Original Medicine 4-Part Series with Mbali Marais - March 22, 2025

Original Medicine 4-Part Series: 

Tending the Fertile Ground of Chaos to Find Peace at the Threshold of Uncertainty

with Mbali Marais, Diviner & Medicine Elder

Saturday, March 22, 2025

9:30 - 11:00 am PT // 6:30 - 8:00 pm SAST

Online via Zoom

Session Description

"Earth symbolizes the mother on whose lap everyone finds a home, nourishment, support, comfort and empowerment." Malidoma Some

We carry a greater earth story consisting of those who came before and includes all of the elements, other worlds, and beings. How we love the earth and others is a reflection of how we love ourselves. What we love, we protect. When we let the world in, not turn away from it we gain vision, rather than anxiety, a deeper sense of belonging not isolation, courage not fear. One can only give from a place of centeredness, and rootedness. The earth is calling us to remember to blossom and bloom. If we don't have a healthy body, where will we live?

In a radically changing world there is a call for a communal initiation, a call to show up not only for ourselves, but also for our community, the next generation, and our beloved earth.

Martín Prechtel says:  We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. For this, we need all peoples:  our poets, our shamans, our dreamers, our youth, our elders, our women, our men, our ancestors, and our real old memories from before we were people.

Mbali invites us to explore together a deeper relationship and responsibility to our common good as stewards of the earth.

About Original Medicine 4-Part Series 

Original Medicine 4-Part Series is a platform for Indigenous elders, teachers, and healers from all four corners of the world to come and share their wisdom. This series seeks to illuminate the often overlooked and unheard voices of Indigenous people. These sessions offer a psycho-spiritual, cross-cultural, and mindfulness approach that weaves Indigenous Wisdom, Buddha-Dharma, and Earth-based practices. We work with each Season as a teacher, featuring a different guest speaker every Season, so that we may be in an intentional practice of connecting ourselves with the natural world.

Reciprocity Contribution

We gratefully welcome donations of any amount that feels meaningful to you. Your support is appreciated, and everyone is welcome, regardless of ability to contribute. 

Setting the Container

We request participants attend the whole program and arrive on time to respect the container of the group and Mbali Marais. 

At Braided Wisdom we strive to build an online environment that creates a safe container for all. Part of creating a safer environment is asking for participants to have their cameras on during the session. If you have an access need around this request, please reach out to info@braidedwisdom.org so we can discuss how best to support you.

About Mbali Marais

Mbali Marais (she/her) is the founder of Return to Orgin NPO/PBO. She was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She is a descendant of the Khoi Khoi peoples, French Huegenots, Dutch, Portuguese, Bushmen, Shangaan, adopted into the Dagara tribe, and is an initiated stick diviner, as well as the Amaghebe clan of the Xhosa peoples. At 3 years old in 1954, she was taken by her parents to live in London, UK. Through her own challenges, which she now understands was her own rootlessness and a sense of homelessness, she developed a passion which became a mission and fascination in health and healing via the "other route."

Herbs, hands-on, and Indigenous wisdom guided her to often heal herself and others. This led her to pursue an MA in Therapeutic Bodywork, and a chance encounter with a Dagara medicine man who introduced her to a profound indigenous technology with which she has been gifted and in which she is still deeply steeped. Mbali’s intrigue by the inner and outer connection to dis-ease, land and nature, and the broken links to origins, keeps her passions and her gifts alive within her.

She understands the importance of re-remembering our connection to Nature as a tool for healing the modern world, and thus Return to Origin was birthed. Mbali facilitates retreats and deep nature quests that draw from ancient African practices, Buddhism, and mindfulness work. In 2012, she returned “home” to South Africa to track her people and resided close to our home of Origin in the Western Cape. Since then she has traveled widely in South Africa; building relations and learning from indigenous peoples including the Bushmen and Baba Credo Mutwa.

Her diverse background in the healing arts, integrative medicine, indigenous practices and transformative guidance, provide a sound container for both modern and ancient healing modalities. She is now living in the Eastern Cape surrounded by two rivers and the Indian Ocean. Learn more at https://www.youtube.com/@waterspirit_mbalimarais.

Zoom Link

An email with the Zoom Link will be sent to you the day before, the morning of, and 5 minutes prior to the program. Please search your emails for info@braidedwisdom.org and check your spam folder if you do not see our email with the Zoom Link.

You will need to sign-in to your Zoom account before clicking the Zoom link, and be sure the name you will be joining with is the same one you used to register for the program. We cannot admit anyone unless they are on our attendance list. Thank you for understanding.

This program registration is for Original Medicine 4-Part Series with Mbali Marais on Saturday, March 22, 2025, 9:30 - 11:00 am PT // 6:30 - 8:00 pm SAST.

If you have any questions, please email info@braidedwisdom.org.