The Serpentine Path

I searched for a medicine woman for many, many years. A female elder who could guide me and orient me on my path. A healer, a teacher, a mentor who I could come to for advice and instruction. However, in my ignorance and arrogance, I was initially unable to truly recognize the medicine woman in front of me when she finally crossed my path.

Abuela María was the purest embodiment of a true medicine woman: a grandmother, an elder, a matriarch of her people. She was sharp. She had ruthless boundaries. Her demeanor was no nonsense. Her work ethic and discipline were incomparable. The abuela walked with the power of her ancestors in every step, weaving her love and care into everything that she touched with her ancient hands. She was unwavering in the support and leadership that she offered to her people alongside her husband, the Taita, the father. She was the representation of motherhood and elder womanhood. She was the medicine woman.

In the time that I learned with and accompanied Abuela María, I slowly peeled back the layers of liberal feminism that had clouded my vision and taught me to devalue the sacred and undeniable power of women’s medicine. For the work of the medicine woman is expressed through the care work that she provides for her family and her community. The path of the medicine woman is the path of humility, subtlety, and nurturance. The medicine woman walks through the world differently than the medicine man. She carries her power in her womb, in the descendants that she has birthed into the world. For it is in them—her children and her grandchildren—that the beauty and sacredness of her medicine is reflected. The medicine woman walks with the undeniable spiritual power of loving and fertile mother.

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In this extended episode I share a handful of stories about abuelos life, his work as a médico tradicional, his role as a defender of his territory, and a very special day that we shared together on his porch. 

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I was 25 years old when I first met Abuelo Querubín. It was a hot jungle evening in early March and he was relaxing on his porch, surrounded by his students, companions, and patients. Shyly, I presented him with the offerings that I had brought and did my best to introduce myself in my embarrassingly poor Spanish. What I know now that I did not know then was that this 108 year old man would very quickly become one of the most important people in my life. 

Throughout my 27th year I had the life changing opportunity to live with and accompany the abuelo through his dying process. I sat by his side, listened to his stories, and cared for him as if he were my own dying grandfather. His death was, truly, one of the most devastating experiences of my life and, yet, his teachings continue to unfold and deepen in my heart as time moves forward. His memory lives on in his children and his descendants. His legacy is stamped into his ancestral territory, the land that he defended and protected for the 110 years of his long and powerful life. 

This is the story of my time learning with and accompanying Abuelo Querubín—leader of his people, yagecero, curandero, curaca, sanador, el tigre de la selva, hijo de la floresta, padre de todos, everyone’s father. This is the story of the days that we spent together, the medicine that he shared, the example that he offered. This is my story of the abuelo. 

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ABUELO

The abuelo speaking at the House of Lords

A short documentary about the abuelo

Recordings of abuelo's ceremonial music

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In this extended episode I share about how I prepare and make space for rest and reflection during my monthly bleed as well as what tools I utilize (herbs, moon belt, creams, heating pads, etc) to support a healthy flow. I also offer advice to men who live with and/or are in a romantic relationship with women in order to better understand how they can best support the women in their lives through their bleeding days each month.

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For the vast majority of my bleeding years I experienced my monthly menstruation as a painful and stress-inducing event that needed to be numbed, ignored, pushed through, and (in my birth control years) entirely shut down. As a consequence of being entirely disembodied from my menstruation and the hormonal matrix of my entire menstrual cycle, I experienced severe female reproductive health issues that impacted my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health on multiple levels.

What began as a quest to find answers to my period pains and PMS symptoms eventually evolved into an extensive unraveling of the collective wound that the wombs of the worlds are experiencing in this current moment of human consciousness. Thus, through my own extensive self-re-education and the guidance and instruction of my indigenous elders and teachers, I have slowly but surely come back into right relationship with the ceremony of my monthly blood.

In this episode, I share about how I have transformed my experience of my moon blood and offer an alternative perspective that challenges our Western narrative that diminishes the power and sacredness of our bleeding time.

MENTIONED:

MY WOMB CARE GUIDE

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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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