Some stories aren’t chosen; they arrive, unbidden, and change the shape of your life. This is one of those stories.
There are moments the soul remembers long before the mind does, moments that mark us, rearrange us, carve a doorway into a place we didn’t know we had access to. And so the story goes something like this…
One of my first initiations into the path of becoming a medicine woman wasn’t gentle, as most initiations are not. It wasn’t a metaphor or a teaching told to me by a mentor. It arrived raw and uncompromising, the way the wild always does, by claiming me completely.
It was the afternoon I became Coyote. Not as an idea or symbol. Not as a guided visualization in a weekend workshop or in my front room, drumming. But as a full-bodied crossing into another way of being.
I found myself very unexpectedly in the deep wild of the Yosemite park, somewhere down a very winding path, and climbing a mountain by myself, scared to death that I would encounter a bear that might not approve of my presence in its home. I did the only thing I could do. I prayed and cried. Something in me told me I had to keep climbing. Every step I took felt heavy, down to my bones.
As I turned a corner, all of a sudden, the world slowed down as if someone had turned a dial inside time. My senses sharpened in an instant, colors brightened, sounds stretched, and the landscape became alive in a way I had never felt. My breath dropped into a place deeper than my lungs, into something ancestral and ancient.
And then… something in me shifted.
I felt myself lowering to the earth, my palms becoming paws, my spine lengthening, my awareness expanding outward in every direction. As my thoughts disappeared, I felt what I would identify as “me” fade into the background, almost non-existent, being ever so delicately tethered by a thin string.
Where the sacred meets the untamed, something ancient remembers itself.
I found myself crawling on all fours, sniffing the ground and tracking something I couldn’t yet name. But what astonished me most wasn’t the movement; it was the knowing. The knowing of confidence. The knowing of capability. The knowing of belonging inside the wild world.
There was no fear. No hesitation.
Only clarity.
Only presence.
Only instinct.
For that afternoon, the veil thinned between realms. I could see into another layer of reality, the one just beneath the one we pretend is the only one.
I saw the web that runs through all things, the pathways animals travel, the shimmer of energy that moves beneath the land, and the diverse smells of nature. I saw with Coyote sight: the humor, the wisdom, the trickster truth that reveals what humans try so hard to hide from themselves. More than ever, I felt alive, for the first time.
Coyote taught me confidence that isn’t loud. Strength that doesn’t demand to be seen. Perception that doesn’t come from thinking, but from listening with the entire body.
This experience marked me. It rearranged me. It gave me a medicine body to grow into.
I have only told a handful of people this story in the past 20 years since it happened.
I was afraid of being misunderstood, dismissed, or seen as strange. But the older I get, the more I understand: these initiations arrive precisely because they are meant to shape the work we do in the world.
Coyote didn’t come to entertain me. Coyote came to initiate me. To teach me how to track truth in another person’s life. How to sense what is hidden, even when they cannot name it. How to move between worlds with steadiness. How to trust the instinct that rises before logic does.
Every time I sit with a client, guide a woman through her grief, or help someone reconnect with their soul, I feel that part of me, the one that sees through illusion, the one that trusts the body’s wisdom, the one that can walk between realms without fear.
The world tries to tame us into forgetting our wild initiations. But the body does not forget. The earth does not forget. The animal spirits do not forget. And neither should we.
This path is not a metaphor. This path is lived, breathed, and walked, sometimes even on all fours, as it goes.
If you’ve ever had a moment when the world opened itself to you, through a dream, a vision, a sudden knowing, a visitation, or a shift in your senses, trust it. These are not accidents. They are invitations.
Initiation rarely, if ever, looks the way we imagine it will. But it always reveals exactly what we needed to remember.
If this story stirred something in you, trust that. These moments come to all of us in different forms: dreams, instincts, visions, thresholds we didn’t mean to cross. If you’re remembering your own wild wisdom, I’d love to walk beside you.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for walking this path with me.
May your instincts guide you home.
Deepest Munay,
Joaquina 🦋
Woven Threads of Wisdom
Munay is a Quechua word meaning “pure love” or “will”—the life force that moves through all things. It is the energy that calls you back home to yourself.
This story reflects my lived experience and the lineage of my personal initiations. While animal-ally experiences are found across many cultures, I speak only from my own path and not on behalf of any Indigenous tradition.
Ready to heal at the root?
[Book your free discovery call here]
