Compassionate Coexistence

Before Angela Prider became a renowned somatic counselor, animist healer,  and ceremonialist who has helped more than 5,000 people on their journeys toward wholeness, she went through decades of dark times when she described herself as “lost.”

Over a Zoom call in January, Prider — who also is known as a Bean Feasa, or Wise Woman in the tradition of her Irish roots —  described being raised Roman Catholic in Australia in a family with “a lot of chaos.” 

As a young adult, she turned her back on Catholicism, squashed her intuitive nature to fit in, and descended into drinking — a rabbit hole that quickly led her to hit rock bottom and also gave her what she calls “the gift of desperation.”

Yearning for a way back to brighter days, she fell in with a recovery community of wild women who studied the teachings of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, hung out for nights on end in nature, and “were very serious” about the search for feminine spirituality. 

She also ended up at a sweat lodge hosted by the Squamish Nation in Vancouver, where the power of connecting with the Elders and Firekeepers, and their deep reverence for Mother Earth, was “very humbling.”

“Somehow the Universe put the right people in my path and the synchronicities began to happen, as they do whenever our soul is calling out for help,” she writes on her website. 

Another zigzag along her spiritual path led her to a therapy group run by a Jungian psychologist, who led guided visualizations. During those gentle sessions, Prider found herself sinking into another world where the therapist’s voice didn’t penetrate, and where she started to have experiences with beings who called themselves her ancestors.

It wasn’t until she attended a workshop run by the Foundation of Shamanic Studies that Prider realized what was happening; she was shamanic journeying. 

The realization — and the new path opening before her — came at a critical time in her life.

“When I went to that workshop, I had made myself a little rattle out of some lentils and some plastic container, and we were sitting in that circle, drumming and rattling, and I just started to weep,” she said. “Not the crying of grief or joy, just the weeping of knowing that this was where I was meant to be.”

Prider has spent more than 20 years in training and initiation with indigenous wisdom keepers — including Australian Aboriginal, Irish, Peruvian, Siksika/Sauk Blackfeet healers, as well as curanderos. Her journey has taken her from Australia to British Columbia, where she currently lives, as well as five pilgrimages to Ireland. 

She has been a guest speaker at the Simon Fraser University and the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine and Spirit Plant Medicine Conference held at the University of British Columbia. She led a 2016 trip to Ireland through Sacred Earth Journeys called “Journey to Ireland — Healing the Ancestral Heart.”

She also worked for ten years as a counselor in the areas of youth career transition, women’s spirituality, addiction treatment, and harm reduction in outpatient services.

As a healer, Prider is known for holding a sacred space of compassion for her clients and for creating a bridge between ancient and modern spirituality and healing. Her offerings are rooted in a lifelong kinship with Nature and conscious living. She also is a psychedelic mentor who encourages her clients to form a deep relationship with plants.

Prider spoke with me about her journey into animism (a worldview that everything has a divine essence and that everything is interconnected), her struggles with religion and her explorations of spiritual paths, reclaiming her center and strength through journeys to her ancestral lands in Ireland, soul loss and soul retrieval, and a very fierce Irish goddess turned teacher known as the Cailleach.

The following Q&A combines our interview and excerpts from her writings, where noted. Answers have been edited for length.  

Make sure to check out the full interview on the Compassionate Coexistence podcast! 

You can also learn more about Angela or get in touch by visiting her website at angelaprider.com or by following her Instagram @sacredlifeanimism.

A Q&A with Angela Prider, Somatic and Animist Healer and Ceremonialist

Can you tell us more about your chosen spiritual path, animism?

If you look at roots, the Proto-Indo-European root is ane, meaning “breath.” There are many cultures that have this same root word that translates as breath, or soul, or wind, or even the four directional winds. In Greek, the word is ánemos, meaning “wind,” and in Old Norse the word is anda meaning to breathe, and in old Irish anal (“breath”), and in Sanskrit अनिल aniti or ánila “breath.” This whole idea of breath, wind, soul, life is connected to the roots of the word animism. 

