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Today, I share about Grandmother Medicine.
I invite you to take a deep breath, roll your shoulders back, and bring to mind a woman in your life who is in her Elder years. A woman you hold near to your heart.
Today’s share is for her.
Grandmother Medicine comes in many forms.
It can appear in the loving embrace that squeezes you tight,
It can show up in the warm cooked meal… including the insistence on having seconds even though you are stuffed.
It can show up in the presence of Master Teacher Plants.
It appears in the Stars and in the Moon.
Grandmother Medicine is a frequency and a gift.
I believe that the wisdom carried within Grandmothers is priceless and precious resource.
It is the lifeblood of our communities, carrying teachings that sustain the future.
It is a specific medicine that we are deficient in.
We find ourselves in a time in which Elders are often cast to the outside, instead of being placed in the center of the circle in Society.
This is a clever tactic and result (both simultaneously feeding one another) that represents and further escalates our disconnection from the Earth, our bodies, and the Mother.
When we are cut off from these life-giving elements and the natural life cycles, we are easier to manipulate and commodify.
When we don’t know the wisdom of Grandmothers and place them at the center, it’s easy to forget the lessons of the past which can inform how we build the future.
I have been blessed enough to bathe in Grandmother Medicine in recent years after spending most of my life cut off from that stream of love.
It was a strange experience to grow up without the stereotypical Grandmother in my life.
Missing that strong Matriarchal figure, created a deep yearning within me. A yearning I wasn’t even conscious of until Her Medicine started to appear in my life and I realized how starved I had been.
It seems that as the years go on, I continue to adopt more Grandmothers into my life.
Synchronicities present me with incredibly wise and powerful women in their 70s and 80s, and a deep friendship is born.
We cook together, share stories, cry, and laugh over tea, and so on.
I joke about adopting them because I never got this type of relationship with my own blood Grandmothers. One Grandmother died long before I was born and the other was already wheelchair-bound and living in a nursing home by the time I arrived.
I never got the experience of going to Grandma’s house for baking cookies and sleepovers. I never curled up on their laps and fell asleep.
I never got to hear their stories.
Now, I seem to acquire Grandmothers everywhere I go.
I think it’s because I know what a rare and precious resource it is. I see the deep value in their stories because I’ve missed them.
I see their hearts, and their wisdom. I see the richness in their eyes of a life fully lived.
& what I have also witnessed is a type of dehydration existing within them.
A part of them that is parched from no longer being looked in the eyes or having their hands held by a younger person eager to hear their stories.
A passion within me has come alive. A passion to reflect back to these women how needed and valued they are.
Maybe that passion is born out of my own parched place that never got to be with her own grandmothers in this way.
Ironically, as this has happened in my life, I feel closer to my grandmothers than ever before. I feel I have a deep relationship with both of them even though they are not here in the flesh. I feel them orchestrating these relationships. I see and feel them in every Elder I meet.
So, I wanted to share a poem that has been percolating within me for over a year.
An ode to this journey that is ever-evolving.
Enjoy. ❤️
The Journey:
I am on the journey my grandmothers never got to take.
The journey in.
The journey of liberation & initiated womanhood.
The journey into embodying womb and heart wisdom.
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A journey to explore the inner realms,
Without being deemed crazy.
Without having a sickness trap me to a wheelchair.
My grandmothers were bound by so much.
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An echo rings through my heart on repeat:
“What a gift my mind and body are,
They allow me the freedom they didn’t have.”
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I wonder…
Did they ever taste their own magic?
Did they know the key codes that lived in their wombs?
Their eyes, cells, and DNA?
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I hear their stories and feel the prison they were both in.
I feel it is my duty to be wild & free…
In their honor.
They survived so I could thrive and fully be here.
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I am on this journey to not only awaken this oozing passion for life within myself - but in them too.
So they can fully taste it.
Feel it through me.
& walk each step alongside me.
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I think I’m doing this for them,
but I feel maybe they’ve been pulling the strings for me all along.
What a gift this Journey of Grandmother Medicine is.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Let me know how you experience Grandmother Medicine. & let’s uplift and center that wisdom in our lives.
All my love,
Lisa Marie xx
So wonderful! Thank you so much for this share. I love the grandmother medicine and you captured so beautifully. This is so timely for me too as I just began healing work with an ancestral lineage of grandmothers that I haven't worked with before. I'm going to read them your poem! 🤗💖
Shared!