, ancestral healing, and indigenous cosmologies—integrating these with contemporary sciences such as trauma studies, neurobiology, and consciousness research.
Through this integration, she began to articulate the foundations of Soul Architecture: a multidimensional decolonization and healing framework and system of practice rooted in ancestral remembrance, energetic coherence, and spiritual sovereignty.
Her work today is the fruit of this unique synthesis—bridging rigorous scholarship, lived experience, and cross-cultural wisdom. She supports individuals and communities to restore coherence, repattern inherited imprints, and realign with the original blueprint of the soul—laying the foundation for personal transformation and collective regeneration.
Academic & Research Background
Dr. Kelsey Moss is a scholar of religion, culture, and healing whose research investigates the intersections of race, spirituality, and colonialism in the Atlantic world. Her academic work focuses on African Diasporic religions, indigenous cosmologies, and the legacies of spiritual violence rooted in histories of enslavement and colonization.
She received her Ph.D. in Religion and Africana Studies from Princeton University, where she specialized in Religion in the Americas with additional certifications in African and Latin American Studies. Her doctoral dissertation examined the processes and practices of spiritual colonization and racialization shaped ideologies of race and religion in the early Americas. Drawing from archival research, ancestral memory, trauma studies, and cultural theory, her work brings forward new frameworks for understanding historical trauma as a spiritual phenomenon with ongoing relational, energetic, and systemic implications.
Dr. Moss has held research and teaching appointments at Princeton University, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, Georgetown University, and currently serves as Visiting Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. Her teaching spans African Diasporic religions, ancestral wisdom traditions, the cosmologies of the natural world, and the reclamation of indigenous epistemologies as valid sciences, technologies, and methodologies of healing and knowing.
Her scholarly work is complemented by a growing body of writing, mentorship, and public teaching that bridges academic insight with lived, embodied practice. She advocates for expanded research methodologies that honor land, body, and ancestral presence as archives of knowledge. Her current projects—including Archives Other-wise and Decolonizing Spirit: Healing Modernity’s Soul Wound—seek to restore dialogue between traditional academic scholarship and the spiritual technologies and wisdom traditions of the cultures and lineages it seeks to understand.
Through her research, Dr. Moss challenges the boundaries between disciplines, cosmologies, and ways of knowing—offering new pathways for the integration of spirit and scholarship, science and ceremony, truth and transformation.
Lineages & Teachers
In addition to her academic formation, Dr. Moss’s work is deeply informed by years of immersive study and training within multiple lineages of spiritual healing and ancestral wisdom. She acknowledges with reverence the teachers, traditions, and ceremonial contexts that have shaped her understanding of energy fields, ritual, and earth-based and elemental wisdom.
Dr. Moss is an initiated ritual practitioner in a lineage of earth-based ancestral medicine stewarded by the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, transmitted through the House of Bakhye. Her training in this tradition was guided by Mark Bockley based on his many years of ongoing study and initiation with the Dagara in Burkina Faso and as these teachings were transmitted to the West by the late Elder Dr. Malidoma Somé. The Dagara cosmology and spiritual technologies continue to inform the ritual technologies, frameworks, and elemental healing principles present in Dr. Moss’ work.
She is also a certified practitioner of Innerlight Energy Balancing Therapy, as learned directly from Dr. Niki Elliott and through practice and study with Victoria Platt. This form of energy medicine has become a foundational element of her healing practice, particularly in addressing inherited trauma and soul-level fragmentation in individual and collective systems.
Dr. Moss has also been informed by her deep study of the shamanic wisdom and practices of energy medicine of the Q’ero lineage. She completed the energy medicine training through the Four Winds Society, as taught by Dr. Alberto Villoldo and his faculty. She was initiated into the Brotherhood of Inti Ñan through the mentorship of Giuliano Salas, studied and the foundations of ritual medicine and practice with Marilu Shinn, and received key rites and transmissions with the Apaza Family lineage of Q’ero medicine holders through the Inca Medicine School.
Alongside these teachings, a core dimension of Dr. Moss’s work emerges from the direct, ongoing transmission of ancestral medicine from within her own lineage. Honoring all of the medicine of her ancestors— African, Native American, and European, she has walked a careful, embodied path of healing and reclamation to recover what was once buried or fragmented in her ancestral lines. Over years of ritual, prayer, and initiatory encounter, she has received visions, teachings, and energetic frameworks directly from her own ancestors—what she now understands as a unique lineage of remembrance and medicine carried through her soul signature. These transmissions form the living foundation of Soul Architecture as both a healing system and a cosmology in service to collective evolution.
Her broader training includes somatic trauma healing, mindfulness-based energy therapies, plant medicine integration, and Afro-Indigenous ritual arts. She holds all traditions with deep humility and does not claim to represent or speak for any lineage, but rather honors the permissions extended by her teachers and the responsibility entrusted to her to carry these teachings with integrity, discernment, and devotion.
Across all of her work, Dr. Moss is committed to practicing in a way that honors the spiritual and cultural contexts from which her teachings arise. She continues to deepen her studies under the guidance of elders, mentors, the ancestors, and Spirit—walking in alignment with the values of reciprocity, right relationship, and ethical engagement.
Invitation
At the heart of Dr. Moss’s work is a commitment to building new paradigms of being and relating—within individuals, across communities, and throughout the living systems we inhabit. She envisions a world in which human beings live in right relationship with their own soul essence, with one another, with the Earth, and with the Spirit that animates all life.
Through the framework of Soul Architecture, she offers a multidimensional path of healing, remembrance, and re-alignment—designed to help individuals and collectives reweave what has been fragmented and build lives, systems, and cultures rooted in sacred design.
Her work is for those who sense that we are standing at a threshold—a moment in history that invites us to step into greater responsibility, creativity, and soul-aligned leadership. Whether through deep healing work, visionary mentorship, or the design of new paradigms for education, leadership, and cultural transformation, Dr. Moss supports those ready to heal, remember, and take aligned action toward building a more coherent, regenerative, and spiritually-rooted world.
If you feel resonance, you are warmly invited to explore her current offerings in courses, mentorship, retreats, and collaborative projects.