Medicine Woman, Shaman, Witch, or Fool?

I am a shaman, a medicine woman, a healer, a coach, a mentor, a teacher, a witch, a psychic, a channel, a wizard, Kali, Medusa, a High Priestess, a bridge, a free diver, a dumpster diver of the soul.

And yet I have struggled so much in what to call myself.

All these terms are triggering to someone, and even to me at various times.

But am I all those things? Yes. Yes I am.

The energy that flows through me when

I drum, well, the beat is undeniable.

I have done this all before.

When I think of a coach I think of sports. So I shied away from the term. I think of a life coach and I think of all the generalizations, assumptions of other life coaches I have seen in my life. It feels so corporate or something. That’s not me. A part of me wants nothing to do with the word coach.

If I think of mentors I think about someone who is more hands off and distant. Maybe a clergy member or a wise old elder. Sometimes I will slice right through something with someone fiercely and hold accountability beyond how I view a mentor.

I have feared the term teacher because I have had guru’s and I have watched probably every documentary on fallen guru’s to know. I have wanted nothing to do with that either. But am I a teacher? Of course I am. I know that I guide and impact people, exposing them to ideas, deep wisdom teachings I have learned experiencially and through decades of lived study. I am passing on information and that is what a teacher does.

How about witch? For that I would ask you watch this.

People fear cultural appropriation with the terms shaman and medicine woman. I don’t have that fear as much. I have not be initiated or apprenticed as many shaman’s or medicine women have. I am first generation born of Eastern European immigrants. My roots are shallow on the land I was born and raised in Oregon but several centuries old and deep roots exist on the ancestral land where my mother still lives to this day in our Czech village. The medicine of my lineage lives in my bones and is felt and lives through me without any other initiation than the one that expresses intuitively through me. We are all indigenous to some place. Our genetic codes carry the wisdom of our ancestors no matter where we are born. The re-membering of that and honoring of that is a journey that ever blossoms and grows when we give attention and intention to do so. The Earth and my Intuition are my greatest teachers and through my underworld journeys through decades of self-initiation I have emerged to guide people through their own underworld dumpster dives.

I come from a line of extremely strong and wise women. Wounded women. Unexpressed women. Limited women. Women who repressed themselves to preserve survival so that I could ultimately come to express myself. I am very grateful for the women who came before me and persevered so that I could find my power. I stand on big shoulders.

There were times in history where people were not warring. There were matriarchal civilizations that worshipped the Goddess that had a deep relationship to the Earth and her movements. Her ebbs and flows, her seasons, and cycles. Her signs and symbols. Her chaos and mystery. These were all revered in honoring and devotion. There was ritual and ceremony of sacred arts, mystery schools that upheld the Divine Feminine in it’s great potency and creative power. Here is a short film on these times in history.

Yet a fall from Grace where the fear of the Feminine led the church to control, manipulate, and denigrate women out of their own inadequacy spread far and wide. Now an awakening is taking place which I believe will rebalance this. I am no expert, and yet I feel it.

Aligning to this rebalancing and stepping into service to this rite of passage for humanity is something I feel so clear about. It has been so synchronistically revealed to me throughout my life that I cannot deny it. So, as She would have it, I am not just a woman named Kamila. I am also a channel for Divine. Sometimes that manifests as Teacher, Mentor, Coach, Medicine Woman, Shaman, just as much as it shows up as Goofball, Villian, Mother, Sister, Daughter, Failure, and so on. We are all these things.

As Shakespeare once said…

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

When we realize this we can get a greater perspective on the great drama, comedy, tragedy that is our lives and this world. We can have more approval for the way in which we show up in various moments to act out our particular role.

Because I have trusted my path so implicitly I have chosen to go the less paved path. I knew I could not go to school and get a degree. I knew that a certification or training in this that or the other would never fulfill me or my mission. My path has always been to trailblaze and bushwack my way through the wild woods. This is a much harder path because there is no one to tell you you are doing it right. There is no one there to celebrate you when you get to the end. There is no piece of paper you can show people so that they trust you. You are the living embodiment of it. And you must trust that, which means you must approve of yourself fully. This does not mean that you do not let others question you or give you feedback. But only you can decide if the lesson is worth keeping.

There will be those who will say I am a fool. That the medicine I carry is not true. And for a long time I doubted myself too. Until one day I no longer could deny what I knew to be true, through and through. After seeing enough miracles right before my very eyes and in my own experience I could no longer deny it.

It wasn’t long ago that I could finally say ‘yes, I am a teacher, a medicine woman, a shaman, a coach.’ I am all these things and so much more and less. Because now it is all for God, The Divine, The Goddess. The Infinite. The Unspeakable. For which there are no words.