​​All of us come into this life with certain gifts that are ours to offer to our community and the world. But most of us need good teachers to help us pierce the layers of fear, insecurity, and doubt that plague us in this culture. We need to know and see that there are others who have walked before us and have wisdom to share about those footsteps. And we need to recognize and honor the ancestors that walked before them.
Granicera
Don Lucio Campos Elizade, a renowned healer and caporal mayor of the Nahua tradition performed my initiation as I became a granicera (Weather Worker), a quarter century ago. In my life and in my work, I honor the powerful and healing forces of the Weather Beings. We graniceras are called to greet them when they arrive with their beneficial rains and snow. We are asked to be in deep relationship with these forces of nature, to honor their gifts that make possible all life on this planet.
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In that spirit, we lead an annual local community ceremony to give thanks for the bountiful harvest. We come together to recognize that our lives are not possible without the generosity and compassion of the wind, rain and snow, clouds, sun, thunder and lightning, and—last but not least—the birthplace of all weather, Grandmother Ocean.
Plant Spirit Medicine
​My heart’s voice set me on an unexpected path in 1996.
A “random” conversation with an herbalist friend connected me to the work of Eliot Cowan. As a result, I attended Eliot's year-long course of Plant Spirit Medicine where the wisdom of the plant spirits is combined with the Five-Element system of traditional Chinese medicine. There, I learned how to work with this healing modality and was initiated into the gentle yet profound healing power of our loving plant spirit friends.
The very first day of my Plant Spirit Medicine class, Eliot spoke of shamanic apprenticeship in the Huichol (Wixárika) tradition. Something ignited inside of me... an awakening, a calling, a deep knowing.
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Eliot was apprenticing himself to his teacher, Don Lupe Gonzales Rios. But he was also leading new apprentices to numerous sacred sites. I went on pilgrimage for the first time in 1998. It was the threshold of the doorway that ultimately led, after many years of pilgrimage and study, to my initiations into two ancestral healing traditions.
Mara'akame
Compelled to heed the call of several sacred sites, I followed in the footsteps of the ones who walked before me to complete an arduous, seven-year apprenticeship under the tutelage of Eliot Cowan. These pilgrimages resulted in my initiation as a traditional medicine healer, or Mara’akame, in the Huichol (Wixárika) tradition. Don José Sandoval de la Cruz oversaw my passage through that sacred doorway of initiation in 2007.
