What is a Medicine Woman?
I get asked this a lot: "What is a Medicine Woman?"
I believe that you will receive a different answer based on who you ask. Rather than give you a definition from the internet or, for those of you who remember, the encyclopedia, I am going to share my perspective and how I walk.
I feel that for a long time in our modern world, people only recognized medicine as a psychedelic plant like ayahuasca or psilocybin. So, I guess I would start here. Traditionally, a medicine person is someone who administered plants, healing support, and even bone setting to their community when they were unwell, confused, or out of balance. These people knew the ways of the roots, barks, seeds, and leaves.
Today we often think of medicine men and women as coming from the Amazon or perhaps indigenous to a certain tribe and culture, and many have forgotten that medicine people existed for all cultures at one point. Including those of us who identify with European or Western roots. If we trace our human lineages far enough back, every culture has ancestral relationships with land, plants, seasons, ceremony, birth, death, and ways of tending illness and imbalance.
The Medicine people understood not only the healing properties that the earth offers us, but also understood the concept of interconnection and how everything is connected. This is how they also understood the liminal space, energy, and the subtleties of the fields around them.
They didnt just offer a potion, a drink, a poltice, or a tincture; often, they created, prepared, and served it with a song, a drum, a vibration, or a prayer and/or a ceremony.
Unfortunately, throughout human history, many of these traditions were suppressed, displaced, forbidden, or driven underground through colonization, religious conversion, persecution, and later through systems that privileged institutional forms of medicine over traditional ways of knowing.
Today you will find a lot of people using these labels and titles once again. Some are genuine, having walked the path deeply with teachers, elders, and grandmothers, while others walk in imitation, distortion, and performance. The latter is why I no longer wish to be associated with the word or label.
I have called myself a Multidimensional Medicine Woman. I understand why others have called me that, and increasingly, I find myself less interested in the title and more interested in the way I walk.
I have been walking this path quite formally for a decade, deeply on the path for 20 years. Everything I offer is my medicine. I have spent more than a decade sitting with teachers, elders, grandmothers, and wisdom keepers and continue to be a student in service. However, when I see people who have just begun, and are walking in imitation and are calling themselves these labels, I do not want to be associated as a colleague, for I am not. We have clearly chosen different paths, and the alignment is not there.
The technologies of the trees, plants, breath, and sound are ancient and futuristic at the same time.
I am a multidimensional human who serves those who are ready to remember. I have always been, and I will always be, and this is the path I have been walking. The medicine is often more than what you can see and feel.
The Medicine is actually within you.
A true medicine person is in service to humanity, serving their medicine to support you and their community to return to balance; physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and energetically.
Modern Western medicine has become extraordinarily sophisticated in its understanding of the physical body, and increasingly the mind and emotions. But many traditional medicine systems begin with a broader understanding of the human being; one that also includes relationship, spirit, energy, community, land, ancestry, and the unseen.
The trend of seeking out healers, medicine people, ceremony, plant wisdom, breath, and ancient practices right now tells me something about where we are.
We have become deeply disconnected, and so many of us are ready to reconnect, reclaim, and remember aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten.
I believe we can marry the old ways with modern science. I don't believe we need to become rigid about either. We can honour what our ancestors understood while also honouring what we have learned through science, physiology, psychology, and our evolving understanding of the human being.
We can be both.
And perhaps that is part of what is being asked of us in these modern times.
When choosing someone to support you on your path and your remembering, don't give your power away to the first person you find.
Don't give your power away because they come from a particular lineage, or because they live in the Amazon, or because they claim extraordinary results.
Don't give your power away because they have beautiful photos, a cool website, thousands of followers, or headline all the festivals.
Use discernment and ask questions.
Who taught them? How long have they been walking? Are they still learning? Do they still have teachers? Do they have a practice of their own? How do they hold themselves when no one is watching?
And most importantly, are they in alignment with you?
Because when they are, it can become a potent collaboration; not for them to become your medicine, but to support you in remembering the medicine that has always lived within you.
The Medicine is within you, and it always has been; it's simply waiting for you to remember.
With love,
Rebecca
