Category: Intuitive medicine

A Ritual in the Sea: Dancing With the Directions

I didn’t bring candles or flowers. I didn’t have a circle or altar or sacred tools.
All I had was my body and the presence of something holy moving through me.

It was Beltane, and I was standing in the Caribbean Sea.

The water was warm and alive. I stepped in reverently letting the waves touch me like a welcome.
Then, I began to dance.

I bowed to the West and honored the water I was standing in. The realm of emotion, intuition, and mystery.
I bowed to the North, calling in the earth and rooting into Pachamama, asking that the light pour down through me and anchor into her heart.
I bowed to the East, asking for vision and clarity, to see through illusion.
I bowed to the South, stoking the fire in my belly, the courage to live from truth.

I called in light from God, from Source, and let it flow through my crown into my field, then all the way down to my root, anchoring deep into the center of the Earth.
I danced in the water, sang softly, and let myself hum and move however the energy wanted to move.

Then I prayed:
“Bless this land. Bless this water. May healing ripple through these waves.”

I offered my body, my breath, and my song. And then something happened.

A small piece of styrofoam floated toward me, like a response. I didn’t ignore it.
I picked it up gently, and I knew. This was part of the ritual.

This was not just pollution. It was message.
The water had given me something to carry, to clear, to heal. And I accepted.

In that moment, I understood something:

Sometimes we don’t offer something to the water.
Sometimes the water offers us a task, a role, a responsibility.
And that is just as sacred.

Then I prayed something deeper:

“Let me see what is hidden. Let me not turn away. Let me see what my mind has been trained not to see.”

I remembered what Alberto Villoldo had said…that when colonists arrived, the native people didn’t see their ships at first because they couldn’t comprehend them.
But I don’t want to live that way.
I don’t want to protect myself from truth.
I want to see the ships.
Even if they’re terrifying.
Even if they change everything.

So I kept dancing.
Becoming part of the Earth’s prayer.

And in that space, under the Beltane sun, in the water, I remembered:

My body is my altar.
My voice is my offering.
And the Earth will speak…if I am willing to listen.

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We Don’t Need to Hurt to Heal: A Feminine Reclamation of Wisdom

I’ve been thinking about all the times I’ve doubted my body because someone with a degree said something different.

All the times I was told that if it wasn’t backed by science, it wasn’t real.
That if it wasn’t studied in a lab, on rats, on men, on isolated variables, it didn’t count.
That my knowing wasn’t proof.

But I’m done accepting that framework.

Because the feminine path of healing doesn’t require violence.

I don’t need to see an animal suffer to know what nourishes me.

I don’t need test results to believe what my womb already told me.
I don’t need a randomized control trial to validate what my intuition whispered when I lay awake at night, wondering why my body was shutting down.
I don’t need mouse trials to honor menstrual cycles, emotions, or sacred bread.

Because the truth is: we are not machines. We are ecosystems.

And the way we heal is not through control and dissection, but through listening and remembering.

Science, as we know it, has been built on extraction.

  • Take from animals.
  • Take from women’s bodies.
  • Take from indigenous wisdom and call it research.
  • Package it. Patent it. Profit from it.

But feminine wisdom doesn’t extract. It relates.

It says:
What if we let the body speak?
What if we trust the earth’s timing?
What if we stop cutting open the mystery and instead sit with it?

I believe in a way of knowing that doesn’t require harm to be valid.

Call it soft science.
Call it sacred.
Call it memory.
Call it what it is: truth.

Because I’ve lived in a body that has broken from expert advice.
I’ve lived through diets that won applause but drained my vitality.
And I’ve felt the return of power when I stopped asking permission and started listening inward.

We don’t need to hurt to heal.

Not animals.
Not ourselves.
Not the land.
Not each other.

We need nourishment.
We need reverence.
We need to remember what we’ve always known.

And we need to stop treating wisdom like it must be proven in order to exist.

Some truths are older than studies.
Some truths are meant to be felt, not measured.

And I will no longer apologize for holding them.

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When the Experts Are All Men: What My Body Knows That Science Ignores

I’m reading One Spirit Medicine by Alberto Villoldo, and I’m trying, truly trying, to keep an open mind.

But I keep noticing something that I can’t unsee: every expert he cites is a man. Every doctor, every researcher, every authority on the gut, brain, or spirit. Men. The only woman he mentions? His wife, in passing, as someone who did a journey for him once when he was ill. No mention of what she found. No mention of her voice.

And that makes me angry.

Because this book claims to be about healing, about spirituality, gut wisdom, ancestral memory. Yet it’s built on a foundation that ignores or sidelines women’s wisdom entirely.

It’s the same pattern I’ve seen in so many spiritual and wellness spaces: male gurus, male teachers, male authors co-opting ancient traditions, especially those rooted in indigenous and feminine knowledge, while continuing to center male voices as the authorities.

Then he starts talking about how carbs are toxic. How grains are destroying us.

And listen, some of it is valid. Yes, the wheat we eat today is more processed and gluten-heavy than what our ancestors ate. Yes, food has changed. But the sweeping claim that carbs and grains are inherently harmful?

That erases entire cultures. Entire ancestral foodways. Entire bodies, like mine.

I tried the high-fat, low-carb “keto” diet years ago. I counted macros. I cut carbs. I lost weight (thirty pounds in a year). But I also lost my period. My hair. My glow. My sweat started to smell like onions, something no deodorant could fix. My hormones were shot.

And no doctor, no expert, no male wellness guru had warned me about that.

Because they weren’t studying women.

My body was trying to tell me something long before the science caught up.

She was saying: I need carbs. I need rhythm. I need nourishment, not just discipline.
I need balance, not control.

I reintroduced carbs slowly. And with them, I brought back life. Color. Softness. Cycles. I made myself a promise: never again will I silence my body’s wisdom in order to fit someone else’s idea of health.

So when I read Villoldo, or any man, talking about “bad foods” and “gut science” and ancient medicine, but only through the lens of male experts and westernized frames of authority, I start to shut down.

Because I know what’s missing:
Women’s voices. Women’s bodies. Women’s experiences.

We are not side notes.
We are not footnotes.
We are not support staff for the hero’s journey.

We are the soil. The seed. The ceremony.

And I don’t need a PhD to know what my body knows.

Posted on by martucia 0