Hello and welcome to the Rooted Source podcast.My name is Ionsul Ferrin, and I’m speaking to you from the unceded ancestral lands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
In this inaugural episode, I wanted to introduce myself and where I’m coming from, as well as my big why for starting this podcast. Please keep in mind that this podcast is not a substitute for professional care of any kind, and any spiritual experiences I describe are my own personal stories, and not intended to suggest what anyone else’s path should look like. I also want to warn you that this episode includes some discussion about medical discrimination and violence, so please listen at the pace that feels right for you.
So, let’s dive in. First thing I want to disclose here is that I’ve had a pretty good amount of imposter syndrome that’s come up around starting this podcast, mainly because I don’t come from an ethnic background that’s directly connected to ancient healing pathways. I was raised white, middle class, and somewhat agnostic, somewhat Christian in the suburbs of northern VA. But I’ve always felt a strong connection to my Celtic Pagan ancestry that was indigenous to Northern Europe long before Roman Catholic colonization.
So even though I grew up in a middle class, white suburban neighborhood, and even though I was conditioned in that environment to have a pretty strictly materialist perspective, I’ve always had an innately spiritual curiosity. I was / am an HSP, or highly sensitive person, and had a lot of philosophical quandaries from a young age. I remember wondering, by the time I was old enough to realize how messed up the world is – “Why is the world like this? How did it get this way?” and, “What can we do to fix things?”
In a very real way, these are still the big motivating questions of my life. And I feel like I do have some answers. When I cross-reference history, sociology, and psychology – which are all related – it seems pretty clear what the answer is. Generational trauma. That’s why the systems are so messed up. That’s why there’s so much suffering on a personal and collective level.
Hurt people hurt people. And after 6,000 years (at least) of increasing war, violence, and extraction, we’re reaching a tipping point. We have to heal – as individual people, and as a unified people – if we’re not going to burn out all our systems and self-implode.
In a future episode, I look forward to nerding out on some of the theories that exist about what started the cycles of trauma 6,000 years ago. But for the most part I think it’s much more important that we talk about solutions. That’s what this podcast aims to address. But I’m coming at it from a pretty subversive angle.
One consequence of having parents who suffered with acute mental health conditions throughout my childhood was that I never really trusted authority. Because I had to rely on my own discernment from a young age, I’ve tended to naturally reject systems that rely on power hierarchies and strict adherence to tradition.
In other words, I’ve explored many “alternative” modalities and practices throughout my life. After I became a single mother 10 years ago, I especially got serious about my own healing journey. It wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about my kids’ future as well. They were 3 and 6 at the time, and had already lived through far too much with all the drama of their dad having substance use disorder, and me being his codependent enabler. So I had to take a sober look at myself and realize that it was my responsibility to transform my unhealthy patterns and low self-worth that had led me to such a dysfunctional relationship in the first place.
By that time I was already living in Asheville, where I still am currently, and luckily there’s a smorgasbord of alternative modalities on offer here. So I tried all kinds of things – women’s retreats, breathwork, yoga, psychedelics, life coaching, even talk therapy – which honestly, I found the most disappointing of all at the time. But still, I couldn’t seem to find lasting solutions to my chronic anxiety, depression, and low self-worth.
Eventually, in the midst of all this seeking, I was at a potluck with friends, when a sister friend of mine (shout out to ML!) started telling me about this amazing shamanic healing school she was attending. Like me, she had tried basically countless modalities over many years, and she was very excited and enthusiastic in telling me that this school, called wildernessFusion, was the “real deal.” She told me that people who attend the school, or see the healers trained there, often have truly miraculous results.
One of the women in her class was in Hospice, literally dying from heart failure, when she started seeing NIASZIIH practitioners (NIASZIIH is the modality taught at wildernessFusion). She had such a dramatic turn around that she not only came out of Hospice – she started working again! Another woman in her class had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and went into full remission after attending clinics at the school. And a third was going blind from Graves Disease. The doctors told her there was nothing they could do, that she would have to adjust to living without sight for the rest of her life. She started seeing NIASZIIH practitioners and fully got her sight back.
Obviously, I was intrigued.
So I went to a free intro class and was immediately hooked. I signed up then and there and have attended the school ever since. I’m currently in year 6 of the 7 year program, and I’ve already completed the 3 year bodywork training. I can affirm, just like ML said, it truly is the most real, effective thing I’ve ever done. I count it as the reason I have the courage and self-worth to even start this podcast in the first place.
