certified by our ancestors
We don’t need to wait to be certified. Or for some of us, we don’t need more certifications. Certified just means documented as truth. Documented means that someone put it on a piece of paper. Certified means that someone other than you put it on a piece of paper and signed it saying that you did something or that you are something. These days it’s not even a piece of paper, it’s a pdf. Start before you’re ready. You don’t need to wait for a piece of paper or pdf to tell you the truth about yourself. You know the truth about yourself. Yes, you do know. chiwpac* wants you to think you don’t know.
Of course, if part of the truth of what you know about yourself is that you have no experience in the thing that you think you need certification in, then own that. You still know the truth about yourself. Go get that experience. You know that you want to know more about. That’s when it makes sense to get some more experience, or just to begin experimenting with what you do already know. So what is your thing? As you know, going to art, music, therapy or horticulture classes doesn’t make someone a profoundly impactful artist, singer, healer or farmer. It just gives folks more exposure and information as to how others have been doing it. Eventually, you just need to get to the doing of the thing. It’s in the doing the thing over and over that makes you an experienced person at something, not a certification. That’s where apprenticeship is more appealing than certification.
If you have been experimenting and you have the experience, you don’t also need to be an expert by someone else’s standards. In fact, you might be amazing without a lot of people ever knowing. Own that. When you attempt to study under someone else, they may have some great techniques and approaches that you’ll find invaluable. There are definitely those teachers, I’ve had many. Eventually, you will need to carve your own way of doing the thing, because we’re complicated nuanced beings. That’s why you have to do the thing.
That said, there are plenty of people that are famous for being famous, not because they are exceptionally masterful at what they do. More power to them, but I’m just saying that being known for what you do doesn’t make a person skillful. We’ve all overpaid or overinvested time and energy into something that we were underwhelmed or even harmed by. When that starts happening more often than not, then you know your discernment might be refining itself. Or maybe we’re overconfident, judgy and have lost the innocence of discovery. Sadly, that happens too. It’s not too late to break up with such attitudes. If it’s not for you and you’ve been fortified by finding out you know more than you thought you did, do your thing. Regardless, stay curious and give grace as needed to others and especially to yourself.
I don’t like to stop learning from others. I always like to see if there is someone that I can learn from. I love finding secret living legends. Many people don’t get recognized for their work until they’ve left this life’s body. So keep learning. Stay open. Revel in the living. They might be younger than you or in a completely different field of study. Allow yourself to cross pollinate your understanding, but don’t let your seeking stop you from starting. Start before you’re ready. You do need to be honest about what you know. And you need to trust what you are beginning to understand and begin anyway. At some point, you need to take responsible risks and refer out when you don’t have a clue of how to handle something or what to do next.
This is where honest humility is necessary. Especially when someone else’s health, safety or access to peace is at risk. If you find yourself taking on more than you can navigate, ask for help. But this too doesn’t mean you need certification or more certifications. Do your part, then do another part. Keep going.
We are certified by our ancestors. They wrote the truth of our heritage with their blood on stardust in illegible heartwriting. Understand where chiwpac wants to take credit and make money off our ancestors. Some of us have access to the heritage of epigenetic or past life mastery in our energetic bodies from the beyond. Some of us have living ancestors that give us the guidance here in this life. Such blessings. There is no definitive course for this, only transmission. For those of us who are the living recipients of the lineages of the creativity and modalities that we have inherited in our multifaceted undocumentable bodies, we cannot separate that knowing. chiwpac seeks to appropriate and profit from our visceral inheritance. We may even be invited by chiwpac to pay for some classes that would offer us certification in something that our body could have translated with a little bit of coaxing through engaging in practices that are familiar to our wholistic beingness. Sometimes it’s enough to be reminded by an unconventional teacher that doesn’t insist on certifications. Or maybe it was a teacher that offers certifications, but you pave your own way of continuing the work through your own knowing. However it arises, then what? Then you begin doing the thing and keep doing it. Imperfectly perfectly. You do know how. Then share, please share the thing!
I became a somatic mindfulness practitioner by listening to my hands, body and heart. I started massaging in my teens. I began working with my hands on myself, on others very young.I began working with my hands on myself, on others intuitively. I remember looking at my hands from a very young age, knowing something my hands. I remember thinking they were powerful and knowing. I also was a very curious child. I asked the questions in my mind to spiritual teachers as young as ten years of age and discerned that the answers were unsatisfactory. I inherited from my paternal grandmother a devout heart that seeked to understand my spiritual connection beyond the human. I inherited from my maternal grandmother my bodywork practice. My maternal grandmother was an artist and a hilot** practitioner. The hilot part was recent news to my mind, but my body and my hands knew.
Eventually these known and unspoken curiosities led me to study performing and visual arts. My body, my voice, my creative connection to the world and how to interpret it were inseparable from the way I navigated and co-created experiences. I held community healing circles instead of partying as a teen. This way of being was so familiar to me. I spent much of my childhood alone with my mind, so meditation was just a way to formalize introspection and gave me words to name what I had already felt and understood. So, classes were often reminders of some practices my bodies and minds were already familiar with. Studying meditation and going on extensive retreats was a familiar way of being with myself. I had visions of the teachers, before I would come to learn who they were in history. The knowing wasn’t from books. The books were the vehicles to remembering. In the past it was oral transmission that reminded us, not official files, papers, documents and journals. This way of validating a person’s enoughness is a new phenomenon. Some of the meditation and bodywork techniques that I learned that were not passed down through a formal oral lineage, were borrowed and/or appropriated from indigenous cultures and repackaged as commodified knowledge or discoveries. This is an unfortunate byproduct of growing up in chiwpac’s presence. This complicates the relay of information. It’s alright. Eventually, our bodies, hearts and minds begin to trust what it knows is ours to hold and what chipwac is trying to sell to us.
Over and over, I give myself permission to trust what I already knew. I also gave myself permission to release the ways that I don’t want to work. I invite you to give yourself the same permission. I invite you to experience what you have limited experience with that you want more of. I invite you to keep experimenting in what you already know to be true. Eventually, we become so familiar with paths of ways of practicing that we wish to share it with others, because we care about how others co-create and experience their lives.
I am also a somatic mindfulness practitioner because I am an experienced bodyworker and have been a meditation practitioner then teacher for decades. I have the experience of working with people that seek the answers to their body and mind’s questions and concerns. I have the experience of answering some of these questions because I learned about the answers through my teachers’ guidance, my own experiences of questioning, grappling with trauma. I have experience co-navigating the bodies, hearts and minds of those that trust me to explore these questions with them.
So for those of you, like me, that are some kind of practitioner of a thing — I invite you to also check and see if your ancestors also wrote the truth of your heritage with their blood on stardust in illegible heartwriting. We can do this through ancestral listening. We are certified by our ancestors.
chipwac*: the inhuman/e cis-hetero-imperialist-patriarchal-white-supremacist-ablist-capitalist archetype
hilot**: a Pinay hands on healing practice
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Thank you Cassandra Lam for encouraging me to claim the heritage of known experience over chipwac’s lure of certification en-titlement.
