She Has Audacity

"Building bridges to connect our outer world with our inner world, allowing us to reconnect with our bodies, nature, & our ancestors."

I wear audacity on my neck because it’s how I move through the world. I am anything but ordinary. My people are the awkward ones, freaks, geeks, Black sheep, and outcasts—the ones told they’re “too much” when really, they’ve always been just the right amount of enough. The Brass Chamber is for them. For us.

I’m Erika Parker-Smith—spiritual herbalist, diviner, death companion, ritual arts facilitator, and cultural preservationist. I founded The Brass Chamber as a regenerative sanctuary for herbal remedies, ritual arts, ancestral reverence, and elemental divination.

I approach this work through both lived experience and lineage. I’ve weathered corporate burnout, wrestled with perfectionism, navigated anxiety and depression, and now walk through the shifting terrain of perimenopause. These practices—herbs, ritual, divination, and ancestral technologies—are the lifelines that brought me back to myself. They sustain me now as a wife and mother of three young children, holding the balance of care, creation, and community.

My path has always braided art, spirit, and care. I trained as a multidisciplinary artist, currently pursuing my MFA before transitioning to a PhD in East-West Psychology at CIIS. My herbal practice was seeded through an apprenticeship at Sacred Vibes Apothecary with Empress Karen M. Rose, where plant medicine became both an anchor and a teacher. My work as a death companion grew through Going with Grace with Alua Arthur and other brilliant souls & Death Doulas, where I learned to walk with others through endings and thresholds. Out of this, I began weaving together what I now call ancestral technology—ritual, cultural memory, and earth-based practice as a way to navigate grief, transition, and transformation.

I also create and hold space: in corporate and community rooms where rest, ease, and wholeness are treated as essentials—not luxuries. And through Rebelmancy™, my elemental divination system, which carries forward traditions of cowrie-shell divination as passed down through East Coast Village with Aamirah Branch, infused with my own Afro-techno-spiritual imagination.

With roots in both corporate technology and ancestral practice, I build bridges between modern innovation and indigenous technologies—reconnecting people to their bodies, their lineages, and the living Earth.

The Brass Chamber isn’t a brand. It’s a room you can enter—where medicine is crafted in rhythm, grief is honored without rush, and healing is treated as both extraordinary and badass.

Welcome home, if you read this far!