About

About Mira

I am a Shamanic Practitioner, located in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada and trained with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies. I currently have a part-time Shamanic Healing Practice.

After people learn the fact that I am a Shamanic Practitioner, they are very interested in knowing my background and what brought me to Shamanism and became a practitioner.

I’ll start with my background. 

I was born and raised in Taiwan, a beautiful island once called Formosa by the Dutch and the Spanish before World War II. Taiwan is an immigrant society with diverse cultures, such as indigenous tribes, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.

Many different indigenous tribal languages traditions and cultures were found in Taiwan. Taiwanese indigenous people are deemed as the First People living on the island. Not many indigenous histories were recorded due to the nature of its oral tradition. However, when the Dutch came to trade with people in Taiwan in 17 century, they recorded the Kingdom of Middag (大肚王國，pronounced as  Dàdù Wángguó) which was located in the central western plains of Taiwan and ruled by Kamachat Aslamie at the time. He was called in the common indigenous name as Lelian (Sun King).

The reason I brought up this piece of history is that it is related to my ancestral line. Kingdom of Middag was a supra-tribal alliances with people of Papora, Babuza, Pazeh and Hoanya. The ancestors from my father’s side were the Babuza people.

This part of the history were hidden by the rulers and the colonists of Taiwan. Many people forgot that they have indigenous blood in them and thought their ancestors were all from China. When Japanese colonized Taiwan, they did a very thorough investigation and recored the origin of all the residents on the island. The records can be requested from the current government of Taiwan today.

Unfortunately, some people feared of discrimination and possible supression, they chose  not to reveal their true identities and origins during the Japenese investigation. Therefore, it became difficult for people to trace their true ancestral lines.

I am lucky to find out my ancestral line because my Great Great grandmother was true to her origin and recored as “Fan”(番) which means savages or indigenous people. It is a word with negative connotation.

I didn’t discover this until I was into Shamanism. It was quite a journey how the universe and spirits brought this information back to me.

 

My Current Life

I moved to Toronto, Canada in 2006 after I married my husband who has completely different background. He is an Indo-Canadian and an Ismaili Muslim. It has been quite an adventure ever since we got married. We have two beautiful daughters together. I discover a lot about myself  in my marriage and parenthood. And by being so far away from Taiwan, I got to see my past and current life in a new perspective. 

I stepped into Shamanic world unexpectedly in 2015. I went to a family constellation session to seek healing for my own personal family issues. During one of the group sessions, the facilitator set the field for a ceremony called the Native Women’s Fire Ceremony inspired by his colleague Francesca Mason Boring. During the session, some people started to move to places closer to the client in the centre and put their hands on her or perform actions of healing . I was awed and amazed at the same time because I just started to stomp the floor rhythmically like drumming with the rest of the circle. I had never learned anything about going into altered state of consciousness with drumming at that point of my life.  

Ever since that day, I was eager to find out what I experienced without knowing the term Shamanism.  Through the power of Google and through conversations with friends, I found the FSS (Foundation for Shemanic Studies) website. I couldn’t stop reading every book I can find to learn about it and participating workshops for further trainings. And here I am.

I currently have a part-time Shamanic Healing practice. I felt the calling to bring healing to the world with the Shamanic tools that I have learned in the past couple years. There’s still so much to learn and to grow from the experiences and the relationship with my helping spirits. I feel truly blessed and grateful to be able to walk on this path.