THE SACRED CULTURE OF OBSIDIAN
It’s hard to believe it’s already been 5 years since all of our lives got turned upside down..
The March, 2020 version of me could never have imagined the twists and turns that would lead to the 2025 version of me. In the Spring of 2020, I was cleaning houses full-time in wealthy Bend, Oregon to support myself while building a business leading women’s retreats to active volcanoes around the world. I was listening to inspiring podcasts while changing sheets in Airbnbs and day-dreaming into all the details needed for our first trip coming up, to Italy in April of 2020.
Or so I thought…
When Italy was the first country to shut down a few weeks later, it was back to the drawing board. Which suddenly there was plenty of time for, given the circumstances.
Deflated with the demise of something I had worked so hard for just as it was getting off the ground, I also felt a renewed fire to birth something that was more fully true to my soul. I had arrived to Bend just over a year prior, fresh out of half a PhD program in Volcano Geophysics. While I am always a scientist at heart, I have also learned that my love for the Earth’s molten fire can’t be contained in the boxes of academia. Now isolated at home, I pondered how I could create a transformational volcano experience that didn’t involve travel? Vision boards and flow charts were already surrounding my living room, I was years-deep in allowing for all the pieces to land clearly. But, I felt like there was something I was just — missing — yet I didn’t know what it was…
Shortly thereafter this missing piece showed up, in the most unexpected form. As the world shut down, I found myself immersed in an online community of women working with Obsidian, a volcanic stone, as a Yoni Egg for deep healing of all kinds. With such beauty and synchronicity, I found myself at the gates of an ancient feminine volcano lineage, an answer to my prayers. From the moment we began, things started shifting and unlocking within me. I felt like I could actually feel my ancestors doing a happy dance, nudging me forward through the threshold. “This is your soul work!” they whispered as I buried my egg in the dirt that first time, nestled in the roots of a juniper tree under the black sky of a New Moon. “Say Yes to this!” So I did, and my whole life has changed.
Obsidian has long been my favorite stone as a geologist and volcano nerd. It is basically magma instantaneously frozen in motion, unique, mysterious, energetic. For decades, it has lined my spaces, and was even woven into my wedding jewelry. I’d carried Obsidian eggs for years but didn’t know how to work with them.
But I could never have imagined as Covid began that 5 years later I would find myself already celebrating my third year full-time in a business that did indeed fulfill my vision boards; no longer cleaning houses but leading women of all ages and walks in life through feminine leadership revolutions, guided by wisdom contained in Obsidian and the Earth. I could never have imagined that I would literally be initiating Volcano Priestesses on the rim of an erupting volcano, and that I would finally be emerging myself from my own long journey healing from ancestral-level abuse patterns, mindfuc*ery, and CPTSD with the strength and capacity to be able to hold these women through the fires of transformation.
Obsidian has helped me see my blindspots; that is how it works. I understand it deeply and truly as a technology. One that requires profound understanding and respect. Although I’ve been immersed in the realms of Obsidian for years now, I still feel like I’m in Kindergarten. There are many high-level teachings about Obsidian I have not yet become privy to. As it is with everything, we only know what we know, and “what we know we don’t know.” Then there there is the vast ocean beyond of “what we don’t know we don’t know.”
Accordingly, a question I get asked occasionally is about the “cultural appropriateness” of the work that I do now, which is such an important question and I’m glad more people are initiating these conversations. This question inspired some thoughts; not answers particularly, but musings and thoughts in general about this big topic. I’d love to hear from you in the comments with what it evokes for you!
My blood is a melting pot, as it is for so many of us, and my people are of many storylines. I carry the blood of both colonizer and of colonized, from Nazi Germany to the Trail of Tears, both ancient knowing and deep ancestral trauma. I believe it is our duty to “do our work” which is to untangle the knots of our own lineages. Obsidian works with blood. The blood of the Earth. The blood of our wombs. Bloodlines. Healing the ancestral wounds while nurturing us like a Mother to her own child. Obsidian is fierce like Kali, cutting away the things that keep her children stuck in illusion. It is a stone in a category all its own, the Earth’s only naturally-occurring glass, a weaver of dreams and synchronicities, a teacher. In the form of an egg, she invites softness and pleasure to the process of untangling, to be connected and “plugged in” with the flow of sacred amrita to help clear the channels. To see clearly, beyond the veils. True power. There is a science to how it works, and also a mystery.
My containers are melting pots too, born first from my own initiations into both that science and mystery; the way I work has been built through inspired and deep listening, a response to a bigger call. I also strive to always appropriately honor and acknowledge the lineages, cultures and teachings that have inspired, informed, and shaped me and my work and only share and teach that which I have been blessed in. And yet I am not of all these cultures whose wisdom opens codes within me. I could never possibly speak for them. I can only speak for the Earth, and for her wisdom and technologies in the ways that I understand them, in the ways she has shown them to me, these foundational tools we have for thriving and loving as humans on Earth in times of great change.
