Reclaiming the Medicine Woman: Embodying Spirituality Beyond Religion

Citation: Dr. Kimberly J. Davis, www.DrKimberlyJ.com

Overview

In this reflection, I share my journey of reclaiming the medicine woman through the lens of African traditional spirituality and embodied practice. More than a system of beliefs, traditional African spirituality offers a holistic worldview that understands life as an interconnected web of relationships between the individual, community, ancestors, nature, and the Divine. Healing is rooted in restoring harmony with the vital life-force energy present in the natural world and the spiritual realm, recognizing that dis-ease often reflects energetic, emotional, spiritual, and communal imbalance.

For many African Americans, reclaiming these ancestral traditions is more than a return to forgotten practices—it is an act of remembrance, restoration, and resistance. In remembering who we were before slavery, colonization, and the erasure of our spiritual traditions, we begin the sacred work of healing the intergenerational wounds that continue to shape our lives today.

Full Text

African culture acknowledges that real healing lies, not in a synthetic pill but in recognition of our true position on the earth and in bringing our actions into respectful balance with the natural world.—Tasha Davis[1]

Exploring ancestral healing traditions is a sacred act of discovering the source of your heart—the central location of healing and balance and the regulator of all life-force energy. Pain, suffering, oppression, and abuse disconnects us from the heart. As a result, we become imbalanced and disembodied; defenseless to ailments and disease. Our ancestors, spiritually in-tune with the rhythm of life, were intimately connected to Mother Earth. They knew that within the depths of her body was the source of all healing. Her natural body provides plants, trees, water, the sun, the moon, the stars, animals, insects, and our human bodies with magic for healing. All planetary life forms are imbued with magic medicine in the form of vital life-fore energy.[2] Since, indigenous cultures believed that spirituality was inextricably linked to healing, they engaged in spiritual practices that revered and communed with spirit to maintain balance and facilitate healing.

In this discourse, I investigate West African traditional healing practices, to discover the source of my holistic healing practices. I demonstrate through this exploration that ancestral healing traditions are embedded in our DNA; hence, they can never be completely lost or destroyed. It is imperative that African Americans reclaim their indigenous medicine to heal the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds suffered at the hands of slavery, oppression, sexism, mass incarceration, police brutality, abuse, and homicide. Traditional healing practices can reconnect us back to our ancestors, bodies, hearts, and land. Furthermore, it can transform the collective for universal healing.

Reclaiming histories, ancestral medicines, and wisdom is often a critical component in the soul retrieval process for most modern Western peoples, who typically have no connections to ancestral medicines and wisdom and often fell disconnected as a result. This reclaiming is medicine in itself, and it can inspire us to weave our disassociated ancestral wisdom back into our heritage, as well as learn from, respect and honor indigenous traditions.[3]

Inquiry into my ancestral healing traditions is complicated. As a descendant of ancestors forcibly brought to America during the transatlantic slave trade, our healing traditions were violently stripped away along with our identities, families, culture, and spirituality. Consequently, we were forced to assimilate into a culture with established religious beliefs that was contradictory to our ancestral earth-based spirituality. Erika Buenaflor in Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo, provides three primary reasons for tracing healing traditions back to their ancient roots:[4]

1) Enables the practitioner to be more fluent in the meanings and expressions of healing rites, thereby making the practices more potent; 2) Allows for the reclamation of indigenous healing techniques that have “historically been derided, ridiculed, and misappropriated;” 3) Creates a traditional healing epistemology rooted in one’s own narrative. Her premise is compelling, especially for cultures whose healing practices were, and continue to be, suppressed by both colonization and slavery.

Mitochondrial DNA testing reveals that my matrilineal ancestral bloodline originated in Cameroon, Africa.[5] Cameroon is located on the central west side of Africa, bordering Nigeria to the west, Chad and the Central African Republic to the east, and Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea to the south. Characterized by its social and ethnic diversity, it is often called, “Africa in miniature.”[6] My ancestors are of Tikar ancestry, an ethnic group that inhabited the Bamenda plateau in the northern area of Cameroon. This area was one of the hardest hit by the slave trade. The most important export commodity from Cameroon by the mid-1550’s, were slaves.[7] The slave trade network continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, at which point colonialism had taken over. Christian missionaries had established themselves in Cameroon and began to play an influential role in the lives of the Cameroonians.[8] Consequently, the shift in religion directly impacted Cameroon’s traditional healing practices.

