Feeling “Un-settled" Leaning into the hard work of Decolonizing.

So there is this saying, ”When you know better you do better….”

This post is about me working hard to do better, however before I dive into a bit of vulnerable sharing I want to say right up front, my process was specifically about looking at myself and no one else.

So it is my hope that anyone reading this, and perhaps seeing a bit of themselves in it, will understand that I am in no way judging, it is not for me to say what is best for anyone else only that this was my process of walking in integrity with my personal value system.

However, it IS my hope that my process may serve to inspire, and motivate others to make changes should they see fit in their lives and work.

Understanding roots:
​My ancestors came to Canada via Romania, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and although they all came long after the worst of the colonization happened,  they enjoyed the benefits of that colonization and the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land.

I also imagine that these ancestors having left their own sacred lands were most likely pretty colonized themselves, because as history has shown us that those who came here to North America learned what they did by having it done to them. And we all know that -Hurt people-hurt people.


I am a fourth generation Canadian who has fond memories of my only living great grandfather at the time of my birth, my grampy Ctzuck who came to Canada from Romania around 1920.

I am also a white woman who grew up in a rural small town in Ontario whose small high school at the time was often half empty at hunting season because most kids were first nations and went out into the bush with their fathers.  My first spiritual teacher was in indigenous Ojibway woman who took my troubled soul in and taught me ways to recover and build my health back up.

You see as white woman I was lost from the tender age of 15 , due to being exiled by my family because of being disfellowshipped from the JW {Jehovah's Witnesses} religion, and I tumbled down a rocky road of self destruction from that point on.

It was this woman who gave me  healing by helping me to understand that although I had lost a religion I thought supported me, and my spiritual footing, I would never lose my connection to the earth, and this is probably what saved me from even worse self harm all those years ago.

She taught be about the medicine wheel and the animals that held each direction and why, and how to communicate with the plants and read the clouds....

However I am eternally grateful, that even then, I understood that those teachings were not mine, and certainly not something I could share, other then to hold inside of me the memory of pine-tip baths and the soft leather medicine bags she lovingly made for me filled with things to help me ground and deal better with the crippling anxiety that was coursing through my body and nervous system at the time.

However fast forward to 30 years later, long after I stepped out into my community as a spirit healer and leader, I begin to self reflect on how informed my spiritual work has been and how I might have potentially crossed the lines without even realising it. I was sure that I was in integrity, and humbled to see how many grey lines I crossed without even realising it!
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Dropping into decolonization and indigenization is a difficult path of brutal self reflection, deep listening, solitude, and making connections between long held rationalizations that can often make up a spiritual life that inadvertently hurts others.
Cultural appropriation is also not very hard to find one’s self participating in, especially when the spiritual culture these days has justifications for pretty much everything, and “white washing” is rampant! Selling anything from from smudge sticks to dream catchers and using terms that are clearly not ones we were given to use and selling workshops using these terms, all falls under appropriation. 

So while my own ancient ancestors most likely wore feathers in their hair, and used herbs to cleanse and purify the air, they probably did not use an abalone shell nor did they sell these sacred plant medicines.

Because I live in Canada, {a first world country}, as a white woman of privilege, and leader in my community it is important that I use my privilege to model how things can be and to support the women that I work with to find their way back to their own ancestral lineages.

As some of you reading this may know most, if not all of my work is deeply informed by what I have referred to as being “shamanic” and how my initiation into a Northern Celtic tradition-the Sagh'ic Thire Dhream, as a Ceann-Iuil has brought me into deeper understanding of myself as an animist, human, healer, and one day an ancestor myself.
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I have long been deeply uncomfortable about using the word “shamanic”, but like many others have referred to it for "context" in the spirit work that I do.

However for me personally, I have come to realise that I need to make a change and that is to be in right alignment with my work and place at this time in history I need to drop most of the word “Shamanic” from my web-sites and use.

Here is what I have written about my healing work at my Ancestral Pathways site:

Spirit work comes in many forms and has many different names depending on the culture it is from.  My work is what the "modern spiritual overculture" refers to as shamanic healing.
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Working with the spirit realm is the world’s oldest spiritual and ancient healing practice known to humans. Although the word shaman originates from the Tungus-speaking peoples of Siberia, we have come to understand this word universally as describing person who is able to experience an altered state of consciousness, in order to interact with the spirit world to ask for healing or information on behalf of others.

