Healing Our Indigeneity: How to Belong to Earth No Matter Where You’re From
One of the most common wounds I see in my Shamanic healing and mentorship clients — particularly those living in the United States and other nations built on colonization — is a deep and unnamed homesickness. Not for a place they’ve lived, but for a way of living. A way of being in relationship with the land. A sense of belonging that feels just out of reach, like something was lost a very long time ago and nobody can quite name what it was.
I believe that something is our indigeneity — our original, Earth-rooted belonging. I not only believe that it can be healed, but I believe healing our personal and collective sense of indigeneity is fundamentally necessary to develop a well and whole global community.
What Is Indigeneity?
In its broadest sense, indigeneity is the condition of being original to a place. Indigenous peoples are communities whose ancestors have lived on particular lands since time immemorial, who maintain deep, living relationships with those lands and with the knowledge systems that arose from them.
But in a deeper, more fundamental sense — the sense that matters most in Shamanic practice — all humans are indigenous to Earth. We are all Earth-born creatures. We all belong here. The longing to feel that belonging is not a product of culture or background. It is a universal human experience.
The Wound of Leaving
Something happens when people leave the land where their ancestors have lived for generations. It doesn’t matter whether that leaving was voluntary or forced, whether it was in search of opportunity or escape from violence. The rupture is real. Think about what it meant, three or five or ten generations ago, to sail across an ocean and never return to your homeland again. Most people wouldn’t choose that unless they had to. That grief — the grief of leaving the land that formed you — lives in the lineage. It gets passed down.
Many of the people who find their way to Shamanic practice carry this grief, even if they can’t name it. There is a structural alteration that happens in the body, in the lineage, when the thread of connection to ancestral land is cut. Part of what we’re doing in Shamanic healing work is repairing that rupture and rebuilding the connection to land and home.
Three Blueprints of Belonging
In my teaching, I invite students to explore three layers of their own geographic and ancestral blueprint. The first is where you live now. Everything you eat, drink, and breathe, as well as the local biome and geologic features, is encoding the electromagnetic and biochemical signature of your current place into your body’s cells. The land where you live is actively shaping you, right now.
The second is where you were born. Your birth location was a strong imprinting — a foundational blueprint that shaped the early development of your body and your energetic field. The third is where your ancestors came from — the lands that shaped their bodies, their foods, their medicine plants, their relationship with the seasons and the water and the stones. All of this is part of the architecture of who you are.
You Belong to Earth No Matter What
Here is what I want you to know, clearly and without qualification: you belong to Earth. Not to a particular patch of it. Not only if you can trace your lineage to a specific place. You belong to Earth because you were born here, in a body made of her minerals, drinking her water, breathing her air.
Healing our indigeneity is not about claiming a culture that is not yours, or inserting yourself into traditions that were not made for you, or bypassing the real and ongoing harm of colonization. It is about coming home to yourself as an Earth being. It is about developing a close, present, intimate, direct personal relationship with the land and nature spirits where you live right now — just as your ancestors did, on their land, long ago.
This is available to you. It does not require permission. It requires only presence, humility, and a genuine desire to belong.
A Practice for Coming Home
Begin with curiosity about the land where you live. Learn its name — not only the city name, but the bioregion. Learn who lived here before you. Learn the names of the common plants and animals. Learn where your water comes from. These are not just facts — they are the beginning of a relationship. And relationship is how we come home.
Ready to go deeper with Shamanic healing for your indigeneity?
Healing our indigeneity is one of the most profound threads woven through all my work. If this resonates with you, I’d love to support your journey. Learn more about Shamanic healing, Shamanic mentorship, or the Foundations of Shamanism course.
Not ready for the deep dive yet? Start with my free guide, Activate Your Shamanic Gifts — a beautiful first step into your own Shamanic practice.
