Continually Arriving: The Shaman's Apprentice with Vonetta E. Taylor

PodcastCognitive and Personal...Human Connection
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Show Notes

This episode invites you into a living memoir. Christine Marie Mason sits down with Vonetta E. Taylor (Vonetta Rain)- a revered shaman and healing expert—whose true-life memoir The Shaman’s Apprentice traces her journey from a challenging upbringing to an award winning career, through a toxic marriage and spiritual disconnection to profound remembrance of purpose.

Guided by a renowned Peruvian shaman, Vonetta steps onto a path of deep healing, ancestral reconciliation, and spiritual initiation. In this episode, she shares how apprenticeship differs from merely “studying” spirituality, what it means to live as an ongoing student of mystery, and how her work now helps others heal from disease, childhood and ancestral trauma, relationship and financial struggles, psycho-somatic disorders, and more.

This episode is an invitation to soften, to listen, and to trust that your own path of healing and purpose is already unfolding beneath your feet.

In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:

  • Her new book

  • The Journey of Self-Realization

  • Cultural and Spiritual Awakening in Kenya

  • The Difference between Studying Shamanism and Becoming an Apprentice

  • The Importance of Presence and the Heart

  • Black Identity

  • Community and Sisterhood

  • Vonetta Taylor's Current Work and Future Plans



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Christine Marie Mason

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@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: 

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Transcript

Vonetta E. Taylor  0:06  

And in my own work, what I see with people is that there are people who we all have these gifts. We have these gifts of clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience, where you can either see or you can hear or you can feel, but not everyone can see. I do work with some people who they're just working with clearing clutter from their mind. They're working with being in the embodied experience of love and presence, and that is enough.


Christine Mason  0:35  

Hello, everyone. It's Christine Marie Mason, your host for the Rose Woman Podcast. Yay. We are constantly holding conversations on love and liberation and more freedom, and living at the evolutionary edge of your own capacity, but also at the edge for culture and society. So I do a lot of talking on women's stuff. I do a lot of talking on spiritual stuff, sexuality, science, and have some wonderful guests. Eco spirituality is one of the things I love my own personal practice and work is around the intersection of our bodies and and creating more magical love and joy filled life. On Earth, I do a lot of work with women, and today I have the joy of welcoming Vonetta Taylor, who is completely unique voice in the world. She's just put out a book called The shamans apprentice, which, once I picked it up and started reading it, I couldn't put it down, because she travels back into her early life in the Boston area, growing up in a little bit of a conflicted family and a confused racial identity and not really knowing what she was about and who she was about becoming and following her amazing transformation and spiritual journey through through motherhood, through relationships, through Emmy award winning work and into the realm of being a shaman. So we talk about what it means to be a shamans apprentice, what it means to be an apprentice in general in this episode, versus just studying something to get so deeply immersed in it and and so many other topics around evolving into our fullest self and Living from the heart. So I hope you love this conversation. So before we drop into the interview, I'd like to give you a little update on my own work and some things that are coming up that I'd love to have you part of. So I released a book in December called the mystic heart of Easter. And even though it sounds religious, it's really about reclaiming these four high liturgical holidays in the Christian calendar as a meta story of most human experience and as a way to do an inward journey of meditation that includes some of the most potent topics of embodiment, like, what does it mean to love fully and to love when you're betrayed by a kiss and to love when there's injustice, how do we deal with powerlessness and an injustice, and when the apparatus of state is arrayed against an individual? How do we deal with grief? How do we deal with ambiguity? How do we live in the celebration and the potential of rebirth? So I let this book out. People are liking it. They're really using it. They're giving it great reviews. But it's the culmination of doing a live program for many years during a Holy Week where we were going through each of the days of Holy Week from the perspective of a tantric lens or a mystical lens, or Christian mystic or a non dualist, and looking at these stories. So so the material has been tested on a lot of people, and I'm going to do that weekend live again in Southern California in April. So it's April 2 to the fifth in North San Diego County. It's not for everybody. You know, there's some restrictions on what we're doing and who it's appropriate for. But I hope you will come to my website, christinemariemason.com, and look under Events, and maybe join us and definitely get the book one way or the other. It's it's out on Kindle. There's an audio version that I did not voice. I used AI voice. And then the print version, which is a sweet little pamphlet that you can take home and work with directly. So please check that out. I have made some new add ons to the Rosebud whole line and community. So over at rosewoman.com


