Personal statement - traditional practices

I would first like to share gratitude for all that supports life and for us to live fully in the moment.

I am deeply grateful to the lineage that has held ceremonies I work with safely through disconnection, genocide and the power over dominant society we live within so that we might have the privilege to use them at this time and place.

I am a white woman, raised with privelages and opportunities that arise out of systems that are profoundly unjust. Even in my own personal efforts for fairness and equality I inevitably carry bias and blindnesses as I come from a society that is filled with centuries of justifications for genocide, seizure of land and replete with stereotypes that mask the truth.

The people from whom these healing traditions came have been silenced and excluded in dehumanising ways. The powerful, peaceful and life sustaining ways of life and governance systems they worked with have been replaced by paradigms that create legal structures that have caused untold harm for all of Life.

I know the likelihood is that I may get things wrong. And that “it is not enough to be exposed to new information. We must first be able to receive it. Essentially we must remake ourselves in order to absorb what we have been taught from childhood to ignore.”(Sally Roech Wagner)

Yet, we use these ways because the Spiritual Laws of Peace, our deep inter relationship with all things, our responsibility to tend Life and honouring our Mother Earth and the body of Woman is for all people.

Used in the right ways and for the right reasons we can activate healing in ourselves and our communities and start “living towards right relationship right now” (Pat Maccabe).

Alongside our engagement in these ceremonies I believe it is important that we educate ourselves and remove our complicity and consent from the domination systems and culture that we inherit and participate in. For a list of resources you can follow this link.

For all our relations. Mitakue Oyasin.