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Medicine Stories

Ancient Medicine & the Love of the Ancestors - Atava Garcia Swiecicki

Medicine Stories

Amber Magnolia Hill

Alternative Health, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2019

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We each carry our own unique ancestral medicine, and can (and should!) spend a lifetime uncovering it. A teacher of herbal, folk, and indigenous medicine, Atava is deeply grounded in and a powerful guide through this sacred work.

IN THE INTRO:

  • Synchronicity, mushroom medicine, and the deer dress
  • Herbal Medicine Giveaway
  • Ancestral Apothecary's Student of Color Scholarship Fund- investing in herbal education is investing in the health of your community
  • The Ancestor Song

IN THE INTERVIEW:

  • Invocation
  • When an ancestor becomes an ally from the other side
  • How to know when it's really a message from spirit and not just our own projection
  • Food as the one surviving cultural tradition within a family
  • Remembering your indigenous mind
  • How giving time and attention to our roots can heal relationships among the living
  • Ancestral connection and reverence work never ends
  • Healing is in our bones, our blood, our DNA
  • Being witnessed in our stories
  • Remembering that the plants are (literally) our ancestors
  • Using plants to ground deeply when talking about and facing ancestral issues like colonization and slavery- we're never alone as long as we have our plant allies
  • Making space for people of color to explore and reclaim their ancestral medicine 
  • Teaching healing skills so that people can treat those within their own communities and not need saving from elsewhere
  • Herbalists are the grassroots community healers
  • You're going to be a better herbalist and healer if you're rooted in your own ancestral traditions
  • We all come from people who work with plants
  • Love is the basic fundamental vibration that keeps the universe moving- how love and community saw Atava through uterine cancer & remembering to reweave the energy of love back into the healing arts
  • A beautiful death: how the love we give and receive in this life carries us into the realm of the ancestors

LINKS:

Transcript

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0:00.0

This knowledge doesn't go away. It doesn't die. It just kind of goes dormant but just given the right conditions

0:07.6

and the openness in a person that that medicine will come through.

0:13.0

I always like to say it's recorded in our bones and blood

0:16.2

in our DNA.

0:18.0

So even if it's been many generations

0:19.8

since someone was a practicing herbalist in our family lineage, it's still there.

0:26.0

Hello friends, welcome to the Medicine Stories Podcast, where we are remembering what it is to be human upon the earth.

0:37.0

I'm Amber Magnolia Hill, and this is episode 40.

0:41.0

Today I'm sharing my interview with Atava Garcia, Swiziki.

0:45.0

It's incredibly beautiful and I also have a very sweet gift for you at the end of this intro. I hope it lands in your heart the way it

0:54.8

landed in mine and super honored and grateful to the people who created it for

1:00.5

doing so and for allowing me to share it with you, but we'll get there.

1:05.0

First I want to tell you about the synchronicity that plays into today's interview.

1:11.0

So I had met Atava 10 years ago and we had done an exchange in which

1:19.1

she got this beautiful vintage embroidered Mexican dress from me. This is back when I was

1:24.6

selling vintage clothing online under the name Violet Folklore which feels like a

1:30.3

lifetime ago but was also you know directly led me to what I'm doing now the

1:36.3

first herbal medicines I sold were St. John's Whart oils that I put up in my Etsy vintage

1:40.5

shop in 2012.

1:43.0

So anyway, a few days before the interview, I was thinking,

1:47.0

I wonder if Atava still has that dress.

1:50.0

It's just always stuck with me.

...

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