Christine Mason  4:23  

What's new is that once you log into your account, you will see a digital version of the body love journal, which is super exciting for me, because I wrote that four years ago as a nine week journey toward befriending your body and exhuming and releasing or including all of the prior things that you thought about your bodies. And that was, it was really designed as a daily practice where there's an inspirational question and then a checklist of, how did you show your body love in a very practical way during that particular day, exercising, breathing, whatever. So by making this digital, thanks to Kyle Sleeper, you can log in, and the prompts come up, and you can journal them, and as you indicate what you've done for your body love that day, it tracks it, and then it shows you trends over time and whether it's getting better or getting worse, and whether it's location dependent, or whether it's dependent on what's happening in your life. And I find the digital version really appealing. The other things that are up there is all of the almost 900 900 articles, millions of words that I've written on women's life cycle, stages of embodiment, sexuality, sensuality, liberation in a body. All of that stuff has now been consolidated into not just blog format, but an encyclopedia format. So at library.rosewoman.com you can see consolidated entries with links to deeper information that you can go through at your leisure. If you have any questions about menarche, menopause, perimenopause, childbirth, all of that stuff. Sexuality in relationship, sexuality in the self, erotic living. All of that stuff is now up at rosewoman.com What else is new there? Kyle built us a beautiful, little inspirational tarot card sort of thing where you can do a surrender, pull, just pull a card, and it pulls something that's relevant for you, or an intentional pull, and that's really fun to play with too. So the rose woman community continues to deepen in content. We've also added curated product choices from some other vendors. I've added some curated sex toys, for example. We have added teas and chocolates, not just from radiant farms, but from other vendors that we like, we have a curated section of washable silks, things that I love. I can't get enough of the lunya stuff that I'm wearing. I could. If I could be one of those great grand dame ladies just walking around in silks all day, I probably would do that. Doesn't work very well for a sweaty yoga practice, but that's what it is. So please come out and hang out with me at christinemariemason.com in person live events, or rosewoman.com where we have all kinds of expanded offerings for you for 2026 so Now without any further ado, I'd like to introduce you to vinetta Taylor. I met vinetta in person through my friend Elizabeth, who is herself, an amazing shaman, a woman shaman, practicing for a long time. And we were in Bali, and in walks this stunningly beautiful woman with long braids down to her waist and just radiant. And you know how sometimes there are people that you're like, you know what? I want to know, what her secret is. Why is she so shiny and radiant? She was one of those people for me. So she has obliged by writing a memoir, The shamans apprentice, which is newly released. It explores devotion and lineage and the discipline of staying in relationship with mystery. She talks about women's friendship, cross cultural initiations and deep commitments to experiencing over belief that she's made over her life. So I hope you enjoy this conversation, and if you do, then please share it widely with others. So we are here today to talk about your new book, well, the book, but also you as a human and your incredible journey. So the shamans apprentice has pretty much just come into the world like in the last year. I feel it's, it's not a finished story, but it's like the first foray into presenting your work in this way. And I wonder too, what was the motivation and intention for doing the book at this time and And was there anything about writing the book or publishing the book that really surprised you?


Vonetta E. Taylor  8:49  

Oh, there was so much about it that surprised me. So the initiation for the book, like my my impetus to write it started in 2012 and it began with the opening scene of my book, where I am in a journey with my Shaman. It was actually an intensive experience in Kauai, where I was taken to the center of the earth in a crystal elevator. And this journey was, it's still one of the most profound experiences that I've ever had in my life, into the inner world. And when I came out of that journey, I was specifically told by my higher self, you're going to write a book about this, because people need to know what lives beyond the realm of physical sense perception, what is possible, what is happening for us on other layers of consciousness and awareness. And so that happened in 2012 and yet I was also given this really specific guidance of what the book was. And at the time, I'm like, I don't know anything about this subject. So I don't think I can write this book. Eventually, it was because I was to write a memoir, and I didn't have the courage in 2012 right, when I just started my initiation into shamanism, I didn't have the courage to share the truth in the way that I have today. And so I think my higher self was like, Hey, you're going to write this little story. And then over the years, I was I received guidance. Know, it's actually really important for you to share the memoir as truth as it is to reveal like your own personal experience as a lived black woman's experience, and just as a human experience. So it took me a really long time just to get to that place of safety for myself. And then I also am not a writer. And so for me, I had a lot of just start and stop, start and stop, start and stop over the year. But last year it was actually in 2024 I said, I cannot. I had so many other projects and and new missions that were coming in that said, you have to write this book in order to step into the next chapter of your life. You have to complete this. And so I just said, That's it. I'm going to do it. And the thing that most surprised me was that in two and a half months I wrote 500 pages. Well, once you made the decision, you just go. Once I made the decision. And I had no idea that I had that capacity, 00, idea that that was even inside of me, that,


