Why I Left the Clinical World: A Return to Indigenous Roots

After more than a decade as a licensed clinical psychotherapist, something inside me began to unravel. At first, it looked like burnout—exhaustion, emotional heaviness, the creeping sense that the work I once loved had become too small for my spirit. But what I later understood was this: I was never meant to simply help people survive within broken systems. I was meant to help them remember who they are.

Through my journey—spiritual initiations, ancestral dreams, sacred ceremonies—I began to see that the traditional mental health model I was trained in, while helpful for many, was never made for people like me—people who hear the whispers of the land, people who carry medicine in their bones, people who were never meant to separate healing from the sacred.

The work of Dr. Jennifer Mullan, founder of Decolonizing Therapy, gave me language for what I had been sensing for years. She teaches that modern therapy is rooted in colonial systems—systems that disconnect us from our bodies, our ancestors, our spirits, and our communities. She reminds us that mental health is not just personal—it’s political, historical, and spiritual.

Her work affirmed what I was already remembering: that healing is not clinical. It’s ancestral. It’s embodied. It’s creative. It’s ritual. And it belongs to all of us.

🔍 Key Ideas from Dr. Mullan That Inspired This Shift:

1. Therapy has roots in white, Western, patriarchal systems

Traditional psychotherapy often centers the individual while ignoring collective trauma, systemic oppression, and ancestral wisdom. It was not designed for the cultural and spiritual needs of Black, Brown, queer, Indigenous people.

"Dr. Mullan reminds us that much of therapy was never created with the bodies, cultures, or spirituality of marginalized communities in mind. It was created to maintain order in colonized systems, not to liberate us."

2. Mental health is political and spiritual

Mental health cannot be separated from social justice, the body, or the land. Healing is deeply tied to how we live in our bodies, relate to each other, and remember our roots.

"This is why I no longer feel right working solely within the clinical lens. My healing work is now more spiritual, embodied, and rooted in indigenous knowledge systems—because healing doesn’t just happen in the mind, it happens in the soul and through connection to Earth and spirit."

3. We must reclaim ancestral healing practices and communities

Dr. Mullan invites us to return to the wisdom of our lineages. Healing is communal, ritualistic, and soul-deep. This includes ceremony, music, movement, storytelling, and sacred gathering.

"My shift toward shamanic, energetic, and ritual-based healing is not a rejection of mental health—it’s a return to it in a deeper form. It’s about remembering the ways our ancestors healed, before they were silenced. It's also about healing in community—not alone in silence."

So I made a sacred choice. I left the clinical world behind. I stepped into my calling as a medicine woman, a ritualist, a shadow dancer, a song weaver. I created Mama Crow's Magic and The Wild Muse Healing Arts Studio—two portals for those who are ready to reclaim healing on their own terms.

Here, we don’t diagnose. We witness. We don’t pathologize your pain. We honor its wisdom. We don’t just treat symptoms. We return to the root, the story, the spirit.

In this space, healing looks like:

• Singing to the grief until it softens.

• Painting your body’s story onto canvas.

• Dancing beneath the moon to remember your wild.

• Sitting in ritual with your ancestors.

• Reclaiming your voice through breath, sound, and trance.

  
  

This is not therapy as you’ve known it. This is the work of remembering.

If you’ve felt out of place in therapy rooms… if you’ve yearned for something deeper, older, wilder… welcome. You are not broken. You are awakening.

This is decolonized healing. This is the return. This is home.

Welcome The Mystic Muse and enter here.