In the Molten Roots Mastermind, for example, women follow a Mexica-based protocol for the Obsidian egg, designed specifically for womb healing on multiple dimensions, which comes from the book Osiris by Ana Silvia Serrano (taught and blessed to me by my late mentor. This protocol is coupled with a journey through the Medicine Wheel, a practice as old as humanity that grounds and orients us in the cycles we all weave with. We explore moon practices and sex magic and ritual, shadow work and somatic unwinding and arrows of intention — all of it in service to the Feminine re-membering and returning to sovereignty and wholeness that is so needed at this time; the journey to break the chains that have bound us for too many thousands of years, too many lifetimes of suffering as a human family. This course channeled through me like lava, and every time I shrink or hide or think who am I to be doing this — the answer swiftly comes to remind me, “You said Yes to this and you continue to say Yes.” As with all soul work, I suppose, it feels as if this work has chosen me rather than the other way around, and I know it will continue to guide and teach me, and continue to hold me accountable.
I have learned that to be accountable to the life force of the planet is quite a thing to say Yes to! (I do highly recommend it, just be prepared to be first annihilated and then allow yourself to be re-created, all of it done unapologetically with grace.)
My truest culture is volcano culture. I experience volcanoes as a global family of intelligent beings, each one unique, each one powerful beyond measure in ways distinct to its homeland, who can communicate with and respond to each other. I experience the Earth as an intelligent conscious being, whose geologic layers are holistically coupled systems that also communicate with each other through electromagnetism and vibration. Volcanoes are the instruments that sing the different notes of a bigger song, a harmony that together circulates and sustains life force on this planet, from the core to the outermost reaches of the magnetic field. Obsidian becomes a language within this system, a cell phone, a way to tap into the bigger field of life we are part of. Obsidian offers an invitation to dance with your wild edges and expand the limits of what you can perceive, co-create, engage with. It offers a place to soften into rebirth.
Our wombs are other amazing portals, volcanoes of culture in their own right. Through them all things can be birthed, all things can be changed. Our wombs open the gates to the liminal, the primal, the essence of life, that which beckons belief in all possibilities, the fullness of vision, hope and dreams. When met with Obsidian, truly amazing things can transpire. The inner volcanoes of body and spirit fountaining forth, connected to the fires of the Earth and the tides of the shared journey of womb-keepers, healing the grief and loss, the pain of disconnection, the wounds on so many levels that hold us back.
I believe it is essential to honor the guidance that moves through us, to create and serve in perhaps new ways that may challenge the status quo at times. I also believe the intention in all healing work, always, should be to repair harm rather than create more — and that especially those of us who are whiter-bodied need to be constantly becoming more attuned with and aware of both our privilege and the internalized programs that are constantly transmitted through the lens of the “Western World” and it’s insidious patriarchal, colonialist dominant cultural frameworks. It’s true work to see these mind-control patterns clearly and unwind them from our bodies and psyches.
The Indigenous cultures that have carried forth and kept alive the lineages of Earth-based healing have done so for generations, often at great risk and peril, as keepers of a flame. Thus, the First Nations wisdom-keepers always need to be honored firstly and appropriately, as their great sacrifices allow us to again remember. To share these technologies is a true honor, even those that come to us directly through our own channel, our visions and our healing work.
It is our responsibility as new paradigm leaders to keep ourselves steeped in these ways, like a tea, humble and receptive, every passing day gaining a deeper honor and respect for the vast and incredible mystery of the immense ancient wisdom contained within the intelligence field of the Earth, and all those who tend it. So much harm continues to be perpetuated by people who intend well but are obliviously sharing practices, medicines, and teachings without adequate training, blessing or understanding of the roots, the important nuances and bigger cultural context — and also, sometimes this same distortion can keep others too far along the sidelines, afraid to share their divinely guided truth for fear of unintended consequences.
Entitlement in all its forms is the old story continuing to live on, the shadow of the patriarchy. It lives in the subconscious, sinks its roots into trauma, and can be very sneaky. Integrity comes hard-earned and must be fiercely upheld. Our antennas of discernment must be constantly honed as well. It’s all very messy at times, but that is also how the chrysalis forms itself anew! My advice always in everything is to trust your body.
We find ourselves in quite a global mess at the moment, because the oligarchs that be still cannot seem to comprehend the immense powers of an intelligent Earth. Because they fear the Feminine and want to control the primal forces they don’t fully understand. Academic geology has not yet caught up to the true Earthly magic, the integrated technologies of frequency and consciousness, and all the ways our evolution has been dependent on a sacred reciprocity with the body of a living Mother Earth. Honoring of the Feminine is a necessary art to cultivate, for every human, a forgotten art by Western standards.
But it has not ever been forgotten in most every Indigenous culture around the world, who deeply understand the necessity of sacred right relationship with the forces and powers of Earth, of harmonizing within duality. It is the only way forward that will allow us to continue thriving on Earth. We can escape to find other planets, to be on the adventure of the stars, but there will never be another planet again like Earth. She is a gem in the Universe!
Earth’s mysteries are what tugged most at my heartstrings 25 years ago when I firsts discovered volcanology could be a career. That curiosity has taken me all around the world, up and down more mountains than I can count; so many adventures getting to know the life force, the essence of this beautiful planet we call home, who pulses and breathes and spits fire and visits in dreams. When I was struck by lightning on the slopes of Kilauea volcano, the volcanoes came to life in a new way. The mysteries opened their gates and beckoned me forth into new realms. We are so much more than we know!
The Earth also has a culture all her own. She may speak differently and feel differently at different places around her surface, as her different landscapes reveals different aspects of character.
But her Wild can never be tamed, and shouldn’t be underestimated — and so it is for you, when you allow her life force to move your own!
