18 Mar 2023 7 min read The Savor Complex

Medicine Woman at Lake Tahoe

Chapter 3. This chapter recounts my experience with Caela, a Mescalero Apache naturopathic physician who blends Eastern, Western, and Native Indigenous practices in support of healing.

SEPTEMBER (Funeral Month) 2019

Trigger Warning: Death, child death, violence, drowning, murder

Medicine Woman at Lake Tahoe

This chapter recounts my experience with Caela, a Mescalero Apache naturopathic physician who blends Eastern, Western, and Native Indigenous practices in support of healing. In this session with Caela, I was brought back to a memory from a past life where I, and a group of children entrusted to me, were killed by drowning or gunshot wounds. In witnessing the deaths, the promises, and the processes I had experienced in past lives, I was able to understand, and ultimately heal from the impact of large fibroid tumors that had been living in my body and holding my health, time, and energy captive for much of my twenties and thirties.

It was good to be back in Tahoe, on that sacred lake, to recalibrate and process together some of what we had experienced a few months ago (July) in Ecuador.

That second Tahoe trip is when/where I had my revelation session with Caela, a Native indigenous woman born on a reservation in California and who had become great friends with one of the women on our trip.

Caela did these sessions where you would be on a massage table and she would move her hands over your body to feel and to read. Her high-pitched, slow-rolling, comfort-iducing voice rang into the small room she and I were in as she recited indigenous prayers learned from her line of Mescalero Apache women. She is a licensed naturopathic physician, licensed acupuncturist, and longtime healerwoman qualified by her line and her love for their medicines.

She offered prayers to call up, cleanse, and clarify things that stirred around in our bodies.

During my session with her, Caela told me some of what she saw in my histories. Not all of it, she warned, because she said that she wasn't always sure if people could handle what she saw. And so she didn't want to leave people with information that they didn't have the capacity to process; I respected that.

Turns out I didn't even need her to share what she saw because as she moved her hands over me, and offered prayer and inquiry, I began to see so much myself!

I saw myself, my mother, and my daughters hundreds of years ago. None of us looked the way we look now, but I recognized them and myself immediately. It was a past-life experience, and it felt so incredibly real and present-tense.
In (that particular) past life, I was assigned (and accepted) the task of rushing a group of children to safety. We were being chased out of a seaside village by tall, skinny, white-skinned men with big guns
I had children strapped to my back. Others ran alongside me. Others were in what I think was a type of wheelbarrow, and I was pushing it while running.
One man shot a few of the children near me, and then shot me in the back. I fell into water, and I watched as one of my (biological) daughters ran away from the water and towards an areas with lots of almond trees.
Even though I was shot and had fallen, a part of me followed my child, and I watched her as she tried to still her breath in efforts to not be heard. She was not frantic at all, but surefooted and quick-moving. I remember feeling like something good had happened, despite all that was definitively not good.

My hourlong session neared its ending. I began to hear Caela’s voice close to me, as opposed to hearing her in the distance like I had been experiencing for what felt like several hours.

She was calling me back to this particular instance of the present moment. I heard her thanking the ancestors that were there watching me, protecting me, witnessing me releasing agreements that were not safe to hold in my present life. I shivered. I experienced some soreness in my legs. My throat felt gravelly. And as I came more and more into my present body, a familiar alarming feeling rushed to the front of the line of thoughts marching towards my conscious mind…‘Oh shit, my period!’

The bulky package in my panties that had become normal and necessary (for me to not bleed on my clothing and whatever I was sitting on are walking on) was nearing its full-up point. I sat up fast. Caela encouraged me to take a moment to breathe. She asked me what time the car was picking me up. I had arranged a Lyft from where we were to the airport and only given myself thirty minutes between the end of our session and the time my Lyft would arrive. When she asked me, I had less than ten minutes left, so I needed to get to the bathroom to change my period package situation. Only had time to change layers one and two (more on that in a sec).

I sat in the Lyft car and legit wailed the entire way to the airport. In between sobbing I stuttered through letting my driver know that I had just had ‘a life-altering experience’ and that she shouldn’t try to chit-chat with me because No. She honored my request, turned the music down, and pushed a box of tissues toward me; she was a godsend.

When I got to the airport, I hightailed it to the bathroom because those were my pre-healing-surgeries days, so my two Super, nightime pads, one Super tampon, wads of paper towels wrapped in kleenex bundle was not going to last long enough for me to just get to my departure gate and wait. I changed out my bundle, tried to wash my face and calm my body, and continued the airport choreography.

Finally, I was seated at my gate with nothing to do but try and breathe deeper, and bring all of myselves back to the present moment. Felt like I had left seven different worlds behind. I met versions of me, and some of the people I loved most. I saw so much'; too much, almost. I remember feeling so impatient about that plane ride back from Tahoe. I wanted distance between my phsyical self and the space where I had experienced past versions of me.

I could not wait to settle into the comforts of my own bed and my family’s voices. What I didn’t plan on settling into, days later, was the planning and completing of my (first) funeral.

Having experienced death in such intimately and startlingly real-to-me ways, I knew that parts of me and my history needed me to lay them to rest.

To give them permission
To usher them out of the frantic situation where their bodies and souls parted, to a place of peace
To let them know that I was not frantically trying to get away, or get to something, or hold anything in my literal body

I grew to understand that the fibroids I had been battling since age 17 were linked to my sense of responsibility and guilt for all those children entrusted to me in that past life. I had gone through naturally shrinking them, surgically removing them, and making massive dietary changes to bid dem thangs adiue. All the while, spiritually, I kept trying to house, nurture, and save them, this time by holding the experience in my uterus. By nurturing invisible-to-me bonds with the children that didn’t survive. That version of me, that agreement holder, she didn’t just need to be acknowledged, she needed to be set free. I needed to lay her to rest because to lay her to rest was to free this current version of myself.

My funeral later that month was the first part of liberation work for my physical body. It was a process, a ritual, that I knew needed to happen. A year later, two surgeries (with more pre-surgery support from Caela), and my body belongs to me now, no past agreements directing my flow of traffic.

In hindsight, all of it was ritual, even the money for aspects of my recovery that my paltry insurance plan didn’t cover, that came from the support of a few members of my make-it-happen family. My willingness to obey the call to eulegize that version of me laid the groundwork for their final rest. She died, I slowed down, I got more support, I paused, then I rested.

Those opportunities

to die,

slow into,

be supported,

pause,

and rest

—they all worked to simmer multiple aspects of me. My ways of creating, of listening, of expressing, are differently arranged now. And so, I now find myself in this part archivist, part futurist symphony, carefully organizing the versions of me that I met in Ecuador and in Tahoe. Some versions gotta go, others I need right now. And others yet, are for Old Woman Me, should we be blessed enough to live ‘til elder status.

The next section of this book represents the inner lands, seas, and skies I’ve travelled to locate myselves within, and detangle myself from some of those gotta-go versions. I noticed that my all my explorations fit into the areas of culture, particularly music, food, and language, so that’s what I’ll write about next.