The Healing Waters Of Mama Aya And Yemayá

Deep healing is both beautiful and terrible...

When you’re in the business of healing, dealing with your own wounds and weaknesses is all in a day’s work - just a part of the job, really. I don’t want to be carrying around any energies which I might transfer to (or project onto) a client. Fortunately though, the self-awareness that’s required to protect my clients from my own energy also helps me to be more aware of when deeper wounds (from childhood, etc.) have the potential to manifest in unhealthy ways in my life.

The Venus retrograde we’ve just completed was rough for nearly everyone I’ve spoken with about it and it wasn’t pleasant for me either. But Inanna’s journey through the underworld was productive and I emerged from the experience with a few items on my self-improvement to-do list.

I’ve done a lot of work on fear issues in my 2nd chakra over the last couple of years, while learning how to be a healer, but there’s always something else to work on. And, I’m realizing, there are some specific goals that I’d like to accomplish in this life that require me to heal some heart chakra issues around love, family, and community.

In my prior life as a quasi-muggle I simply created workarounds that helped me avoid triggering issues, like you do. As a shamanic healer, I have better tools and practices when it comes to self-healing but there are situations, particularly when I’m struggling to see my issues clearly, or when self-healing would simply take too long, where a more drastic approach is required. Sometimes the most direct way to healing is with a plant medicine ceremony.

Here in the jungle of the Riviera Maya, we have all the medicine you could ever need to heal those deep wounds -and authentic traditions to ensure the experience is safe, legitimate, and sacred. It’s so easy to find good quality plant medicine ceremonies that it’s easy to take it for granted, but from the depths of this Venus retrograde, I was looking for a medicine ceremony to break through this energy blockage I’d discovered in my heart.

So when our friend, and trusted plant medicine curandero, Edgar, told us that he was hosting a special water focused ayahuasca ceremony, I was intrigued. I often recommend working with the water element when healing the heart, so this seemed like a good fit. Plus, Edgar is a true spirit worker, and his description of this event immediately sold me.

He described the ceremony as a cross-over between his Chichimecas / Zapotecas healing tradition and Brazilian ayahuasca ceremonies involving the Orisha Yemayá, goddess of the sea and other living bodies of water in African-diaspora traditions. Most intriguingly, he explained that his introduction to these rituals was made possible via his lineage’s collaboration with the Santo Daime (an ayahuasca-centric Brazilian syncretic-religious organization).

Fascinated, but still having no idea what that might be like, Edgar’s explanation of the event left me with too many questions to bother asking more questions, so I just signed up immediately to experience it for myself.

This was a very watery ceremony, and certainly a beautiful one, but more, it was the real deal -honest to goodness magic, and in a wonderfully intimate group ritual at that. This wonderful ceremony was exactly what I needed and even included an unexpected bonus bit of magic that was the highlight of the entire event.