Medicine Woman

I was watching the Waltons this morning. The episode where Mary Ellen decides she wants to become a doctor so that she can help the hill people better than she had been able to as a nurse. I felt really connected to that, to the way she felt about it.

Then there was the episode where John-Boy was helping a pregnant woman in a deserted mountain cabin and when she got sick, he went to see the local African-American healer, who directed him to her shelf full of herbal blends. There, he found exactly the one she'd prescribed and it worked.

Last night, I listened to a teleclass designed to sell a weekend training in August that I won't be able to attend.

But the woman who was speaking last night was talking about finding one's authentic voice. She mentioned themes and threads that follow us, in her opinion, through many lifetimes, that will help us figure out what our message is, what our voice is. If I believed in multiple lifetimes, based on the attraction I have always had for healing, medicine people, curanderas, etc, I would be sure that I had been one of them in a previous life.

What I do believe, instead, is that we carry generational memories, some that need to be healed, some that will guide us as to who we really are. We inherit traits and maybe even life or soul missions, right alongside the blue eyes or brown skin and the tendency toward high cholesterol.

Well, my family is said to have some native American ancestry.

I never have been very interested in genealogy before now, but it suddenly occurs to me that maybe I take after some native American ancestor. If you can heal in every generational direction, can you also inherit that way, as well?

Perhaps it's a flight of fancy (I am quite the romantic sort), but I feel somehow connected to some wise woman/medicine woman/village healer/storyteller. If true, it would certainly tie a lot of things together: my interest in healing, my intuition, my connection to nature, my desire to be part of a small town/intentional community/etc. Maybe even my attraction to log cabins and country decor :)

These are all things that seem odd in comparison to the family members I know.

Another thought I had is that if this is true, I have some layers of false self that still need to be healed. For example, I have allergies!

I'm working on that, though.

And I called my mother to ask her about it. She thinks the connection is through her grandfather, but she's going to ask around and try to find out more.

But even if that turns out to be a dead end, I know I'm onto something in tying these things together. And now I know that last night's teleclass wasn't a total waste of time!