Chapter 5: Leaning In and Learning
Written by Meg Gibbs
A signature story from Meg Gibbs’s book: Spiritually Parented: A Foot in Both Worlds. To view the book, click here.
In college, I sat with a friend going through some difficulties in her romantic relationship, and I intuitively gave her some direction. “Start moving your hips.” Then she began to sway in circles, and tears came to her eyes. As she moved the pain and energy through her body, the stuckness loosened.
I don’t know how I knew to do this, but I went with it.
This is a great example of the foundation of somatic connection—linking the mind, body, and spirit and looking at the interplay between the three.
“Somatics describes any practice that uses the mind-body connection to help you survey your internal self and listen to signals your body sends about areas of pain, discomfort, or imbalance. These practices allow you to access more information about the ways you hold on to your experiences in your body” (Raypole 2020).
I placed my hands on my friend’s heart, we took deep breaths together, and I stayed with her as she swayed. She started to slow down her hip circles, and I felt the energy dissipate. She opened her eyes pretty starkly and said, “You are such a healer.” I was a bit taken aback because I definitely felt like “a student of healing.” I didn’t claim any professional title at that point, and it would actually take several more years before I fully stepped into that identity as a career.
I mumbled something like “thank you,” but then it started to happen more and more. People would randomly share their stories with me, which often led to tears and cleansing. People have cried with me for years, and I’m a big crier, too, so I’m very comfortable with big emotions. One of the most humbling and honest aspects of this path is that healing doesn’t always feel good. I don’t do spiritual work because it’s always a “good time” but rather because it’s a true time. It gets to the heart of what’s going on and helps you make a shift.
The moment I embraced being a healer was during a workshop in North Carolina with Don Mariano Quispe Flores. He is a highly regarded Peruvian shaman my moms and I have worked with for several years. This was my first workshop alone after Mom died. Don Mariano holds a vision of sharing the rites and teachings from the Q’ero Nation of the Andes all over the world.
The focus of the workshop was on the Pleiades—the Seven Sisters constellation—and we received initiations or “rites” to connect each star to a specific point on the body. This is one of my all-time favorite topics because it involves two pieces I care about deeply: the stars and creating an embodied practice.
Each day, we would “receive the rites,” which is a new concept to most, so I’ll do my best to give a concrete example. For one of the initiations, we stood in front of Don Mariano as he knelt at our feet. He took one of his stones that held sacred energy from the Pleiades and one of our stones infused with the star’s energy. He then wound it around our feet in a figure eight, releasing the past and any old, heavy energy that blocked our path. He unwound and freed us for the future we were to step into.
Serene and powerful, his work is rooted in the Divine Feminine and always feels respectful and gentle. After the second day of the workshop, Don Mariano offered each of us a fifteen- minute mini-reading, where he gave us information about which star in the Pleiades we came from or had a deep connection to. Don Mariano only speaks Quechua, but his translator, who spoke many languages, offered to do my reading in Spanish instead of English. I studied Spanish in college but was nervous because I was still learning. His translator and I had been practicing together since he missed speaking Spanish away from home.
In that short conversation, I heard the phrase that changed my life: “Eres una curandera.” You are a healer.
“Do you know that?” his translator asked me.
I knew the word curandera and revered it but had never used it for myself. I literally felt energy trickle down my body and immediately had a sense of recognition. The many times I’d heard the word “healer” in English had never hit me like the one time I heard that word bestowed upon me by my teacher.
At that moment, I truly “got it” for the first time. From then on, I felt comfortable saying, “I am a healer. Yo soy una curandera.”
“That is what you’re meant to be doing,” Don Mariano went on. So, with some hesitation, at his encouragement, I started integrating more ceremonial practices into my work with coaching clients.
To me, my soul and body look very different, almost incongruent. Maybe that’s a universal feeling when your outsides don’t seem to match your insides. I cannot speak from this experience personally, but this is what I imagine it also feels like for bicultural and multilingual folks, where someone moves between both languages or cultures but may not feel like they fully belong to either.
I often felt like I had to speak one language at home and one at school or work. It’s a type of spiritual code switching. However, as a kid, I didn’t know that’s what you’re supposed to do. It took me a long time to learn this through tough consequences, unfortunately. No barrier between the sacred and my everyday experience existed as a child. I think it had a lot to do with how I was raised.
At the age of five, my moms, Red Earth and Dreaming Bear, met but chose to live apart.
Because, as Mom put it, “I’m not raising my child out in the country.” It’s a very “red” place— and for those who don’t know, Atlanta and the rest of Georgia are culturally two very different experiences.
Counter to that, “I’m not moving to the city and leaving this land for anything!” Dreaming Bear made that clear very early on in their relationship.
The diversity, community, and acceptance in the city has generally not bled into the rural areas. And my stepmom is an extremely liberal, radical out woman who has lived down a dirt road for over forty years in this small mountain town.
Mom raised me in a neighborhood in Atlanta near Little Five Points. Down the street from our old house is a park and a small strip of shops. We lived near the original Flying Biscuit Café and only a few minutes from my elementary school. Mom worked from home with clients, wore flowing skirts, and enjoyed eating at local restaurants throughout the week.
