Original Medicine 4-Part Series:
Tending the Fertile Ground of Chaos to Find Peace at the Threshold of Uncertainty
with Mbali Marais, Diviner & Medicine Elder
Session Description:
"Earth symbolizes the mother on whose lap everyone finds a home, nourishment, support, comfort and empowerment." Malidoma Some
We carry a greater earth story consisting of those who came before and includes all of the elements, other worlds, and beings. How we love the earth and others is a reflection of how we love ourselves. What we love, we protect. When we let the world in, not turn away from it we gain vision, rather than anxiety, a deeper sense of belonging not isolation, courage not fear. One can only give from a place of centeredness, and rootedness. The earth is calling us to remember to blossom and bloom. If we don't have a healthy body, where will we live?
In a radically changing world there is a call for a communal initiation, a call to show up not only for ourselves, but also for our community, the next generation, and our beloved earth.
Martín Prechtel says: We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. For this, we need all peoples: our poets, our shamans, our dreamers, our youth, our elders, our women, our men, our ancestors, and our real old memories from before we were people.
Mbali invites us to explore together a deeper relationship and responsibility to our common good as stewards of the earth.
About Original Medicine 4-Part Series
Original Medicine 4-Part Series is a platform for Indigenous elders, teachers, and healers from all four corners of the world to come and share their wisdom. This series seeks to illuminate the often overlooked and unheard voices of Indigenous people. These sessions offer a psycho-spiritual, cross-cultural, and mindfulness approach that weaves Indigenous Wisdom, Buddha-Dharma, and Earth-based practices. We work with each Season as a teacher, featuring a different guest speaker every Season, so that we may be in an intentional practice of connecting ourselves with the natural world.
About the Teacher:
Mbali Marais is a descendant of a Khoi Khoi ( Khoi Khoi means -The Real People) peoples on her mother’s side from the Western Cape, South Africa and the Amaghebe clan of the Xhosa peoples on her father’s side in the Eastern Cape. She is mother to a Xhosa boy (who came into her life when he was 9 years old) a sister, daughter, aunt, mother to many. Her lineages include Dagara west Africa (adopted) Bushmen, Shangan, Grique, Khoi Khoi, Dutch, French Hugeunots and Portuguese.
Mbali Marais is the founder of the Return to Origin non-profit organization. www.returntoorigin.org.za an organization that works with young underserved people in South Africa to return them to their origins. She has facilitated the three year Indigenous Knowledge Leadership Program and graduated leaders where inner and outer work are at the heart of transformation.