Who Is Ann?

I don’t have a tidy title for what I do.

What I have is a lifetime of figuring it out.

Even as a little girl, sitting alone in front of a mirror, I felt like I didn’t quite belong to this world in the ordinary way. I couldn’t explain it. I just knew something in me was reaching toward the stars.

Long before I had language for any of it, I could feel what was happening beneath the surface of people and rooms and quiet spaces. I noticed what others carried. What they didn’t say. What lived just underneath the surface.

My uncle, a medicine man, saw something in me long before I could see it in myself. He gave me my spirit name — Mimiges. Butterfly. Rooted in my Mi’kmaq lineage. I didn’t fully understand the gift of that name then. I do now. Because transformation has been the thread running through my entire life.

For many years I made myself small. I chose peace over truth. I lost myself so quietly I didn’t notice it happening until I was so far from myself I no longer recognized who was looking back at me.

I’ve pulled myself up from some very dark places. More than once. Those were my choices and my crossroads. And each time, I found my way back. It took honesty. It took looking at my fears, my shadows, my ego. It takes doing The “Work”.

My path led me to the Peruvian Mesa Tradition, where something ancient in me finally began returning home. Not just as a practice. As a way of being.

That is who Ann is.

A woman who has been to the dark and came back. Who was seen before she could see herself. Who learned that the only way home is within.

And who now sits with other women while they find their way home too.

Sacredly, Ann Mimiges Mealey