(From her website): Animism’s roots lay in a deep knowing and belief that every living being has an essence and is interconnected with all other living beings through a spiritual web of relationships. This great web of interconnection means that all of Nature is connected and therefore one ripple in the web influences the whole. One of the greatest gifts I have received from living and walking this path of animism is a deep knowing that I am indeed connected to everything around me and within me in every moment and every breath. My existence plays a unique energy in this time and place and has a purpose.

Animism is a path of spiritual ecology that reconnects us with the sacred nature of creation and empowers us to take our seat in the healing of our planet.

Going to Ireland to explore your ancestral roots held many lessons for you. Can you share more about the initial tug that set you on that path?

I had been on this path of earth-based spirituality for about 10 years. A lot of the time in my journey, I am guided to do something through a dream. I really work with my dreams deeply.

I began to have these dreams of being visited by three women; one that had red hair, one that was very old and gnarly, and the other one I can’t  remember too much about now. We were standing on what appeared to be the coast somewhere in the Western Isles, and the old woman said, “We are your ancestors, and you need to start listening to us.”  

I wasn’t really too sure what to do about that. I just kept journeying. In one of my journeys, I was taken to a mountain where they pulled out a book and gave it to me. One said, “This knowledge that we had as healers has had to go underground, and now it needs to come back into the world. Now is the time.”

Through a series of zig-zags, I ended up going to Ireland. A shamanic practitioner friend there said, “You don’t need a teacher here, you just need to meet the land.” When I spoke to him about this old woman, and these three women, he just said, “I’ll take you to meet the Cailleach.”

The Cailleach is a really old goddess who has been around since Paleolithic times, who is also known as the Storm Hag or the daughter of the bones. She’s this very old wise woman who is also very strong. She is a formidable teacher, and she’s been my spiritual teacher for all these years.

She is Grandmother Winter energy. It is the Cailleach who comes and says, “Everything now has to die or go to sleep,” and she comes as the storms, as the snow, as the deep freeze. It goes against what we’re doing here in the West, in North America, this whole thing of what I call the “Unending Summer.” We live in the infinite summer where we just do, do, do.. and everyone is burning out, because we’re always in the fire. 

The Cailleach says, “OK, you won’t rest, you won’t stop?” And then she will bring something into your life that will make you rest. “You won’t let go? Ok, we’ll just make this so uncomfortable for you until you can.” She’s a big teacher about death and rest and going deep, deep, deep within. 

Please share more about the view toward land and people’s relationship with it that you discovered in Ireland.

During my first trip to Ireland, we went to a specific sacred circle that was stewarded by a man whose family had lived on the land for nine generations. When we talked about that stone circle, he said, “You’re going over to meet them, aren’t you?” Not “it” or “Are you going to see the circle?”  

And then I was in another place in southwest Ireland, and I was going out to a particular rock there that is connected to the Cailleach, and the woman at the Air BnB said, “Are you going to go meet her?” Just so casual.

So when I met this guy, we had a long chat about the circle and the responsibility of being that steward. Then I really began to think, “Wow, if you’re ripped off that land, how do you orient?” If you’re not getting those medicines that feed your soul that come with the land, then there’s not the same reverence for the land.

With America being a land of immigrants, do you think the loss of connection to those ancestral lands impacts how people treat the earth here?

I often look at colonization and the western world and what we’re doing to the land — raping and mining and clearing and consuming, basically, without thought or consciousness — and I wonder if these mass emigrations, this disconnection from the land, and not being able to rebuild a new relationship with the land (because it takes generations).. if our soul connection really potentially got severed, and people likely left parts of their soul back at their homelands.