Now, I want to just pause and say that, even after years at wildernessFusion, I wrestle with using the word “shamanic.” It’s a term that was coined by a white guy, and it’s often used as a Western umbrella term that unfairly flattens many distinct traditions. But just like all words are symbols for more complex ideas, “shamanic” is simply the best word I know of in English to denote healing modalities that bridge physical and non-physical dimensions. If you know of a better term, please leave it in the comments!
I also just want to be clear here that while the wildernessFusion curriculum is based in Lipan Apache philosophy and spirituality, I am not by any means claiming to be an authority on that – or any other – indigenous tradition. I am not speaking on behalf of cultures or lineages that are not mine.
In wildernessFusion, we don’t engage in any specific cultural practices that people often think of related to the term “shamanic” – things like drumming, chanting, or taking psychedelic medicine. Those are beautiful and valuable practices. They’re just not ones that we engage in. Honestly, what classtime mainly looks like is uncovering the hardest and most painful parts of ourselves so that we can stay in contact with our authenticity, with the Earth, and with each other.
NIASZIIH – again, the name of the healing approach taught at wildernessFusion – is an Apache word that means “Place or Vessel of Healing.” And, in a way, to call it a “modality” is even kind of a misnomer. Because it’s really more about a consciousness shift, about embodying a state of being, than it is about learning a set of distinct practices.
It’s something I’m really passionate about, so I’ve offered NIASZIIH healing sessions professionally for years now. But it’s been challenging to make a living at it for a number of reasons. For one thing, if you throw a stone in Asheville, you’ll likely hit an alternative healer of some sort. There are so many amazing healers here, so there’s a good amount of competition. I also can’t stand marketing and self-promotion, which are kind of essential if you’re going to make it as a solopreneur. Plus, almost no one has heard of NIASZIIH, and most people won’t pay for something they haven’t even heard of and don’t understand.
So, in order to create more financial stability for myself and my kids, I started grad school for mental health counseling last year. My goal is to do a version of NIASZIIH that fits with counseling, and be able to take insurance, particularly so I can see people from underserved communities.
Admittedly, before I started grad school, I was pretty skeptical that I would like it. For so long, I was resistant to becoming part of an industry that has some pretty dubious origins (which is something we’ll get into in a future episode). Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve had my own disappointing experiences with talk therapy.
But I’m grateful and relieved to report that I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by my experience in grad school so far. My professors have been humble and wonderful, and I’m finding it’s actually quite fun to study a topic I’m passionate about alongside other people who are nerds about the same things. I also started seeing a talk therapist that I really enjoy, and who feels like a great compliment and support to the inner work I’m doing through wildernessFusion.
Nonetheless, I still see that both conventional talk therapy and allopathic medicine practices are often inadequate to helping people meaningfully transform suffering. Practitioners of both are mainly taught to treat symptoms, rather than the root causes of dis-ease, and so long-term results are often disappointing.
To explain a bit more, let me give some historical context.
The reality is that modern mental health and allopathic medicine industries, such as we know them today, developed amidst colonialist, capitalist mindsets. And medicalized frameworks were often used to justify oppression.
I’ll give just a couple of examples. Did you know that in the 1800’s America, enslaved people who wanted their freedom were pathologized as having a mental disorder? I’m not joking. There was even a clinical name for it: drapetomania. It was defined as a “disease” that compelled enslaved Black people to seek freedom. The desire for liberation was literally medicalized and pathologized. How insane is that?Or, let’s briefly touch on the vast topic of medical misogyny. “Hysteria,” based on the Greek word for uterus, was a medical diagnostic term that was used for centuries to pathologize women who had natural reactions to their own oppression and challenged social norms. In the 18th and 19th centuries, hysteria was a catch-all diagnosis for any woman who showed anxiety, depression, was sexually assertive, or resistant to marriage.
Both of these instances show how pathologizing normal human responses functioned as a tool of social control, rather than as something that was actually meant to help patients.
Now, you might be thinking, “Well, that’s the past. Our systems are much better these days.” Which is true to some extent. They certainly are better, and improving all the time. But there is still ample evidence of inequity, especially when it comes to marginalized communities.
For example:
Nearly 20% of Indgenous American and Alaska Native adults report serious psychological distress, and 8.5% admit to seriously considering suicide in the past year. That rate is about twice what’s seen in the overall U.S. population. Not surprisingly, they also have the highest rates of suicide of any ethnic group in the U.S.
