In my last life I was a tree.

Or, rather, I was the spirit of a tree, called an Ilpho in the tradition of my primary teacher.

I realize this might seem very strange, but stay with me.

Because of the peace of my previous lifetime (trees, after all, are said to know without question the perfection of both their existence and their unity with all that is), for the first eight years of my life on earth I apparently did not recognize fully that I was a human and no longer a tree, and enjoyed what I remember as an largely blissful, oblivious existence of total connection to the world around me, especially to animals.

I was born twenty minutes after John Lennon was shot in 1980, and from that moment until just before my birthday in ’88 my family knew me as a generally smiling, sweet, artistic, peaceful, and sensitive small human.

I remember so clearly the moment I woke up to the reality of my circumstances in this life. It wasn’t a particularly special moment—I was just moving through the curtain that separated by childhood bedroom from the rest of our house—but it was as if I had walked from one world into another; I had passed, in an instant, from an unquestionable sense of spaciousness and belonging into profound fear, tension, and constriction. I became a completely changed child. I could no longer sleep alone and became consumed by anxiety and racing thoughts, mean-spirited towards my siblings, defiant towards my parents, and constricted in my connections to others. The shift was so drastic that my Mom feared that I had been abused.

I lived in this state from the age of eight until my late twenties. The stress of my strange awakening was so profound that it impacted every part of my experience, and yet, once I had been in it for so long I don’t think that I recognized the full reality and intensity of my state until I was able to shift it later. I fell into an extreme form of perfectionism to help me ‘cope’ with the pressure, excelling in school, music, and artistic endeavors, and began dieting and exercising obsessively. I became hyper-critical of myself and others—and surely intolerable to be in relationship with—as I attempted to create what felt like a sense of security in the otherwise overwhelming reality of my existence. I was so tense that I think I psychologically prevented my body from going through puberty until I was 18, by which point I had bleeding ulcers, two broken legs from running, and was on a second round of medication for major depression and anxiety. I had also developed a severe binge-eating/starvation habit that, combined with the stress of having 9 different jobs while going to university, caused my hair to fall out by the time I was 20, and my body went into some form of shutdown. I was a mess.

Through my early twenties I was diagnosed and medicated for an abundance of psychological disorders, including borderline personality disorder, attention deficit, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder along with the anxiety and depression I had previously been diagnosed with. Each medication and some of the therapy I did offered a temporary ‘fix’, but nothing stuck. As I was cycling through these medications I had also begun drinking and partying quite heavily as well, propping myself up by constructing an external presentation of being a fun, quasi-functional human being.  

Because the funny thing is that if you would have asked most people around me during these years I suspect that to many I would have seemed like a relatively put together person until you got to know me well. I know I was perceived as highly nervous, arrogant, and more than a bit neurotic, sure, but my successes maintained an excellent front throughout my teenage and early adult years: I represented Canada at the International Science and Engineering Fair (the world’s most prestigious science fair) and was doing second year university statistics by Grade 9, lauded as some kind of math whiz by my teachers. I received the highest marks given out in my province on classical piano exams and the significant academic awards throughout high school, landing me full scholarship offers to several schools across Canada. I completed an undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Victoria. I managed the bar of ‘Canada’s Hottest New Restaurant’ at 24. I also became, with no training, a successful makeup artist and ran my own business doing freelance work, all while bartending, working mornings as a janitor, and going to school full time.

I was a complete mess on the inside, but, somehow, I kept moving.

But then one fateful and unceremonious day in June when I was 26, I was dumped by a beloved boyfriend, fired from my job the next, and the day after that I decided (why or how I will never know) to take myself off all the psychoactive medications I was on, which was a lot by this time. I don’t really remember the next six months of my life as my existence spiralled entirely out of control. I woke up from this chaotic process somehow having made a trip from Calgary to a lonely hostel in Bangkok where I lay covered in bedbug bites, determined to figure out another way to exist as a human being.

There are many steps in my journey that need not be articulated here—a story for another time—but my path of discovery eventually landed me in San Francisco, about two years after my exit to Thailand, where I was pursuing a Master’s degree in Integrative Healing. I had given up drinking, become a certified yoga instructor by this time, and was practicing all manner of healing disciplines to try to create change. Another form of awakening had begun, and I was committed to showing up for it, devouring everything I could on mysticism, holistic healing, Buddhism, Taoism, and more. But while all this work was deeply impactful and contributed to significant shifts in my physical and psychological health, something was very much still missing. Something I could not yet put my finger on.

It wasn’t until I was approached by a woman who I had met at school—who turned out to be a Bolivian chamakana (plant medicine woman) and Shamanic Practitioner—that my path to understanding, utilizing, and teaching medicine and power began. She offered me a formal apprenticeship which I accepted, and through her lineage and personal teachings I was reconnected to the forces which now form the basis of my spiritual identity, to the knowing that provides the stability and structure of my entire being, and to the medicine work that allows me to serve and support myself and others in their journey to alignment, right relationship, and unquestionable confidence and belonging. She offered me something that most human lineages have forgotten or have had beaten out of them: how to occupy the very specific and unique space you are meant to occupy in this lifetime, how to practice and know authentic medicine, and how to reconnect with the intelligent and omnipresent organizing force and allied energies that shape and guide our existences. Through her teachings and those of other Master teachers from Tibetan, Lakota, and Haida lineages, I have come to know my medicine, my mastery, my power, and my place in this world, and now work to support all others in understanding theirs too. I have never again taken a psychoactive medication and have entirely healed my relationship with my body, and I now understand and honour it as the sacred vessel I know it to be. I live a life of indescribable beauty with my two young children and incredible husband in the deep woods of British Columbia, Canada.

I am Ciel Grove Patenaude, and I am an artist, wounded healer, musician, Traditional Shamanic Practitioner, Psychotherapist, Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter, Land-tender, perpetual Trickster, and spirit of the trees.

I am here to create, perceive, and amplify beauty, to nourish power and knowing in everyone around me, and to support humanity in healing our relationship with each other, our bodies, this planet, and with Spirit.

Thank you for reading my story.