Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.
Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.
Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.
Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.
Chris: We hope you enjoy.
Mallory: I’m really excited about this one, Chris. This week I’m sharing a conversation that Tami had with Pānquetzani, who is a traditional healer and practitioner of Mesoamerican healing practices. She works primarily with womb healing and plant medicine, and she carries forward ancestral wisdom in a really profound way.
Chris: Yeah, I love her modern take on this ancestral wisdom and bringing it forward.
Mallory: Pānquetzani’s book Thriving Postpartum is one that I’ve actually purchased a few times for family members and friends all going through pregnancy and postpartum. But don’t click away yet.
Chris: I’m staying with you. I have gone through pregnancy — just not in my—
Mallory: Right, right. Her wisdom isn’t just applicable to mothers and those actively going through postpartum. In today’s episode, Pānquetzani talks about making her life sort of an altar for her ancestors — not just in words, but actually living the things they didn’t get to experience.
Chris: Oh.
Mallory: Things like slowing down and experiencing joy and dancing and pleasure. She’s also intentionally creating spaces for her own children to discover who they are and what they love in a way that previous generations maybe weren’t able to.
Chris: So they’re living out what their ancestors couldn’t.
Mallory: Yeah, like breaking cycles. She shares a story about her fifteen-year-old son discovering metalwork, but I don’t want to spoil it too much. So let’s just get into it.
Chris: All right. So here are Tami and Pānquetzani exploring: How do we honor our ancestors by thriving?
Mallory: Stay with us.
Tami Simon: One of the things I feel in your book, and in who you are and the way you speak, is a sense of devotion that you have to your whole ancestral line and your inheritance as a traditional healer. How would you language that devotion? What is it that you feel dedicated to as an ancestral healer today, in the contemporary world?
Pānquetzani: There’s so much. I feel like it starts with me when I check into my womb. There’s ancestral stuff in there. The first postpartum [acomodada?], which is womb adjustment in Mesoamerican culture — we believe in the prolapse and the way that organs need to be sitting in your body. I remember feeling so much anger released with my first postpartum [acomodada?], and I felt like that anger wasn’t even mine. I felt like that anger was ancestral.
And I have so many ancestral gifts, right? And with those gifts, I also have ancestral wounds. And so as a healer, it’s my job to not only use the gifts, but address the wounds. Because my ancestors bled for me to be here. My ancestors struggled and suffered so that I could be able to disseminate this medicine. So of course I owe them reverence, and I owe them reverence through doing the healing work that they may have not had the opportunity to do.
Maybe they didn’t have the privilege to slow down. Maybe they didn’t have the privilege to cry, to dance, to experience sensual, sexual pleasure. Right? So I need to make my life an altar for my ancestors. I need to be the one who is coming with the fire of: hey, this is all for you. My life is for you. The way that I move through the world, the way that I live my life — this is an homage to you, my ancestors. Because you were oppressed in these specific ways, because you went through this trauma, I’m going to heal this in me, and I’m going to make sure that I don’t perpetuate trauma.
I’m going to slow down with my children, and even when I’m tired, give them my best — give them the best version of me. And through this generational healing, I heal lineages backwards. I give them, hey, you know what? This wasn’t in vain. Your suffering wasn’t in vain. I give them that reason.
I know that they survived colonization and oppression, and they didn’t do it just for them. You need a strong will to survive if you survive colonization. If you survive all of the violence that our people were exposed to, then you had to have had conviction. Right? Was it twenty million? Twenty million Indigenous people killed in the first few years of the Spanish invasion? Millions. Right?
So we’re survivors, and I deserve to thrive. What does that mean? To me, thriving means waking up feeling happy, feeling energized, experiencing joy. It means disseminating my medicine with the people who need it the most. It means celebrating myself. It means giving my children the lives that they deserve, the resources that my grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t have — and not only the physical resources, but the energetic, mental, social resources that they may have not had.
And I see it already in my oldest children. My fifteen-year-old, for example, he is a self-directed, self-taught student of metal. He does metalwork, and he creates weapons and bows and arrows and knives and swords and tools. And I showed my grandmother, who’s eighty-three years old — oh, look what [Ami?] made. And she’s like, oh, your grandfather used to do that.
Wait, my grandfather worked with metal? And she was like, yeah, herrero means metal worker, you know, herrería? Yeah, they had a whole — that’s what his whole family did. That was their business in Mexico. I remember going to their shop, and yeah, they were masters at it.
Wow. Because I’m able to give my child a life where he wakes up and is in tune with his body and knows what he wants to do, he is falling into the family legacy of metalwork. And it seems so simple, right? But a lot of children don’t have that freedom in their homes. A lot of people don’t teach their children: hey, you know what? Tune into your heart. Do what you love. Follow your curiosity. Make a mess, and then also clean it up.
Chris: This has been Just One Question. You can listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge that this conversation was taken from on your preferred podcast platform or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.