I have had this theory/thought/feeling for a long time now. I would say that for me,  Ireland is my grandmother land but Australia is my motherland.  When I’m away from the land too long, I have this feeling of being homesick. My whole being, my soul, my body needs to be on the vibration of that land. I need to go and smell those smells, breathe that air and walk that land. 

(From her website): Over the last 20 years in my practice, disconnection has been the greatest increasing soul malady I have witnessed. It’s ironic that we’re relying on screens to “get us connected,” and yet as we do that, we’re actually disconnecting, not only from our body’s wisdom and our mythic soul life, but also from the spiritual kinship available to us from the many communities to which we belong. We have forgotten that we are a member of not only our immediate human community, but also our Nature communities (plants, trees, mountains, rivers, oceans), our animal community, and our ancestral community. This forgetting leaves us with soul lethargy, a sense of meaninglessness, and lacking the spiritual resilience to navigate life’s challenges.

Can you speak more about “soul lethargy” and “soul loss”?

Soul loss is an understanding that a part of our soul will leave due to a trauma or a life decision that we make that is not the best for us. We may overstay in an unhealthy relationship, or we’ve got the golden handcuffs on at work, or we go through something really traumatic, or there is this gradual whittling away of the soul. 

There is this traumatic experience, and you don’t have all of you with you. And you need all of you with you in life. You need to be full; that’s how you remain healthy. But the soul will come back when it knows you are safe and your body is healed somewhat. 

We don’t know oftentimes that we have soul loss. But one way of detecting it is when something happens, and you haven’t been the same since.  You’re just feeling flat, lethargic, depressed, or sometimes people develop addictions because they are trying to feed this loss. 

The medical world would call soul loss shock, and the psychology world would call it dissociation. But in the spiritual/healing world we would call it soul loss. Just recognizing that there is a potential that part of you has left.

Where do the soul parts go? Sometimes the soul parts will be stuck in the time and place of the trauma. Sometimes soul parts will be in some other dimension or some place where they felt really safe. Sometimes the soul parts will get walled up in a part of our body.

How do you work with clients to call their spirits back — also known as soul retrieval?

What people can do is calling your name and setting your intention to call yourself back. When my daughter was little and she’d have a fall and be a bit shocked, I would get her to tap her heart, the center of her heart, and I’d tell her to just tell herself to come back. She would say her name and “Come back.” 

I also tell people to create a little altar, maybe add a candle and a picture of yourself where you can see in that picture that you are not there. Light a candle every night and say, “I am ready for you to return, and it’s safe.”  Sometimes I’ll get people to write a letter to that soul part to tell that soul part all about their life right now: I live here, I’m all grown up, I have this great job, this is my home… letting this part of yourself know to come back.

You can call the soul part back, but it may not stay — [for instance,] let’s say you grew up in an alcoholic home that was chaotic, and you happen to be living with a partner who is alcoholic and your life is still chaotic. Quite often there is Big Work that has to accompany the integration phase of soul retrieval.

When I work with people I generally go through a a 3-6 week process. When you work with a practitioner it’s great, because a practitioner can go and find the soul part and then do spiritual healing work with them on the other side so there’s not as much charge with that soul part when it comes back, and they can work with you to help you integrate and make the changes in your life so you can fully integrate this essence. 

I’m also a somatic counselor, and when doing spiritual healing or soul retrieval I also work with somatic work at the same time (with clients). I’ve found that working with the nervous system and safely helping people to titrate the energy that is associated with trauma through somatic work creates space. There is quite a spontaneous soul retrieval that happens quite regularly.

As a teacher, you also help clients work to revere their bodies as well as the earth — can you share more about why reverently “being in your body” is healing?

Your body is the earth. This is what I teach my students all the time, that you have your own little mini Mother Earth right here. As long as we are trying to leave our body or be somewhere else, we are missing out on our choice to have a human experience. Having a human experience is to be in your body and to have this relationship happening between your soul and your body, your mind and your body; it’s all interconnected.