Traditional African healing is a holistic approach to medicine that utilizes vital life-force energy found in the natural physical world—plants, herbs, stones, leaves, roots, trees, insects—in combination with life-force from the spiritual realm, to create emotional, mental, physical, spiritual balance within individual, collective, and universal bodies.[9] Accordingly, dis-ease is understood to be the result of energetic imbalances, misalignment, or spiritual dis-orders. Tasha Davis explains:

It is believed that all people are made up of many levels of being which function together as a whole; moral, social, physical and spiritual, and if any of these parts are out of balance, the person will become physically ill (dis-eased) or suffer spiritually.[10]

Traditional medicine encapsulates knowledge of all disease, understanding of energy, and access to natural, curative, protective, or preventive ashe (energies of the universe) which bring about wellness.[11]

Cameroon operates under a dual healthcare system in which traditional and biomedical (western) medicine and health practices coexist and are used simultaneously.[12] Recently, in the last decade, there has been in a surge in the use of traditional medicine. This rise is attributed to increases in conventional healthcare costs, medical services, facilities, pharmaceuticals and a decrease in the quality of conventional health-care services.[13] Another reason for the surge, is the increase in drug resistance to common diseases like malaria, bacterial infections and sexually transmitted diseases.[14] As a result, Cameroon’s health officials are collaborating with the World Health Organization (WHO) to explore options to systemically integrate traditional and conventional medicine practices.[15] Thus, the objective is to create a strategic platform that optimizes their synergistic benefits.

Although many Cameroonians use traditional medicine for economic reasons, the vast majority believe in its power to holistically heal and restore the body. Traditional medicine takes an integral approach to healing; focusing on the root cause of health issues as energetic imbalances and implementing natural and supernatural solutions to restore balance. Ultimately, preservation or restoration of health is impossible without the vital life-force energy found in the natural world.[16]  

For centuries, traditional medicine was the only system of health care available for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of social, mental and physical illnesses.[17] However, since colonialism, western medicine has been the only formally accepted medicine in Cameroon. During colonialism, western missionaries from Europe and America condemned and demonized traditional healing practices, “equating traditional healing and other parts of the indigenous world with evil practices.”[18]

Consequently, traditional medicine was stigmatized and labeled as black magic, witchcraft, and sorcery. Unfortunately, these negative connotations have since been internalized, and many government officials and upper class Cameroonians, like their European counterparts, denounce traditional medicine. As a result, many traditional healers work clandestinely underground, maintaining low visibility while fiercely protecting their healing medicine and the right to administer it to their people. Traditional healers in Cameroon are guardians of a cultural tradition and gatekeeper’s ancestral healing knowledge. Secrecy of their healing wisdom and medicine is critical because it is a “gift from the ancestors and perfected through years of apprenticeship and training.”[19]

Divination and Herbalism are two main components of Cameroon’s traditional health system.[20] Healing practitioners may identify as herbalists, diviners, spirit mediums, religious specialists, medicine men/women; however, their healing practices are fluid. They often combining various modalities of healing. Herbalists always use some form of divination when using plants for healing.[21] Historically, diviners, spirit mediums and religious specialists were regarded higher in status than herbalists. As the result of a cultural shift away from ritual and community-wide healing towards individual treatment, herbalists are now more predominant and in-demand.[22]

Diviners have the ability to access, manipulate, and leverage life-force energy for healing. [23] Their role is to balance energies within the human, natural, and universal body. They also assist in the removal of denser energies which prevent the flow of vital life-force energy. Diviners possess the power and ability to connect to the spirit realm. Spirit realm communication is used to diagnose and treat illness. The diviner receives messages—visions, voices, feelings, signs—from spirit through prayer, mediation, and/or ritual. These messages guide the healer to the appropriate healing solution; the required natural or plant medicine; and the suitable dosages.

