Restore Connection. Embody Clarity.
From inner coherence to shared impact.
About Colleen Akiko
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​​I’m Colleen Weaver Bird Akiko, writing from the high desert mountains of northwestern Nevada, ancestral homeland of the Washoe people. I live near Topaz Lake with my husband, Chris, and our four-legged companion, Lilah.
A mentoring elder once gave me the name “Weaver Bird.” I’ve carried it ever since as a reminder of what I love most: gathering people to weave song, story, reflection, and shared learning into embodied connection.
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Over the years, my work has taken many forms:
• Host of the WeBeTheChange Podcast & Blog
• Singer-songwriter and recording artist
• Group facilitator and Essential Connection Coach
• Experiential Musical Speaker offering Keynote and Retreat Sessions
• Founder of the Bowl of Light Restorative Leadership framework
Across roles, the throughline remains the same: cultivating clarity, coherence, and meaningful connection.​​​​​
Musical Roots
My childhood was steeped in classical music. My father, a concert violinist, and my pianist mother filled our home with rehearsals and performances. My early years were shaped by concerts, piano lessons, recitals, and competitions.
When my parents divorced and my mother returned to Japan, music became refuge. A guitar carried me through adolescence, when songwriting emerged not as ambition, but as necessity.
Over the decades that followed, I raised step, birth, foster, and adopted children, taught music, helped form four nonprofits, pursued certifications, and offered transformational coaching and energy healing — all while continuing to perform and create.
As a teenager, a single derogatory comment about my singing lodged deeply in my body. For years, my throat constricted with fear whenever I stepped forward to sing. Compassionate communities — including faith communities where I shared music — helped me gently unwind that contraction. That lived experience informs the embodied and somatic dimensions of my work today.
In 2023, my 19-year-old son, Gabe, passed through the veil following a fentanyl overdose. Music has continued to carry me through grief — and through the long work of integrating love and loss. Some of those songs are shared here.
​​Today
Today, I speak and share songs in a range of settings — sometimes intimate, usually interactive. Music has a way of softening what feels rigid, opening what feels closed, and illuminating what feels confused.
From instrumentals and chants to bare ballads and full-band arrangements, song creation has accompanied me for more than fifty years. It remains one of the most direct ways I experience coherence.
I also love camping, taking pictures, finding rocks, tending my greenhouse, practicing Tai Chi Chih with Chris, watching eagles, and hiking the sagebrush hills. And . . . very dark chocolate.
The work you’ll find here — whether in the Bowl of Light Café, the podcast, the blog, or through music — is rooted in a simple conviction: connection is not something we manufacture. It emerges when we remove what interferes.
If you feel called toward clarity, steadiness, or meaningful contribution in uncertain times, I would be honored to walk alongside you.
​​Colleen Akiko 🪶