In this extended episode I share about the resources that supported me in my gender dissension journey—aka choosing to actively return to identifying with the gender/sex that I was assigned at birth after 7+ years of rejecting womanhood and femaleness.

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As a young child, I didn’t fit into the gendered norms that little girls were expected to follow. I hated dress up, couldn’t stand tea parties, and was actively allergic to the color pink. Rather, I preferred spending all of my time outdoors climbing trees, skinning my knees, and playing football with the boys. In comparison to my two younger sisters who engaged in more stereotypically “girly” activities, I constantly felt like I was doing girlhood “wrong” (as if that’s even possible…). Moving into my teen years and early adulthood, the shift into womanhood was profoundly painful and overwhelming and eventually led to me exploring a gender-fluid/non-binary identity for the better part of 7 years.

During this time, I felt that escaping womanhood was the only option that I had in order to feel at peace in my body. However, this detachment from the biological reality of my femaleness created a plethora of issues that led to severe and painful effects on my mental and physical health, my romantic and platonic relationships, and, most importantly, my inability to picture myself as a future mother.

Over the past few years, I have deeply committed myself to coming into right relationship with womanhood once more and healing the underlying causes of what I used to refer to as “gender dysphoria”. In my healing, I came to understand that my fears of femininity and womanhood were a direct result of extensive sexual abuse that I experienced throughout my childhood, teen, and young adult years. In healing my sexual trauma, I was slowly but surely understanding that womanhood was not the prison that I had once envisioned it to be. Rather, it was the source of my greatest power and my deepest healing. Finally, at 28 years old, I am able to genuinely say that I love being a woman and that it is the most sacred and divine path that I could possibly choose to walk in this lifetime.

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In this extra episode, I share about birth as an altered state of consciousness

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For the majority of human history, mothers gave birth in the comfort of their own homes, surrounded by family and community members and the loving hands of those who will be supporting in the raising of the child. However, over the past few generations, this sacred rite of passage has been taken out of the safety and comfort of a familiar family environment and forced into the sterile, hospital setting that medicalizes, warps, and distorts this natural, simple, and straightforward process of birthing and being born.

In this episode, I explore the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual consequences of medicalized hospital births and the lineage of birth trauma that has been passed down to me through my mother line. I share about the resistance towards and rejection of motherhood that I moved through in my early/mid 20’s and how the healing of intergenerational birth trauma has been a major part of preparing for my own future motherhood journey. 

In this process of unraveling, I have come to understand how profoundly committed I am to birth sovereignty, birth education, and the return to birthing outside of the medical industrial complex. I have also come to understand how drastically our birth imprints impact not only our natural mothering instincts, intuition, and innate wisdom but also our ability to connect with, bond to, and nurture our children in the ways that they truly need. Additionally, I’ve seen, in myself and many others, how a traumatic entry into the world affects our capacity to envision ourselves becoming mothers and how this robs women of their divine right to create and birth life in a safe, loving, familiar environment. 

Content Edit: Newborn babies need 16-18 hours of sleep/day, infants need 13-15 hours of sleep/day

Mentioned: Childbirth Wisdom from the World's Oldest Societies by Judith Goldsmith

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LISTEN: “BIRTH PORTAL PRAYERS”

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In this extended episode I share about the differences that I saw in how young children view death in Western society and indigenous jungle communities. I also share about my Grandfather Gary's last words as he passed away.

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(PART TWO)

My twenty-seventh year of life was marked by the four life-changing deaths of my blood and spiritual elders: my mother’s mother, Marnie, my father’s father, Gary, and my spiritual grandparents, Abuelo Querubin of the Cofan Nation and Abuela Maria of the Murui Nation. 

Throughout this year, I accompanied four entirely different experiences of transitioning to the other side of the Great Mystery. In this process, I came to understand how warped and distorted our modern culture’s vision of death is and how deeply this loss has colored the ways in which we care for our elders in their dying portal. In comparing the vastly different cultures of death and mourning practices within Western and Indigenous South American jungle communities, I committed to witnessing and offering my full loving presence to my elders byway of dreams, prayers, visions, songs, deep ancestral healing, and in-person care work. 

As I slowly move towards my own eventual motherhood chapter, I, too, begin to understand, more and more, that death and birth are two sides of the same coin. I have come to understand, as well, what they mean when they say that the role of the ancestral archetypal midwife was that of one who accompanied all of life’s sacred initiations from womb to tomb. In our dying we are reborn, in our birthing there is also always a death. And both rites of passage not only require but deserve to be held in ceremony with the deepest reverence and respect.

This was the year that my heart was broken open time and time again. The year that I became deeply intimate with the turning of the generational wheel. The year that I was humbled by the unimaginable beauty and the unfathomable grief of losing four people that I had loved with all my heart. 

This was the year of midwifing my elders through the portal of death… 

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In this extended episode I share more about the deaths of my grandmother, Marnie, and my teacher, Abuela Maria.

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(PART ONE)

My twenty-seventh year of life was marked by the four life-changing deaths of my blood and spiritual elders: my mother’s mother, Marnie, my father’s father, Gary, and my spiritual grandparents, Abuelo Querubin of the Cofan Nation and Abuela Maria of the Murui Nation. 

Throughout this year, I accompanied four entirely different experiences of transitioning to the other side of the Great Mystery. In this process, I came to understand how warped and distorted our modern culture’s vision of death is and how deeply this loss has colored the ways in which we care for our elders in their dying portal. In comparing the vastly different cultures of death and mourning practices within Western and Indigenous South American jungle communities, I committed to witnessing and offering my full loving presence to my elders byway of dreams, prayers, visions, songs, deep ancestral healing, and in-person care work. 

As I slowly move towards my own eventual motherhood chapter, I, too, begin to understand, more and more, that death and birth are two sides of the same coin. I have come to understand, as well, what they mean when they say that the role of the ancestral archetypal midwife was that of one who accompanied all of life’s sacred initiations from womb to tomb. In our dying we are reborn, in our birthing there is also always a death. And both rites of passage not only require but deserve to be held in ceremony with the deepest reverence and respect.

This was the year that my heart was broken open time and time again. The year that I became deeply intimate with the turning of the generational wheel. The year that I was humbled by the unimaginable beauty and the unfathomable grief of losing four people that I had loved with all my heart. 

This was the year of midwifing my elders through the portal of death… 

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In this episode, I share more about the inspiration behind the podcast, snake medicine, how I received the title song for the podcast and the ethos of the podcast in ceremony, and how I created the cover image for the podcast.

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Welcome to The Serpentine Path Podcast where we will be diving into all things related to plant medicine, the birth/death/rebirth cycle, ancestral reconnection, intergenerational healing, womb sovereignty + bodily autonomy, dreamwork, rites of passage/initiations, time travel, shapeshifting, dimension hopping, and the reclamation of our collective earth-based practices—all of which I consider to be portals into altered states of consciousness.

In this introductory episode, I share a little bit about who I am, what my life path has looked like thus far, and what my visions are for this storytelling project. 

This podcast (and, really, all the work that I do in my life) is dedicated to all of my ancestors and future descendants. My story is their story as their story is mine. It is also dedicated to my late and beloved spiritual elders whose wisdom and orientation brought me back into right relationship with the original instructions of the Creator. This project would not have been possible without their unwavering love and instruction.

Thank you for joining! Let’s see where this serpentine path of life takes us…

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