The leaves of recognition
In July 2019, I spent a week in the heart of the Amazon, in the Acre region of Brazil. The story of how I came to be there is for another day. This one is the biggest lesson of that trip: to stop searching outside myself for answers I have known, deep down, for a long time.
We had been invited to visit the village of Mutum, the only matriarchal village of the Yawanawá tribe, for a week of women’s exchange and conversation. The village women were hosting nineteen women from across Canada and the US.
In January of that year, once the group was confirmed, we joined a video call with the women of the village to introduce ourselves and share our intentions for the trip, along with our questions for the spirit of the Amazon. It was a beautiful encounter. They wrote down each of our names, intentions, and questions so they could carry them in ceremony until we arrived. That attention stayed with me. They were inviting us into their hearts six months before we set foot in the village.
My intention, my question, circled my troubled marriage. The relationship had been strained for a long time, and I didn’t know how to shift it. I was out of answers, out of solutions, and ready to surrender to whatever I might learn about how to save it.
We arrived in the village of Mutum on a day the Mayans call the day out of time. It felt like an experience out of time, too. It had taken us three and a half days to reach the village: three flights, an overnight stay in a small town, a four-hour bus ride, and a seven-hour boat ride.
The week was magical, a story for another time, and I kept my intention alive in my heart every moment. On the fourth day, I found the chance to sit with the village chief, an elderly woman who seemed to carry inner power and wisdom in equal measure. I began by telling her about my relationship and about my husband’s mysterious illness, which had changed him and our lives for nine years, when she stopped me. “They’ve let your husband be sick for nine years? In our village, when someone’s spirit leaves their body – which I learned was their definition of illness – we sit in ceremony that night and ask for their spirit to come back.” She was stunned that we live in a system that allows illness to carry on that long, and I couldn’t disagree. I realized, sitting there, that we don’t only allow it. We built systems around illness Vs health. At the end of our conversation, she told me she wasn’t certain she could help but that she would speak with the elder medicine men of the village and let me know. I didn’t hear anything from her for the week.
On the seventh morning, the day of our departure, she called me over and handed me a small bag of leaves. She said they had been prayed over, and that I needed to sit with my husband as soon as I got home, burn them in a small fire, and ask for his spirit to come back. After a week of ceremony and the shifts I had felt in myself, I could sense the weight the leaves carried. I thanked her for the offering and set off on the long journey back to Toronto.
I arrived home three and a half days later, greeted by the same dynamic I had left. I told my husband about the leaves and asked if we could sit in the backyard and burn them that night. He said maybe later. I don’t remember if I asked again. I imagine I tried once more, then stopped after that, and life continued as it was.
Three weeks after I arrived home, I suddenly remembered the Amazonian leaves, still in the kitchen cabinet. When I pulled out the bag, the leaves had rotted over time due to a lack of oxygen. Of course they had. Leaves rot when disconnected from source and nutrients. I stood there staring at another lost opportunity, tears began running down my face, understanding, finally, the medicine and the lesson they carried. These leaves were never meant for my husband. They were meant for me and for my spirit. They reflected the state of our relationship, laid bare: years without source, without nutrients, two people trapped inside limitations that were stifling both of their life forces. The leaves showed me I had been trying to revive a relationship that was already gone.
The medicine brought my spirit back into my body. It shone a light on something I had known for a long time and had been afraid to name, afraid to own.
That November, the marriage dissolved too.
It’s been seven years since that Amazon trip. The lessons still surface. The medicine still lives in my veins and my spirit. It took time for my spirit to trust its way back into my body. Now, I feel fully alive, and every day, I help others do the same: To reconnect what was separated a long time ago and return their spirit to where it rightfully belongs.
I’m curious. Is there an inner knowing you keep ignoring, one you replace by searching for answers outside yourself? Are there environments where you feel like you can’t be fully yourself? Beliefs that keep you stuck? A calling you’ve been putting off?
I’m sharing my story so it might act as an invitation for you, so you can see where you’ve been dimmed. Where your spirit isn’t yet living in its rightful home: inside you. Living, creating, and expressing through you.
With love,
Mahshad