Divination tools are also used to assist with the diagnosis process. These tools provide guidance for identifying a specific cause for an ailment and potential cure. A traditional healer describes how he uses a chicken to diagnose illness:

After the reception of a patient, I diagnose with the help of a chick. I place a chick on some sensitive part of the patient’s body until this chick dies. When the chick has died, I operate to discover the contaminated parts, which are immediately transferred and related to the patients. At times, the kidney is swollen to look like a tortoise or a chick without wings. This kind of illness is called the “tortoise” illness.[24]

Other divination tools can include “reading an egg”, a bowl of water, dream interpretations, cola nut seeds, mirrors, candles, cowries, or any other tool the healer is divinely guided to use.[25] Ritual diagnosis is another divination tool used by traditional healers. These practitioners engage in ritual to seek wisdom from the ancestors, connect to the spiritual essence of a plant and restore balance for healing. Ritual is used in combination with medicinal treatments to “recreate adequate spiritual conditions for a healthy life."[26] Art, dance, drumming, singing, poetry, and acting are “brought into ritual, ceremony, or the individual’s healer’s repertoire in an effort to…bring wellness.”[27]

Herbalists merge divination with the use of medicinal plants, roots, trees and herbs to treat health ailments and diseases. Cameroon’s topography consists of roughly 90% of the African ecosystems—the Sahelian, Sudan, humid tropical forest, mountains, coastal and mountain eco-regions. [28] As such, it is rich with native plants and trees with medicinal value. Traditional healers know the essences of plants and proper protocol for how to gather and prepare them for medicinal use. Ndenecho Emmanuel Neba explains;

“Medicinal plants cannot be gathered at any time of the day; they have their proper time. This is because the spirits of the plants can only be found in their "bodies” at certain moments. Moreover, they must never be pulled or torn violently during harvesting.”[29]

Frequently, the work of herbalists include communication with both the spirit of the plant and the spirit of the patient. As such, prior to using a tree or plant for healing, the healer must pay homage to that plant, using incantations to ask permission for its attendant spirit to be used.[30] Incantations are used to invoke the spirit of the plant. Consequently, the potency of the medicine is dependent upon the healer’s sacred integration of divination, incantation, and plant knowledge.[31] Neba states that “a healer’s power is not determined by the number of medicinal plants he knows but by the ability to apply an understanding of the intricate relationship between the patient and the world around him.”[32] 

The Cameroonian worldview of spirituality that views the spiritual, natural and material world as energetically animated, interconnected, and interrelated has subconsciously shaped my entire existence. Through my discovery that healing is inextricably linked with spirituality, I have been able to reclaim my ancestral healing practices. These practices, for the most part of my life remained hidden; buried in the trauma of generational oppression caused by slavery. As an African American woman whose family migrated to Chicago from the slave plantations in Mississippi, my conscious knowledge of traditional medicine was limited. Traditional healing practices rooted in spirituality, were ripped from my ancestors. However, despite the destruction of many of our indigenous healing practices, African Americans have somehow managed to maintain some of our traditional medicine, mixing it with the medicine of other cultures—Native American and European, to create new traditional medicine. In A Healing Grove, Stephanie Rose Bird explains this phenomena:

I’m not quite sure where or how, but we brought our belief systems with us, though our cord seems to have been brutally severed from the Motherland…We observed the healing ways of indigenous people in areas where we were transplanted, but the development of African diasporic ethno medicine was not taught to us…By and large, we developed our healing ways in the New World through experimentation, testing, and direct observation, as has been the way of herbalists and shamans around the world from time immemorial.[33]

 Bird’s description exemplifies my point of entry into the world of traditional healing.