Part of our work on this spiritual path is to be in deep connection and reverence for our body as its own planet, its own earth, and coming home to our body can be its own journey.  

How do you stay grounded while you are holding space for others for deep healing?

One of the things I have learned from one of the wise people in my life is that I change up my self-care all the time. I don’t have a specific routine. I just observe myself, and depending on what is going on in my life will lead me to lean in to parts of my practice that I can tell are going to help me.

These last five years of my life have probably been the most challenging five years of my adult life. I went through this conscious uncoupling with my partner of 29 years, and my daughter was a teenager; I could feel her slipping through the cracks. I had a very busy caseload of clients and teaching in the apprenticeship and all sorts of things.

During that time, I could really feel that I was undernourished on many levels, and I needed to basically get my shit together because I had a child. I had to suck it up and make myself very strong. So what I did during that period of time is that I gave a lot of gifts and offerings to Mother Earth.

This is a practice that I recommend to a lot of people in all sorts of different ways. I always say to people that you have everything you need in your kitchen pantry; you do not need to go to some new age store and buy all this stuff. 

I would make beautiful little mandalas on the ground. Some days, I needed sustenance and strength, and for me with my ancestors maybe that’s bread… so I would get some bread and go bury it in a little hole outside. Or I was having a hard time letting go, so I would take some flower petals and go to the ocean — because the ocean can take all of your tears — and I would ask the ocean, “Can you please help me? This grief is too much for me, can I give this to you?” and I would give my grief to the ocean. Or I was so confused and I needed to get clarity, so I would take some salt and give it to the stream and ask, “Can you help me to have clarity?” I did a lot of that daily connection to Mother Earth, because anything I would ask her, she would bring it to me as long as my ears and my eyes and my heart are open to receive. So that is a practice I do a lot — give offerings to Mother Earth.

I’ve been on the burnout train more than once. I’ve had to really break the back of my people-pleasing, I’ve had to have boundaries, and that has been a big challenge for me. People don’t like to hear “No” in our culture. I just had to have boundaries, and learn how to keep boundaries and still keep an open heart.  Having clear and clean boundaries is knowing myself enough to know that these are my limitations, and I have to honor my limitations or I am not going to do a good job or be in good service to you.

I also had to really embrace my compassion for myself and everything that I’ve been through in life.  I think that we hear this term compassion fatigue, and I’ve heard that if you have compassion fatigue, it’s because you’re not deeply compassionate enough with yourself. 

When I am holding space, I love this little prayer from when I went and sat with Clarissa Pinkola Estés; she says, “Creator, please make me small enough and clean enough that I can make it through this little doorway.” I always say, “Make me small enough and clean enough.” To get through the eye of the needle, you have to have humility. When you get through to the other side, when you are sitting with the medicine, or you are in ceremony or doing healing work with people, there is so much help. 

I always say that the ancestors are holding the space for me, the teachers and the medicine lineage… they are holding the space for me. As long as I call them in, and I’m in right relationship with them, and I’m acknowledging them and mentioning their names, I’m giving them love, I’m sharing my gratitude and my prayers for them… when I go into a space and I do all of that, I open the door, and they are all there, and they hold the space. I am just working in the space.

Any final insights about connecting with self and the natural world for healing that you would like to share?

I lived up on a mountain, by this ravine, for over 18 years, during which I learned about the rhythm of nature. I learned that the bear would pass by at the same time, and when the raccoons or squirrels would come by. It was just by looking out the window every day, or stepping outside and having my tea outside…

If there’s one thing I would suggest to people, it’s try to have a daily visit with nature, whether it’s in your yard or somewhere else. Every day, stop and watch. As much as nature feels unpredictable, it’s quite predictable. There’s a rhythm there that is happening. 

Another thing I suggest to people is if you are leaving your house and going out and getting in your car, for example, and you pass by the same tree everyday, just see what it’s like to stop and say hello to the tree. How beautiful it is to see if you have a bit of a connection.