My Healing Quest

I undertook a Healing Quest in June of 1997, on Mount Shasta. I and five other women, from Tehachapi, California decided to study the wisdom of The Thirteen Clan Mothers and undertake journey work into the dreamtime. We wrote Jamie Sams, the author of The Thirteen Clan Mothers, to tell her what we were doing and asked if she could recommend someone to lead us out on a Healing Quest. Ms. Sams wrote us back and put us in touch with Maria Yraceburu, an Apache Medicine Woman who was planning to set a group of women from the San Francisco area out on the hill in a years time. My group met twice a month, over a years time, on the full and new moons, to study that moons Clan Mother, journey into the dreamtime and feast. We also built a sweatlodge and worked closely with a Lakota lodge in Santa Paula. During that year, I prepared my mind and body for the Healing Quest. I was focused and physically prepared for the challenge ahead. While I will not tell you my personal vision, I can say that a Quest is not for the weak. You are alone and there is no one to talk to except Spirit. It is difficult to shed civilization. We are so used to the constant bombardment of our jobs, families, news, music, shopping, all those things attendent to western civilization, and then you are alone, all is silent except for the sigh of the wind and the occasional twitter of a bird. When you are out on the hill in the middle of the night and something is crashing through the brush, it gets rough, it gets scary and you want to scream and shout. But that is one of things you have to face, your fear of the unknown.

The Healing Quest, is perhaps better known as a Vision Quest. However, the teachers we worked with, Jamie Sams and Maria, called it a Healing Quest because it was geared towards the healing of the women involved. Women go through much pain through the process of birthing a child, dismissal from society as second class citizens, taking care of others before ourselves. The Healing Quest is considered a time when the woman goes deep within and heals old wounds, nurtures her spirit, and seeks a vision to be whole and strong when we step back into the world. We are allowed a little soup, dried fruit, and water to nurture ourselves, we do not need to seek out pain and deprivation - we already know that experience. We sit up all night, alone within our medicine wheel, tend the fire, watch the star nation travel across the sky, and listen for the voice of spirit whispering in our hearts. We speak to the others who are also out on the hill alone, with our drums and click sticks. We drum together to honor the Great Spirit, Earth Mother, and our connectedness to the great web of life. Our sisters who were the watchers, secretly checked on us during the day, while we sleep and seek vision in the Dreamtime. At the end of three nights we were called by our teachers drum to break our Medicine Wheel and return to her campfire. The women built a sweatlodge on the side of beautiful Klamath lake, a hawk wings over as we smoke the pipe. Inside the sweatlodge, we prayed and spoke of our visions, and then we broke camp and returned to our lives healed.

All My Relations.