This is my alchemical story.
From the roots
to the sky
and back again.
Through rhythm
and ancestral memory.
From the dominator mind to the Dancing Ancestors.
My medicine is hand-woven thread by thread.
I am guided by
my felt sense of the future.
May this prayer be our first ceremony together.
A Story of Displacement & Discovery
I am a neurodivergent, queer, non-binary woman, an inconceivably sensitive creature with a big, old soul.
For a long time, my story was one of displacement—searching for my roots while navigating the heavy weather
of Complex PTSD.
In my search for a reason to remain here,
I became a student of the Earth as the Vast Self
(honoring the teachings of Joseph Rael, Beautiful Painted Arrow).
Through the darkness, I recovered my light and discovered a secret:
The Ground I Stand On:
A Statement of Integrity
The Journey of a Bright Soul
Learning from the Land
Today, living in Northern Arizona, I continue to learn from the locals: Buck, Blue Jay, Fern, and Ponderosa.
My work is empowered by my relationships with the forces of nature.
I am deeply grateful to the Earth for guiding me on this path.
She is the original teacher and healer.
To me, She is divine.
Every ceremony I weave is an offering to her and guided by her.
Endless pain is unreal because
Love is everywhere.
My identity is a complex tapestry of lineage and land. While my ancestral memories reach back to ancient Brittania with Celtic and Nordic roots,
I carry the weight of the present:
I am a white settler on Turtle Island, belonging to a lineage that has benefited from over 500 years of colonization.
Part of my record of service is the necessary work of divesting from whiteness.
As a white person, this is my spiritual and ancestral responsibility.
As a student of decolonization, I have been engaged in Decolonial Shadow Work with Dra. Rocío Rosales Mesa, learning to unlearn and walk with greater integrity.
I will continue to be a student of this movement.
The Long Road to the Ground
I was raised without religion.
Christianity and Mormonism heavily influenced my lineage, but my parents broke free from those paths. I am deeply grateful to them for allowing me to explore my beliefs on my own, but with no directions given by my family, I wove a path through many traditions outside my birth culture.
Seeking resonance and connection, I went towards Eastern wisdom. In my youth, I dove deeply into yoga, meditation, Taoism, and Buddhism. These practices gave me a solid foundation, and I acknowledge their profound medicine—while also acknowledging that my experience of them was often severed from their land of origin.
Today, these traditions continue to support my private journey.
I went f a r o u t in my spiritual journey seeking freedom from
the "dominator mind."
Non-duality was a balm for my soul, allowing me to surrender my sense of self to something so massive it could never be hurt.
I own this part of the path: dissolving into the "One" bolstered my dissociation and expanded my spiritual ego while disconnecting me from my sense of being Karly. It was an essential, enlightening step, but it kept me hovering above my life.
It took years for all that light to reach the ground below my feet.
Getting back down to Earth required
a series of descending initiations through my body.
Ancient Indian teachings about the body's chakra system deeply informed these years of descent. Through each of my energy centers from crown to root, I learned what blocks I had to work through and what gifts were on the other side.
During this integration, I also found primary support in the indigenous wisdom of the Medicine Wheel.
Understanding where I am and what I am made of, through the directions and elementals, allowed me to finally find my roots into the Earth.
I realized my ancient, indigenous ancestors lived in deep relationship
and reverence to these forces, too.
Tapping into these sources now, I connect myself back to them.
Lineage of Sound
The drums and rattles that guide my medicine today are not new iterations; they are a return. In middle school band, I played the bass drum—the consistent pulse powering the symphony.
Long before that, as a baby, a rattle was my constant companion.
My rhythm training didn't begin in a weekend workshop; it began in the crib and matured in the band room. It is my soul in action.
I have since learned that Celtic warriors would drum out rhythms on their armor before going into battle. For me, rhythm is an ancestral inheritance—a deep, ancient frequency I have carried through every stage of my life.
This is the rhythm of my belonging.
Ancestral Liberation:
Transforming the dominator mind into
The Dancing Ancestors
Stay quiet. Be agreeable. Follow the rules. Do it right or not at all. Hide your emotions. Hide your pain. Dissociate. Disconnect. Ignore. Don’t interfere. Be afraid of difference. Fall in line. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be weird. Be pretty. Be polite. Stay still. Sit up straight. Stop crying. Stop whining. Do as I say. Control yourself.
Don’t make it worse.
No.
Not like that.
You’re wrong.
You’re bad.
Stop being like that.
Stop being you.
There’s something wrong with you.
Fix it.
This is what whiteness taught me.
Whiteness stole belonging from my lineage, leaving a silence where there should have been a song.
Long before my ancestors reached Turtle Island, they were severed from their own indigenous rhythms by the lords and churches of Europe.
To survive that trauma, they adopted the "dominator mind"—a cold, controlling survival mechanism designed to overpower and suppress.
I feel my ancestors bone-deep, responding to the trauma they experienced by tightening themselves up—shoving themselves away, disconnecting from their bodies, and distancing themselves from the Earth.
They brought this imprint across the ocean, continuing the cycle of violence by silencing the songs of the land and the Black and Indigenous bodies that belonged to it.
I carry the rot of this history in my bones.
The "stay quiet" mind cage I inherited was the colonizer’s way of maintaining control over the wild, organic rhythm of the soul.
I know where my medicine tools come from, and I know why my people lost them. I am doing the work to steward them with integrity—tending the white dominator within me and bringing it back into the fold of love and organic reality.
How do we heal a mind taught to conquer?
We dissolve its edges into the greater forces that were here first:
the dance, the song, the Earth, and the wild pulse of Love.
In Memory of the Circle
I see my ancient ancestors dancing in a circle—expressing spontaneously, singing, crying, dancing, screaming, laughing, playing, embracing.
Their bodies attuned to the soil below and the sky above,
Akin with crashing waves and oak groves.
They knew the secret: That all life is a sacred gift to be cherished.
That Love is everywhere.
A Dance of Return
As I dance and sing spontaneously, I allow my ancestors to heal through me.
I shapeshift through songs, touching something beyond my conditioning—an ancient, billowing breadth of presence.
The tension, the ache, and the desire to be free echo through every muscle.
I accept the pain... I find its natural end.
Freedom opens me.
My body moves with an intelligence I didn’t invent.
I become a vessel for a force that says Yes.
This is love coursing through my fascia,
Shaking loose everything that clings to my flowing form.
I feel my body turn darkness into fertile soil.
In this soil, my practice takes root.
When I pick up the drum or allow my body and voice to move in ways that are too much, too loud, or too weird, I am performing an act of ancestral restoration.
I am inviting those quiet, frozen ghosts to finally join the circle, proving that
the white mind can melt back into the BodySoul of the Earth.
My medicine is an ode to the inner child
The part of the lineage that never forgot how to play,
even when told to stay small.
My medicine is a reclamation
of the ancestral dance
The one they were forced to trade for agreeableness and control.