In Cameroonian culture, “healing hands are said to be a gift from the gods.”[34] I have inherited that gift through my ancestral lineage. I am a holistic healing practitioner who uses energetic forces found in the natural, material, and spiritual world to create balanced environments conducive for healing mind, body, emotion and spirit. In Mesoamerican culture, I could be identified as a Curandera—female healer who heals on a holistic level by “integrating an understanding of soul and spirit with that of the body and mind.”[35] The divination tools I use to do my healing work include my hands, intuition, breath, healing stones, essential oils, and spoken word. In Cameroon, I could be identified as a Diviner.

I was never formally taught how to heal. As Rose explained, I like many African American healers, developed traditional healing ways through experimentation, testing, and direct observation. Having very few spiritual mentors, my healing practice primarily evolved organically through my spiritual DNA. Sherri Mitchell explains this concept as having sources of information energetically available to us; “perhaps a different expression of DNA or genetic memory that hints at a continuity of consciousness that has yet to be defined by modern science.”[36] I was divinely lead to this path, by my ancestors and spiritual teachers when I began to do my own healing work to liberate myself from generational internalized oppressions rooted in capitalism, slavery, sexism, and abuse. Being a traditional healer allows me to reclaim indigenous healing practices and use those practices for generational healing.

My holistic healing practice—Akashic Records, Reiki, yoga, ritual, and pedagogy—is my traditional medicine. Although I perform different modalities of healing, I use certain tools and techniques with each healing session—meditation, ancestor communication, spirit realm communication, and intuition. I will describe these techniques within the context of my Akashic Records healing practice.

The Akashic Records are a vibrational body of knowledge that exists in a higher dimension of consciousness.[37] These records contain knowledge about the soul’s purpose and journey. The eternal soul exists in many dimensions and throughout many lifetimes; therefore, the records encapsulate “everything that every soul has ever thought, said, and done over the course of its existence, as well as all its future possibilities.”[38] The Akashic Records are a powerful repository of higher consciousness that when accessed, allows us to see our true essence as divine creators and bearers of light. Linda Howe explains:

“Akashic Records are both the perfect soul-level blueprint and the catalogue of experiences of an individual soul as it grows into awareness of itself as a spiritual being. Divine in nature and manifesting in the physical earth-arena.”[39]

I access the Akashic records to obtain wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and healing for myself and my clients. As such, I have the ability to energetically connect, with permission, to a higher consciousness, accessing the records for whatever is needed for healing. Prior to accessing the records, I create a safe and sacred space for myself and clients by clearing the energy of the space with sage; setting intentions that we receive healing for our highest and greatest good; meditating to ground and shield my energy from denser energies; lighting white candles for clarity and incense for the ancestors. Once the space is prepared, I recite a sacred prayer which serves as my petition to the forces of light, asking for guidance and direction from my masters, guides, teachers, and ancestors.

During the Akashic Records consultation, clients express their issues, fears, doubts, traumas, and dramas. I then receive an energetic download directly from the spirit realm of masters, teachers, and ancestors. One of my intuitive gifts is clairaudience—hearing spirit from within. As such, I hear messages of wisdom, truth, and healing which I share with the client. Sometimes these messages are delivered directly by an ancestor whose presence I feel and sometimes see in the room. Once the intelligence is shared, clients are welcome to ask additional or more clarifying questions. Based upon our dialogue, I am able to determine what, if any, other healing services are warranted. If the client is experiencing emotional or physical distress or fatigue, I administer Reiki—energy healing through my hands. This technique assists with moving blocked energy and restores balance back to the body; it releases dense energy and provides fresh life-force energy.

Akashic healing closely resembles curanderismo platicas. Buenaflor describes platicas as “heart-straightening talks, in which a person vocalizes and releases that which weighs heavy in their heart and soul to facilitate a healing.”[40] During these talks, the curandera “holds sacred space…asks questions to facilitate the purge, realization and renewal; and says prayers or magical invocations calling for divine aid.”[41] The platica is a holistic approach to healing that engages the mind, body, spirit, and soul during the healing process.

