Riera de la Bisbal

On the 26th of December I pullled a tarot card “Heaven Sent”- it told me that very soon, I would receive a spiritual gift of great magnitude. I forgot about it for a few days while life threw its challenges at me, but then I was given an unexpected gift.

I have been wanting to book a reflexology appointment for ages, since my feet are truly one of the most communicative parts of my body, and I got the privilege of sitting with Eva, a magical woman with a very compassionate touch.

She shared quite a few incites with me about what she could feel through my feet that made logical sense to my current health and situation. But one thing she began to speak about surprised me: she asked me if I hated shoes&socks, and if this topic resonates with me… (my family is laughing already 😂) but for those who don’t know, I made my caretakers lives absolute hell over socks and shoes, always resisting them til I was in middle school, and even at the start of college I spent nearly a year barefoot in rebellion. For the last 8 years, I’ve owned one pair of shoes (barefoot shoes) and refuse to wear anything else more restrictive.

Eva told me that she believes she can feel my past life, and asked if I felt connected to South America/the Andes. Again this completely caught me off guard, since this woman doesn’t know anything of my past in the Andes of Ecuador/Peru- the places that called me since I was a child, the places I made my home before (semi reluctantly, but in hindsight very fortunately) moving to Europe. She continued saying that she feels I was indigenous Latino, and that the traces are strong.

I took a DNA test when I was in the states in the fall, kind of expecting some little bit of Latino genes to be hidden somewhere. I have always felt so connected to Latino culture, language, the preservation of nature, and to rituals… all since I was so small, even before I really “knew” about those places.

I thought this was interesting, but am never super quick to subscribe to any particular idea, so I let it settle for a few days. Once I arrived at the New Year’s retreat, it kept popping into my mind randomly…. And one day, a woman named Lourdes approached me and said, “I’d really like to chat with you!” And so we did, and she became a part of this journey into embracing the idea that Eva brought into my life.

All of my seemingly varied and different passions as well as those strange feelings of belonging somewhere I hadn’t ever even seen since I was small feel seamlessly connected and make a lot of sense under this lens. My studying Latin American development politics and environmental preservation, my time lobbying for protection of the forests, my work facilitating the exchange of knowledge between tribes (Panama, 2015-2019) and supporting plant ceremonies, in connecting everything I’ve ever done to the moon, Pocahontas as my childhood hero, resenting clothing and shoes and hating the distance capitalism puts between us and our communities and nature..

I honestly neither doubted nor believed in past lives; I have always been open to the possibility but never had any personal experience or reason to lean to one side or another. Whether it is objectively “true” or not, it brings me peace to understand a part of myself in a new way. The greatest part of this gift is the peace it gave me in putting to rest a part of my wondering of “why” I feel a part of me still belongs in los Andes, why is has always felt like home.Read more