Becoming The Healer I Already Was

I wasn't changed into a healer. 

I learned to recognize myself. 

I spent a long time wondering whether I was allowed to be the kind of healer I already knew myself to be. There was a time when I believed certain healing techniques and tools were not for me. Things like receiving healing visions, offering intuitive guidance, singing, using drums, rattles, bells, and feathers.

I hesitated for a long time before sharing my gifts and using these tools publicly. I didn’t move toward these practices casually. I questioned myself for years. Quite frankly, my healing gifts felt loud and disorienting. I didn't always know what to do with the visions I had or with the information I seemed to receive out of thin air. I wanted to understand my relationship to them before I asked someone else to trust me with them. The wildness of my gifts coupled with the western lens that often placed these ways of healing and tools into categories that feel separate from people who look like me kept me quiet for a long time.

My main teacher, an Indigenous Native American woman, understood these practices in a wider human context. She spoke about parallels across traditions not as sameness, but as shared human ways of listening, connecting, and working in relationship.

What I eventually learned is that my own ancestors — Polish, Lithuanian, British, Welsh, and Irish — connected with spirits, talked to nature, and used song, rhythm, percussion, bells, and ceremonial objects in their ways of healing. These tools were not foreign to my lineage - I just had no idea they were a part of it until I did some research.

As I studied animistic healing through core shamanism, Irish paganism, Slavic paganism, Celtic paganism, and my own ancestry I realized that many of the ways I naturally understood and engaged with the world existed in older traditions my ancestors would have recognized. 

Finding My Teachers

In 2012 I moved from Buffalo, New York, to Portland, Oregon with two suitcases and no real plan. My sister told me my people were in Portland. I had nothing to lose so I traveled to Portland for what was supposed to be a short visit. I quickly met healers and teachers who could actually see me.

In one of my initial healing sessions with a woman I later apprenticed with, I was told that it was “my time.” She told me I had arrived at the place where I could no longer ignore who I was. In that moment, I was a 32 year old woman with a list of sad stories, tragedies, and trauma that made my therapists cry. Those stories and experiences defined me - sad and traumatized is who I thought I was. I didn’t feel powerful, but I definitely had a sense that there was more to me than I knew how to access. Again, with nothing to lose, I jumped into shamanic apprenticeship and training with both feet.

I began learning animist healing and energy medicine techniques inside a spiritual community that held me while I first applied what I was learning on my own self. At that point my whole life had come undone and I began to understand the dismantling as a gift. So much of how I had been living was out of alignment with how I knew myself, but I had not learned any other way to be. It made sense that my life had to unravel so it could be put back together in a way that was true to who I was at the core of me. It made sense that all that I thought I was had to dissolve so my true self could be revealed.

My true self had an innate understanding of metaphysical transformation and a world of spirits ready and willing to begin working through me to bring healing to others. As I developed my relationship with the spiritual realms, I saw myself in the context of the larger web of life - this is something you cannot un-see once you see it. Understanding myself as an interdependent being with impact and value simply because I exist changed everything. I understood how we are all related and what it meant to be a healer within the larger circle of all that is.

While my teachers didn’t give me permission to be the healer that I am, they did give me language and structure for something I had been experiencing my whole life. They taught me what it means to be in right relationship with myself and with others. My teachers helped me recognize what I had been all along, and showed me how to be who I am with integrity and connected to resources of wisdom.

More To The Story

In 2020 I heard the words:

“To be white is to be nothing.”

I understood the conversation intellectually. My body didn’t agree. Something in me refused to disappear inside that sentence. I realized a part of me had been living inside a story about who I was allowed to be and it didn’t match what I knew in my body.

I felt my ancestors standing up behind me. I had been training in animistic healing techniques for 8 years and my connection to my helping spirits and spiritual healing was strong. But, I didn't know my ancestors. At that moment they were no longer content to remain unknown.

As I looked more closely into the history of my lineages, I understood that my ancestors were not “white.” They were specific people with languages, land, stories, and spiritual ways of relating to the world. The category of “white” developed later, especially in colonial America, as a legal and social classification. While “whiteness” is something I was born into, it is not really who I am.

My ancestors showed me memories of my childhood as a way of helping me to understand myself. As a child, I sensed stories in ordinary things — like a couch waiting on the curb before garbage pickup, carrying the imprint of the families who had lived on it. Strangers would tell me their life stories on buses or while waiting in lines, and somehow I knew how to respond in a way that eased something in them. I had dreams that were predictive and/or  felt like information. I often heard the voices and felt the presence of people who had died. At the time I didn’t think of these experiences as spiritual. They were simply how I experienced the world.

The way I noticed the world then is still how I notice and listen to it now. 

What Is Happening Now

Today my work sits at the meeting point of training, lineage, and lived experience.

I listen to what people say, and I listen to what their bodies are saying underneath the words. I work in relationship with the person in front of me, with their history, and with the larger field of life they belong to.

I don’t spend much time asking whether I’m allowed to do this work anymore. My focus is on showing up honestly for the people who find their way here. 

Who Finds Me

Most people who find their way to me aren’t broken. They’re disconnected from parts of themselves that stopped trusting who they are. I don’t try to change who someone is. I help them recognize themselves again.

If you've ever felt like parts of you are waiting to be remembered, you’re not alone.

Sometimes the path forward isn’t about becoming someone new. Sometimes it begins by noticing who you’ve been all along.