However, sadly we must also understand that the words "shaman and shamanic" are culturally appropriated, and terribly mis-used almost everywhere.

The overuse of the word shaman has come to harm many indigenous people simply due to the fact that this word is being used to describe everything even remotely "spiritual or animist" leaving many, indigenous people resorting to using the word shaman describe themselves, which is often not their language or even accurate, and takes away from the rich use of their own language and culture.  

Because the word shaman does not accurately describe many Indigenous healing practises, using it to explain everything spiritual or animist diminishes cultures that are diverse and rich, for the use of a single word.


I believe that here in the west we can do better, and that when learning or understanding other cultures we need to stop labelling them all {shamans} and allow them to share with us their approach to healing work or spiritual ceremony including the words in their own language they use, not what we decide they are.

The word shamanic has now been removed from my facebook page, and mostly both of my web-sites, however it will probably take me a bit longer to remove it from my vocabulary, as I have been practising spirit work for well over a decade at this point and need to re-train myself to use other words to describe my work.
Many of my students and clients have expressed that if it were not for that word they would have never found me, so I have left the word shamanic in a few specific places for context, however for the most part I use the word Ceann-Iuíl which is what we call ourselves in our tradition, and means Pathfinder or walker between.

Over the next year it is my hope to begin sharing and expanding my work in the ancestral realm, as I work to create bridges with women of colour and expand on how we can be more compassionate with ourselves as we pick up the dismantling of our colonization.

I want to have conversations about how we can heal the ancestral lines and to share about my own experience of doing just that over the past 3 years.

In my healing work I have always seen the ancestors first, they come before I can usually do anything else and as I have learned to navigate the spirit realm for healing, I have also sought out elders to help me be safe in this work and to understand it better.
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And now is the time! Now is the time to to put my actions where my mouth is, and trust that while some may not agree with me, or may choose to step away and out of my realm, others will find me for exactly this reason and perhaps together we can create a new story of how the world can be!  

What is the next Step:​
Lets start talking about Ancestral Recovery, about looking into bloodlines and stories and all the things that make us up as humans. Recovering our ancestral understanding is vital to the conversation, especially if we are going to be showing up to this problem, and meeting the demands for the creation of a new story.

Lets stop justifying our actions and simple make a change no matter how small, to step away from the ways we were taught.
That is to say, lets us break out of the patriarchal paradigm that says it has to be one way or another and begin to carve new ways of being!

If you live in Vancouver--come out to an event I am sponsoring on April 27th to learn more about Canadian Indigenous History-The Blanket Excercise.

We are all humans, and we all share this one earth, so the sooner we can stop dividing ourselves and start getting back to what is important, the sooner we can begin to repair some of the damage done to our earth mother.

I for one am excited about re-wilding myself even further, to visiting the lands of my ancestors, and deepening my connection to the land I live on here in Canada and learning new ways of being in right relationship to my ancestors.

I leave you with this quote by Carolyn Hillyer:

"What is the story of our forgotten people?
It is story of return. It is a story of hearthstones and home; of amber from oceans and copper from earth; of men who soar with buzzards and women who weave heron feathers in their hair.

It is also however, the story of ourselves; in a landscape where time spirals rather then runs ahead of us in rigid lines, we look to our forgotten people to remember something about our own lives.
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Remembering our own people, those who are connected to us by blood or clan, or land or any other bond that serves to entwine our hearts and souls, is part of rooting ourselves in our landscape and shaping the road along which we choose to travel. We learn from our ancestors in order to understand the ancestors we might become. "
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Footnotes:
Here are a few links to resources for those interested in diving into this more:
Origins of the word "shaman"www.sacredhoop.org/Free-Guide-To-Shamanism/Sacred-Hoop-Free-Guide-To-Shamanism.pdf
Awakening The Horse- Decolonization and ancestral recovery
White Awake-Awakening ourselves for the benefit of all
How privileged are you
​Layla Saad-A blog to white spiritual women