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Inner Healing
Coming Home: The Medicine Woman Tradition
by Kiva Rose
In an off-moment when I was feeling overwhelmed, a wonderful letter arrived. “Thank you,” it said, “for showing that the ancient tradition of women healers isn’t just history, but something relevant and very possibly crucial in our troubled times.”
Truly, it would be inaccurate to apply the term “modern medicine” only to certified allopathic doctors and their institutionally approved treatments, or to associate all alternatives with fringe elements or a mythic past. Plant medicine, self-empowerment, self-healing, apprentice studies, and community service are examples of ancient practices that are revived in the contemporary Medicine Woman Tradition. This modernized system can not only further our physical and emotional healing, but it can help us achieve our fullest experience of life.
The Medicine Woman closes and treats wounds, assists bodily repair and tries to bring people back into balance when they develop disease. But unlike allopathic practitioners, the role of the medicine woman is not to “fix” problems. The definition of the word “fix,” according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is “to make firm, stable, or stationary.” Rather, the Medicine Woman seeks balance through movement, adapting and growing according to need and ability. We heal by helping each injured person, disrupted ecosystem or displaced element to return to their authentic natures and ways of being. This tradition defines health in terms of relationships, just as our earliest ancestors did. It places value upon our connection with the food we eat, the land we live on, the work we do, and the people we care for. It is impossible for us to wholly know ourselves outside of our context: the climate that feeds and tests us, the challenges we face, the friends we hold dearest, the plants that inform and nourish us, and the dreams we dare to live.
Within every organism and ecosystem, many pieces are engaged in a never-ending cycle of reciprocity. This structure of give and take helps keep the whole healthy and intact. In the same way, we experience optimal wellbeing when we are gratefully open to receiving nourishment and giving back. Service to our fellow humans as well as to the living earth is an underlying principle of the Medicine Woman’s perspective and practice. Through caring touch, wise counsel, discerning clarity and exceptional example, we fulfill our most meaningful purpose. Equally important is for us to gladly accept nourishment in return, to rest when needed, to savor our food, and bask in the love of land, home and family. Wholeness and true health result from a deliberate and artful balancing of self and world, of giving and receiving.
In the Medicine Woman Tradition, we strive for wellness and vitality on every level. At the same time, we also recognize the benefits and lessons that illness or discomfort can provide. The nettle’s sting is not a punishment, but a message to be more aware. The devastating exhaustion of adrenal burnout teaches us to treat ourselves more gently. Anima teaches us that every disease affords an opportunity for deeper self-knowledge and that pain stretches our vessel of feeling, enlarging our capacity for pleasurable sensation, satisfaction and bliss.
Healing can be thought of as a kind of remembering, as a way of reconnecting with and returning to the vital magic of our source and origins. The restorative powers of the earth and our own life energy, our anima, can help us find our way home to wholeness no matter how deeply we have been wounded. It is possible to finally find healing even when we are faced with death, and to discover who we really are as we prepare ourselves to return to the earth. In decay and growth, death and birth, we honor the importance of all of life’s cycles. Just as the rose is blessed with both bloom and thorn, we discover beauty in nature’s exquisite shifts and balance.
As Medicine Women, we find healing in wildflowers and wind, in kisses and sweet moments alone, in slow cooked stew and the embrace of a special river or ocean’s waves. Wholeness is an ever-evolving process through which we dance, embracing sadness and loss, joy and celebration. In order to assist others in their healing process, we must provide not only remedies but nourishment, not only wise words but consistent example. We give our full selves to our work and purpose and take time to gratefully replenish our inspiration, energy and strength. For the Medicine Woman, such healing is an act of coming home to ourselves, of discovering, embracing and tending the completeness of who we are despite any scars, wounds or disease. We may deal with constant pain from a terminal illness, lack sight in one eye or do our work from a wheelchair, yet we are still truly ourselves—uncompromised, undiluted, undaunted, and unrepressed. Health is a dynamic state of wholeness. It is not the absence of pain or disease, but the fulfillment of our authentic selves through fully living and giving.
The Medicine Woman Tradition calls us to our own healing, as well as to the work of helping others. Whether in challenge or rest, pain or bliss, we hold fast to ourselves and our mission through generations of women and time. Journeying on our own unique path to wholeness, we each find our way through the illness and danger of the modern world to that timeless place in heart and purpose called home.
Kiva Rose is an acclaimed herbalist and teacher of the Medicine Woman Tradition. She and her partners tend a riverside sanctuary and ancient place of power in the enchanted southwest, offering Shaman Path and Medicine Woman correspondence courses, wilderness retreats, vision quests and special events. Animá Center, Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830. Enjoy her award-winning blog at www.bearmedicineherbals.com or visit www.medicinewomantradition.org.