What Do the Munay Ki Rite Initiations Feel Like?
There was a time in my life when I could not digest food.
I lost three stone in six months.
I dropped below six stone in weight.
Food would not stay in my body. I vomited constantly. I looked, quite honestly, like a famine victim.
Doctors ran tests and found nothing wrong.
“You’re anxious.”
“It’s psychological.”
“You’re anorexic / bullemic.”
I was young - at just 19 years old. I was intimidated because they looked at me with those authoritative eyes, like a naughty little girl. I began to doubt myself.
But I knew something was wrong.
Finally, I was lucky enough to be gifted a session with a Homoeopath and Herbalist.
She looked at me — really looked and listened deeply to all I had to say about how I felt — and said gently,
“You’ve eaten too much trauma. Your body can’t take any more.”
At the time, I thought she meant my own, as I had experienced a lot of physical, emotional and sexual trauma growing up.
She gave me Calendula officinalis to heal my gut — the golden medicine of restoration and boundary repair. Within three days, my body responded. I could eat a full plate of food without vomiting. Over the next few months, I regained weight and strength. Physically, I recovered fully.
But it would take years before I understood the deeper truth.
I wasn’t just carrying my own pain.
I was digesting everyone else’s.
Trauma, the Body, and “Eating Heucha”
Eating Heucha
In the Q’ero lineage, heavy, unprocessed emotional energy is called heucha.
It isn’t evil. It isn’t dramatic. It is simply energy that has not been metabolised.
Nature doesn’t create heucha. Trees don’t store resentment. Rivers don’t internalise grief. Animals don’t absorb emotional toxins to keep the peace.
Only humans do that.
Growing up in a traditionally dysfunctional British household — a stoic, emotionally unavailable mother, a father absent in ways that mattered — I became the regulator.
I learned to swallow tension.
To smooth the emotional weather.
To eat the heaviness so the room could feel safer.
It was survival.
But survival strategies have consequences.
Every time I visited my parents as an adult, my body would collapse.
Week-long migraines.
Forty mouth ulcers at a time.
Full-body tension so severe it resembled fibromyalgia.
I would go with good intentions. Smile. Behave. Often regress into the “difficult child” role they expected.
And I would get sick.
I didn’t tell them. I didn’t think they would understand. I wasn’t sure I fully understood it myself.
Until the day my teacher, a Shamanista (female shaman), decided to gift me the Bands of Power.
The Bands of Power: What the Initiation Felt Like
She had trained originally as a druid, later walking the Mayan and Q’ero shamanic paths. We had been working together on trauma and its physical manifestations.
That day, she said I was ready.
The Bands of Power initiation weaves six luminous strands into the energy field.
As she began, I saw the colours clearly — I am a natural visualiser — but more than that, I felt something ancient wake up inside me.
A rainbow band of light from crown to spine and back again.
A black band grounds me to the earth.
Red at the solar plexus — water, flow, emotional movement.
Gold at the heart — sun and fire.
Silver at the throat — air and moon.
Clear light at the brow and crown — ether, the vastness.
But it did not feel theatrical.
It felt calm.
Like invisible ancestors standing behind me.
Like elemental beings remembering me.
Like a protective shield settling softly around my body.
I felt taller. Stronger. More… myself.
Not hardened.
Held.
What Do the Munay Ki Rites Feel Like in Practice?
The Test
The real test came the next time I visited my parents.
As I approached their house, I consciously activated the Bands.
Something was different immediately.
My body was not bracing.
No tightening across my shoulders.
No electric buzz of vigilance.
No creeping sense that I was about to collapse into a teenage version of myself.
I felt adult. Present. Sovereign.
And then something extraordinary happened.
My children went for a walk with my husband and mother. My father and I were left alone.
We both fell asleep on the sofa.
Side by side.
For the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to sleep beside my father.
No migraine followed.
No ulcers bloomed.
No body-wide pain surged through me.
The rite had not changed them.
It had changed my field.
It strengthened my boundaries without armouring my heart.
And that changed everything.
Over time, our relationship matured. As I arrived differently, they responded differently. There was more respect. Less regression. Less unconscious replaying of old roles.
I stopped eating their heucha.
And my body stopped paying the price.
The Different Munay Ki Rites and Their Effects
The Munay Ki rites were brought to the West through the Q’ero elders and later shared more widely through teachers such as Alberto Villoldo.
