Part One: Lessons from my teacher

I was 20 years old, and my father, who was only in his 40’s, was in a coma, dying. Weeks earlier, he was at home and simply feeling tired. Doctors didn’t forecast there was anything wrong. I knew he was going to pass long before anyone else did. I had begun to experience highly intuitive phenomena 6 years before.

A few months before my father died, I had a prophetic dream. 

I was in the desert learning from a woman who was tiny and bird-like with powerful, black-as-coal eyes. In the dream, she was giving detailed instructions for how to call back lost parts of myself and heal my family line.  She was powerful and clear. She told me I felt too much and had to learn how to cleanse my energy field and give death to who I thought I was.

The next morning I woke and told a friend about this dream I could not shake. “That sounds like this shamanic healer I’ve heard of, named Blade.” She said.

I asked for her phone number and called her.

I’ll share the intricacies of that phone call in another email, but for now, all I’ll say is she invited me to apprentice with her for 3 months. Then it was 6 months.

I ended up staying in New Mexico with her for a full year. 

The first day of our apprenticeship, she had me make a list of every single person in my life:  Family, friends, neighbours, right down to the girl I walked to school with in kindergarten and my tap dance teacher I had just for a few months when I was 7. My first grade crush. The babysitter I had when I was 10. Everyone. 

The list took more than a day to write. I found it exhausting. “There’s more,” she said. “I can feel it." 

"We begin by calling back all your threads of energy from these people. We’ll do this with the help of your healthy ancestors.” “Who”? I said. “They are your Guides. You have many guides, but the healthy ancestors are a significant branch of them.” We all have healthy ancestors waiting to be invited to help us reclaim our energy so we can be free. We just have to welcome them in.” 

After a few days of making the list of people in my life, including the ones on the periphery that I wouldn’t have thought had an impact, we settled into the practice. 

But first, I had a panic attack. 

 Blade was explaining the purpose of reclaiming my energy back from the long list of people who have touched my life was so that I could be free. But to be free, I had to give death to my personal history. And to give death to my personal history meant I had to surrender the stories I had about others and also the ones I had about myself. “It’s to give death to the story that keeps you, and that other person, frozen in time.”

“Then who will I be!” I cried with terror. “I am who I am because of these people, my family is important to me. I am these stories.” 

The purpose to reclaim energy back from the cast of characters from our life and give back their energy so we can see past situations and even current ones clearly. When we see a situation for what it really is, we are less emotionally hooked. Instead of walking around with hundreds of fish hooks in our energetic body that we carry around years later, we remove them, with understanding and perspective.

This is a small introduction to the kind of work we will be doing in The Rose & Root Apprenticeship along with the help of Plant Spirit Medicine.