Author’s Note:
This piece speaks to a deep personal process I entered while working with the medicine in Brazil. There are no graphic details here, but the themes may touch tender places. Read gently.
Brazil is the homeland of the medicine that has shaped me, undone me, and taught me how to live again. Sitting with the medicine on that soil was not simply powerful. It was ancestral. It was as if the forest itself remembered me, and I remembered it in return. Every prayer carried weight, carrying history, grief, and a gratitude too vast to speak aloud.
I travelled with my soul sister Monique, two women from distant lands walking together into a remembering older than either of us. To be invited to co-create and guide within this pilgrimage is something I still feel moving through my bones.
But the deepest part of the journey happened where no one could see it.
I’ve done many processes around what happened to me. I’ve walked the long corridors of healing therapy, ceremony, silence, the slow rebuilding of trust inside my own body. I thought I understood the landscape of that wound.
Brazil showed me I had only ever stood at the edges.
The medicine did not bring me back to the story. It brought me into the body into the very place where the experience had been held for decades. It asked me to feel it. Really feel it. Not with my mind, but with the truth stored in flesh and breath and bone.
Not to punish.
Not to retraumatise.
But because some wounds do not release through words.
They release through embodiment.
This time, the medicine asked me to let the pain move not only for myself, but for the women who never got the chance. The ones who swallowed their truth because there was nowhere safe to place it. The ones who carried shame that was never theirs. The ones whose bodies held what their voices weren’t allowed to speak.
It asked me to let this wound speak across time. To allow the current to run through me so it could move through the lineage. To bow my head and ask permission from the ancestors.
To let this be the moment something ancient could finally shift.
And as I surrendered into that depth, something unexpected rose.
A strength I didn’t know I possessed.
Not the strength of the girl who survived.
The strength of the woman who can turn toward the darkest room inside herself and not collapse.
The strength of someone who has walked through fire, not to burn, but to be forged.
Brazil didn’t show me weakness.
It showed me my capacity.
It showed me that healing is not about erasing the past, but reclaiming what was taken and returning it to where it belongs.
Somewhere between the vines and the red earth, another remembering stirred.
Ireland rose inside me my own homeland, marked by colonisation, silenced tongues, and severed roots. These two lands speak to each other across the ocean. Both have known loss. Both have known resilience. Both carry songs that were nearly extinguished, yet still rise through the cracks.
The bridge between Brazil and Ireland is alive.
Alive in my body.
Alive in my bloodline.
Alive in the work I am here to do.
This journey changed me in a way that cannot be undone.
It rearranged the architecture of my being.
It reminded me why I hold space, why I walk with others into their depths, why I can sit with truth that most people fear to touch.
What awakened in Brazil belongs not only to my story, but to the ones who came before and the ones yet to come.
And I know this much:
Our children’s children will feel the shift.
The lineage has begun to move.
Closing Reflection
If these words stir something in you, honour that movement. Healing does not follow time. It follows truth. And sometimes truth arrives as a tremor in the body, a memory surfacing gently, a feeling that suddenly asks to be met. Wherever you are in your own journey, may you meet yourself with the courage your ancestors prayed for.