Each rite is different.
The Healer’s Rite — the first one I gift in The Shaman’s Way — feels like remembering something you have always known. It connects you to a lineage of healers across time. Many feel heat in their hands. Tingling. A rising current of love that brings tears.
One of my students, in her early seventies, describes her experience as a feeling of blissful warmth flooding her entire body during her initiation, which made her cry a little from sheer joy. She felt the activation energy flow through my hands to her hands, and felt that flow continue through her hands to others — not imagined, not forced, more like a remembering, a reawakening of a sleeping gift.
The Bands of Power feel like sovereignty and a safety shield settling into your nervous system.
The Harmony Rite introduces archetypal allies — serpent, jaguar, hummingbird, eagle — not as mythology, but as embodied guidance. We begin to see with new perspectives, with the wisdom of these archetypes awakening us.
The Seer’s Rite sharpens perception, activating the third eye.
The Daykeeper and Wisdomkeeper Rites anchor you into the right relationship with the earth and time itself.
The rites are not information.
They are transmission.
Why I Carry and Teach the Munay Ki Rites Slowly
Three years after receiving my first initiation, I trained formally with Ally Wilkin in Yorkshire — an elder in this lineage, generous and grounded. She taught with depth and transparency, explaining the history and meaning behind every rite.
That mattered to me.
My first teacher had been secretive. It was not enough for me to simply receive something mystical without understanding it.
So when I began gifting the rites myself, I chose a different approach.
I teach the history.
The meaning.
The cosmology.
The psychology.
And I gift the rites slowly.
Not in ten days.
Not in a rush.
Because transformation that moves too quickly can frighten the subconscious and cause backlash. Gentle transformation. Graceful awakening. Change that integrates into daily life — that is what lasts.
Who This Path Is For
If you are a person who absorbs everything…
If you are a nurturer who forgets to nurture yourself…
If you feel the quiet fear of your own power — the old witch wound whispering that visibility is dangerous…
If you doubt yourself despite knowing you are capable of more…
This work is for you.
We heal the earth one heart at a time.
The Dalai Lama once said Western women will heal the world.
That healing begins with reclaiming our sovereignty, creating healthy boundaries to maintain our energy and health. With remembering we are not solely victims of our past, but also powerful creators of our future.
The Shaman’s Way: A 13 Moon Journey
On March 20th 2026, we begin the Shaman’s Way journey again with a new circle, and there are just a couple of places left now to claim.
Once a month, on a Friday, we gather in circle.
We receive the rites over 13 moons.
We learn the art of shamanic journeying and visioning.
We work with powerful yet safe and gentle healing plant medicines.
We create sacred medicine bundles as tools for healing and divination.
We heal our collective ancestral wounds.
We remember the lost parts of ourselves that have been shut down from trauma.
We learn who we are, what we need and how to speak up for ourselves, as we become more comfortable in our uniqueness
We dissolve what is toxic.
We repair what is ready to be repaired.
And perhaps most important of all, I see people discover themselves, align with their unique path in life, feel the universal life force expressing itself through them as they step into their power as creators, and learn how to love themselves and others - as we heal our hearts together.
As we step from victimhood into creator consciousness, everyone around us benefits.
And when you complete the full cycle of rites, you are empowered — if you choose — to pass them on.
Not because you must. But because when something changes your life that profoundly, you naturally want to share it.
The Munay Ki rites do not make you someone new. They help you remember who you were before you learned to shrink. And that remembering changes everything.
🔥 Why Now? The Year of the Fire Horse
Because this is the Year of the Fire Horse.
A year of momentum.
Of courage.
Of movement that cannot be contained.
Fire Horse years do not whisper. They invite you to run and take charge.
If you have felt the stirring… the restlessness… the quiet knowing that you were born for more — this year will magnify that call.
So if you are ready to begin the journey of self-discovery, to step into your power, let us ride this year together.
The Fire Horse runs whether we are ready or not. But we can choose to ride with presence, skill and steady hands. Because this year will move you one way or another — Why not move with it, consciously and with support? Let us hold one another steady as we transform.
Your healing is my healing.
And together, that ripple becomes medicine for the world.
🌿🔥
Fuel for the Journey
For the next week only, we are offering a reduced rate on the Pay in 3 and Pay in 12 options — a small gesture of support for those who feel the call but would value a little financial breathing space as they begin.