Dreaming Bear lives alone to this day and talks to all the animals around her, from the ants to the birds, snakes, and various creatures that come and go. She has a deep love of her garden and talks to the vegetables as well. Imagine Snow White, but instead of a young woman twirling in a pretty dress in the forest, there’s a mountain woman who chops her own firewood with a chainsaw and is a steward of the land rather than the “owner” of it.
The question of either mom relocating never really came up. Both held strong in their values and committed to this long-distance relationship for twenty years. We had a country mouse/city mouse situation driving back and forth, so I grew up in both places.
When in North Georgia, I often felt wrapped up in the Earth and learned to value nature’s pace, especially as I got older. As a young child, I had to get creative with how I spent my time because Dreaming Bear did not have a TV or WiFi. She used to read a lot of magazines for entertainment. Today, this feels unimaginable—no cartoons or distraction—and it blows my mind with how tied to technology we are nowadays.
There is still no cell service there, and I love it. I find it freeing now, but as a kid, it felt isolating, and I was sure it contributed to my internal distress of “being different.” No one at school understood what it meant to spend time on the land or slow down and connect with the Earth. For both my moms, this time to unplug was important. We spent a lot of time together as a family, but sometimes Mom would send me out to play in the woods to essentially leave her in peace.
When we gathered in the evenings, we would listen to the radio and play board games. Often, on Saturday nights, we played Rummikub in the living room, while listening to A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. I treasure those memories.
I read a lot when we were up in the mountains. I sat on the front porch in a comfy chair reading until my butt went numb. I relished the accomplishment of finishing a book in two days. It solidified the power of reading and moving between different worlds with an author.
As I got older, my relationship with the woods changed. I no longer thought of it as just a pretty place to go play. It also became a source of wisdom. The woods held the mysteries of the Universe, the energy of creation. A sacred connection to Mother Earth and Father Sky. I could be alone there and scream or sing without losing any privacy. I started exploring how to ask questions in nature and received responses in the form of dreams, visions, and whispers from the Universe.
I learned an important sacred lesson the hard way when I walked to the edge of a clearing one night and asked an open question. Walking into the dark pushed my comfort zone. I put my hands out in front of me and was alone with the night. The farther from the house, the darker it got and the easier it was to see the stars. They were so bright and beautiful, as though looking over us and casting their stories into the night sky.
I always felt connected with the stars and appreciated their light in the darkness. Our Lakota teacher taught us to refer to them as the “campfires of the ancestors.” I love the image of people who have passed over, or souls yet to come back, hanging out around a fire together, watching over us from another plane.
I used to be very scared of the dark as a kid, and darkness in the mountains was a totally different experience than in the city. Living at the end of a dirt road with no one around for miles meant there were nights when the moon didn’t brighten the sky and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
One time, I wanted to push my comfort zone a bit and left the house around ten p.m. I walked down the hill past where the house lights reached and felt the chill of the evening air in the darkness. I asked Spirit, “Will you teach me something or show me something?” And very quickly, I perceived an energy body in front of me. It was about seven feet tall, off to my left. I could see it float and move just above the ground. I took a shallow breath. “What’s your name?”
“Geneen,” it said. I got chills because I couldn’t tell what it was, and Mom didn’t do this kind of thing, or at least she didn’t tell me about it.
I asked a couple more questions, watching it closely. It felt like female energy with an amorphous shape. I didn’t know what it was here to teach me or where exactly it came from. I could just sense it was from another realm several layers away. It wasn’t an embodiment of someone who crossed over—I knew what that felt like and could distinguish it. It also felt foreign in that it did not naturally live or generate from this land. It showed itself to me because I asked it to. This still feels slightly uneasy in my body.
When I told this story to my Lakota teacher, she verbally gave me a slap on the wrist. “Don’t ever go asking such an open question like that again. Anything could have happened or come to you. You need to be very deliberate with your intentions and use words that will only call in what you want to connect to.” I got a little scared, like I had messed up. I was always a “good student” and didn’t want to disappoint.
The Teacher checked my energy and cleared any attachments that didn’t belong to me, using sage and a feather. This was the first time I had been reprimanded and felt guilty. But sometimes trial by fire, while uncomfortable, gets the point across extremely clearly. I never did it again.
Since then, I approach Spirit with specific intention and a desire to establish a loving connection, to focus on what I’m calling in and create a field of protection before reaching out to connect with the energetic realm.
That specific energy didn’t feel light and good, but it wasn’t overtly negative either. It just felt off. I learned so much from this experience. I now consciously use the words “the beings who love us” when inviting energy into sacred circles.
I set up luminescent protection around myself before adventuring into the spirit realm. And I release all the energy back from where it originated at the end.
Meg Gibbs is a Somatic Spiritual Guide, Certified Coach, and Author. She has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, LGBTQ+ leaders, and creatives over the last 10 years. She helps people get in touch with their intuition, body and Spirit. Meg has studied shamanism since she was young, which has led to a lifelong journey of spiritual exploration with various healers and teachers from the US and South America. When not contemplating the mysteries of the Universe, Meg loves dancing, having deep conversations over high quality ice cream, and spending time with her dog.
For more information: www.meggibbs.com
Sometimes we learn what to do by learning what not to do. Luckily, there weren’t huge repercussions in this instance, but it certainly impacted how I prayed and connected from then on.
I share this to support other spiritually curious folks who want to dive into energy work and are looking for guidance. Choose your words consciously and invite in “the beings who love you.”