Quite often, healing is achieved simply through the energetic connection to the Akashic Records. Thus, “When we are connected to source wisdom, we recognize that we are interrelated spiritual beings. We also come to realize that the lives we are living have purpose and that this purpose is tied to a broader path of destiny that includes the entire creation.”[42] When we can see ourselves in the light of the Akashic Records, we are in-tune with our soul and the purpose for incarnating. As a result, we are able to see past our material traumas, narratives, and limitations and explore our personal power to heal and embody creator energy to impact and transform universal reality.

My pathway into traditional healing was ordained by my ancestors. It is a journey that has led me back to my indigenous roots, which despite the perils of slavery, has not be severed. Seeking, affirming, and reclaiming traditional healing practices allows us to find our place in the world and leverage that location to institute healing for ourselves, communities, and Mother Earth. Our collective survival is dependent on the medicine woman.           

Footnotes

[1]. Tasha Davis, "Traditional African Healing: Medicine & Africa," African People, accessed October 30, 2018, http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/traditionalhealing.html.

[2]. Ndenecho Emmanuel Neba,"Traditional Health Care System and Challenges in Developing Ethnopharmacology in Africa: Example of Oku, Cameroon," Studies on Ethno-Medicine 5, no. 2 (2011): 133.

[3]. Erika Buenaflor, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo: Limpias Espirituales of Ancient Mesoamerican Shamans (Rochester: Bear & Company, 2018), 4.

[4]. Ibid., 3.

[5]. AfricanAncestry.com DNA Test Results, April 23, 2012.

[6]. John Mukum Mbaku, Culture and Customs of Cameroon (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005) 1.

[7]. Ibid., 23.

[8]. Emmanuel Aoudi Chance, "The Practices of the Traditional Caring Culture and Western Nursing Culture in Cameroon," (University of Bergen, 2015), 14.

[9]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 133.

[10]. Davis, “Traditional African Healing,” http://www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/traditionalhealing.html.

[11]. Stephanie Rose Bird, A Healing Grove: African Tree Remedies and Rituals for Body and Spirit (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009), 18.

[12].  Arnold Nyiegwen Muweh, "Modernity in Traditional Medicine Women’s Experiences and Perceptions in the Kumba Health District, SW Region Cameroon," (UMEA University, 2011), 22.

[13]. C N Fokunang et al, “Traditional Medicine: Past, Present and Future Research and Development Prospects and Integration in the National Health System of Cameroon,” African Journal of Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Medicines 8, no. 3 (2011):284.

[14]. Ibid.

[15]. Ibid.

[16]. Emily Hillenbrand, "Improving Traditional-Conventional Medicine Collaboration: Perspectives from Cameroonian Traditional Practitioners," Nordic Journal of African Studies 1, no. 15 (2006): 2.

[17]. Muweh, "Modernity in Traditional Medicine,” 22.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Hillenbrand, “Improving Traditional-Conventional Medicine,” 4.

[20]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 136.

[21].“Bamiléké - Religion and Expressive Culture,” World Culture Encyclopedia, accessed October 30, 2018, “https://www.everyculture.com/Africa-Middle-East/Bamil-k-Religion-and-Expressive-Culture.html.

[22]. Ibid.

[23]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 133.

[24]. Chance, “The Practices of the Traditional Caring Culture,” 79.

[25]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 135.

[26]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 136.

[27]. Bird, A Healing Grove: African Tree Remedies, 22.

[28]. Fokunang et al, “Traditional Medicine,” 284.

[29]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 136.

[30]. Ibid.

[31]. Bird, A Healing Grove: African Tree Remedies, 19.

[32]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 135.

[33]. Bird, A Healing Grove: African Tree Remedies, 39.

[34]. Neba, “Traditional Health Care System,” 135.

[35]. Buenaflor, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo, 6.

[36]. Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018), 28.

[37]. Linda Howe, How to Read the Akashic Records: Accessing the Archive of the Soul's Journey (Boulder: Sounds True Inc., 2009) 3.

[38]. Ibid.

[39]. Ibid., 8.

[40]. Buenaflor, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo, 64.

[41]. Ibid.

[42]. Mitchell, Sacred Instructions, 29.

Bibliography

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Women’s Experiences and Perceptions in the Kumba Health District, SW Region Cameroon." UMEA University, 2011.

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