And all racialized groups in the US are all significantly less likely than white adults to have access to mental health services. Even for those who do receive support, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian adults all report higher levels of unfair treatment or disrespect from providers than white adults.
To be clear — mental health care has helped many people. It has been lifesaving for some.
But it has also failed many, and continues to particularly fail those from economically disadvantaged and racially marginalized communities.
But even for white folks, our healthcare systems are often inadequate. Of course capitalism, and privatizing the human right to health care is a big part of that, but accessibility isn’t even what I’m talking about. What I am pointing to is the fact that, even when care is received, it’s often not effective, and sometimes it even makes things worse.
According to some estimates, mistakes made by medical practitioners is the third leading cause of accidental death in the US. And while mental health drugs can make things better for people, they can also make things worse, even leading to suicide in some cases. According to some estimates, as many as half of all people who seek mental health support quit treatment before seeing their desired results. Meaning that talk therapy is only reliably effective about roughly half the time.
And yet – there are some amazing practitioners operating within these systems. I have several friends who are amazing therapists, and obviously I’m aiming to be one myself one day. And I believe most people who get into healthcare of any kind do it because they genuinely care about helping people.
So this is not at all about whole-sale rejecting modern systems.
This is about expanding what we imagine healing can be. And that’s what compelled me to start this podcast. That, and – when I sat at my altar and asked for guidance – the ancestors told me to.
Now, this is where my personal self-disclosure starts to feel particularly edgy. Something we get conditioned to believe in western culture is that any extrasensory perceptions one might experience are basically delusional, and often dangerous. There’s generally an unspoken cultural agreement that scientific materialism is the one and only correct way to view the world.
I guess it’s better than the time of the witch burnings. Only now, instead of calling it “consorting with the devil,” terms like “psychosis” or “fantasy” are often used instead. Thankfully, it’s not true 100% of the time. Depending on the practitioner, spiritual experiences can be seen as valid.
But this is one of the places where modern science and ancient ways of knowing generally diverge. Humans have connected with unseen beings forever. It’s unfair, and I’d argue even unrealistic, to dismiss these kinds of experiences out of hand. And yet it happens all the time in the western medical model.
Of course, it’s not black and white. Sometimes mental health interventions can really help those experiencing genuine psychosis. But those same interventions can also harm people, depending on the patient. Professional support can be lifesaving. And it can be destructive. There’s a ton of grey area here. My intention is not to disparage clinical care, but to widen the conversation about what we consider “normal,” or sane, and how to best serve the unique individuals that are seeking care and guidance.
Because there are also those of us who aren’t experiencing anything like psychosis, we’re just spiritually intuitive. I know there are so many of us secret spiritual weirdos who seem “normal,” yet secretly hold beliefs and practices that we might hide from colleagues – especially within western healthcare industries.
The culture is shifting rapidly, but generally there’s still so much stigma on this topic.
I’m taking the risk of talking about it here, maybe even at the cost of future job opportunities, because I know I’m not alone. There are so many of us who are recovering ancient practices like conversing with ancestors, holding community rituals, and healing with psychedelics, among many other fun things we’ll be talking about in future episodes on this show.
To sum up – at its heart, this podcast will be advocating for a few simple, yet radical, ideas:
I want modern healthcare systems to be effective, equitable, and spiritually inclusive.
I want racialized communities to see their ancestral healing pathways validated rather than sidelined.
I want healing to be understood as relational and collective, not just individual symptom management.
And I want all of us to be able to access the ancient human wisdom that will help us heal from thousands of years of hierarchy and oppression.
And at the same time, I hope we’ll have fun along the way! One of my favorite factoids is from psychologist researcher Karyn Purvis who said:
“It takes about 400 repetitions to create a new neural pathway — unless it’s done through play, in which case it takes about 40 repetitions.”
So even though we’re covering hard topics at times here, I hope we’ll also enjoy the journey. Pleasure, gratitude, experiences of awe, celebration, and connection – these are all healing technologies that our ancestors knew, too.
So, what do you think? Did this podcast challenge or validate you? What are some topics you’d love to see covered? Let’s keep this conversation going! You can comment here, or the best way to make sure I see it is to email me at [email protected]
As we part ways for now, please remember that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Let’s stay connected to ourselves, to the earth, and to each other.
Thank you for being here. I’m glad you found your way.
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