Featured Wisdom Keeper
Mbali Marais
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About Mbali Marais
Mbali is a global medicine woman and wisdom keeper, initiated stick diviner in the Dagara tradition. Her journey originated in South Africa where she was born. She is descendant of a Khoi Khoi female healer as confirmed by Credo Mutwa and has recently been accepted as a daughter of the AmaGhebe clan from Xhosa tradition in rural Eastern Cape. She is an initiated Igqira (Indigenous Healer in the Xhosa tradition). Her ancestors are also French Huguenots, Bushmen, Dutch and Portuguese.Â
‘Our Divine Medicine is the remembering of the medicine we carry to heal ourselves. It is our unique gift, the gift to share with the world. That is divine work. The old ones believe we come into to the world with medicine, a purpose. We are alight when we are living our life fully by igniting our creative fire. The community thrives when we offer our gifts and talents for the greater good of all beings.’
-MbaliÂ
Modern-day initiations, such as loss of a partner, home, self-worth, identity and illness, cause us now, more than ever, to live with fear and uncertainty. Self-help methods have been exhausted, and we feel betrayed and immobile, no longer willing to take risks. We have become disconnected from our source and each other, and we have forgotten the work we came here to do. The result is a spiritual homelessness and a fear of the unknown.
Medicine abounds everywhere. We only need look up to see the sign from the hawk or down to see the ant, Â the healing of a plant, the message in the wind or a thunderstorm. What is calling us to wake up?
Divinations from the Dagara Tradition
In the Dagara tradition, 2024 is a mineral year, offering us an expansion of dream visions and opportunities to re-envision and re-member who we are.
Mbali Marais is an initiated stick and cowrie shell diviner in the Dagara tradition of West Africa – the Ancient Art of Stick Divining. A divination spread offers us a beautiful cosmological portal, one that uses the traditional and mystical language of symbolism, icons and connection to our ancestors to offer guidance into crossroads, crisis, transition, change and healing. It is a personal deciphering, counsel and guidance for your life issues.
A reading with Mbali provides insightful information that enables you to explore the deeper context of what keeps you from moving forward to uncover your purpose and life’s work on the planet and break the unhealthy patterns often carried from our ancestral lineage. We call upon our ancestors to assit in the clean-up, the clearing and for the nectar of ancestral wisdom to transmute the medicine we carry into a self-healing.
Our cosmology, elementals and the ancestors, all assist in the divination. We carry ancestral wounding, which may play a part in our present-day challenges, illnesses or behaviours. Divination shell or stick explores ancestral wounding past legacies as a way to assist us in healing. This work heals back so we may heal and carries forward in healing the next generations.
Prescriptions for healing may be offered in the form of creative, imaginative rituals. Our medicine, the gifts we came in with, are often unharnessed due to wounding, trauma, loss and the profound act of not being seen. We stay in the discomfort of the comfortable, negative self-image and low self-worth. We seldom explore the mystery of life and our potential; we remain immobile, and our gifts remain unclaimed. As such, we are unable to take action.
A divination can help the divinee bring their medicine into this world, move from the concept of scarcity to abundance, uncover their gifts and mobilise them to move forward and help them heal for the purpose of serving the greater good. It is also a spiritual check-up to see how the remedies are working and what is next on this amazing journey called life. Divinations are suggested regularly.
Why Ritual?
‘The work of ritual provides the sacred space, the vessel that we enter into with our emotional self. It is where spiritual and material worlds interact. The balance that ritual maintains is health, and the work of ritual is healing.’Â
– Malidoma Some
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