Christine Mason  11:24  

in of itself, is the teaching I've been working with a lot. Like once you decide the world conspires to support you, but as long as you're in the wishy washy, it's difficult to get anything done 100% I'm so grateful that you wrote the story as an embodied story of awakening, because, you know, it's so easy to meet someone who's really far down their journey and to take them as a fully baked like Venus on the half shell just appeared suddenly, completely formed until, until, like, really lose the narrative of how difficult some people's beginnings are and how they get to This evolved place. And so I was very moved by your story of your family dynamic and your relationship with your sister and your mother, and the sort of the congestion and fear in that system, and all the way up through this repeated dream of a horrific death at 16 that changed belief in God. And so I would, I would love it if you would give like whatever you feel is a little bit of a recap of that so that the listener understands the software you've


Vonetta E. Taylor  12:28  

come thank you for sharing that I made this decision as a writer to write the story either from the embodied consciousness that I was carrying when I was writing it fully in 2024 or to go back and try to find the language and the consciousness and the energy of what I had and just speak it from that place of now. And so I share in the story the traumatic experience that happened to me when I was a little girl, when I was five years old, when I was beat to to a place of like where i, where i where I lost myself, where I completely disassociated from my body, and develop this extreme distrust in simply being here on this planet, distrust in the people who were my parents and who were here to guide me, distrust in life. And so it was really important for me to begin the story there, and to share my earliest memories, where the very first memory that I have, where my grandmother, my great grandmother, had died when I was three years old. And that and the fear, the grief that just the level of sheer human sadness that I have as my very first memory is this connection to my lineage, my great grandmother, who was the matriarch of our family up until that time. And so I begin the story there, and it's really it was important for me just to share this is where I landed and when I was a little girl after that first traumatic experience. I don't want to give it all away, but from that moment on, I remember going to my window at night and looking out at the stars, and I would say, God send the ships, because I've landed in the wrong place. And so even though I got disconnected from God as I grew up as a as a young child, I had a very clear understanding of what God was to me. And I obviously believe that I had arrived in some form of spaceship, that I was speaking to the stars to ask for another ship to come and rescue me. And then, just through conditioning and being raised in, you know, a Western I was raised Southern Baptist family, these ideas of what God was also raised as in a black family in a white suburban community that was primarily Catholic, there were so many mixed ideas. Of what God was, and this dream that I had that was repeated in exact detail of my death by this man dressed in all black, I mean. And the symbolism of it was so great, which, you know, I'm not surprised that I ended up studying cultural anthropology and understanding cultural symbolism. But it was so deep that all I could do after seven days of this exact same dream was to choose to stop believing and everything that I had been told. And I do feel that that dream was part of my initiation, that it was my initiation into this awakening path, into the path of Self Realization, where I decide and choose from myself, how, how I want to show up in the world. And it was the beginning of that journey. And also connects to these dreaming cultures of the of the ashwar people and the Aborigines.


Christine Mason  16:00  

Yeah, it's an astonishing story, and I can totally relate to that experience of being born into a family, and you're like, What am I doing here again? Did I choose this one? Like that spaceship experience is exactly how I felt when I was coming up. And also, like knowing that, like I was meant to do something else, and I was there for a reason, and I had to experience this family and this life, because that's where I would serve from, like, at earliest, for that, that's beautiful experience, too.


Vonetta E. Taylor  16:28  

I mean that I feel like, that's incredible. I didn't have that awareness. I was still kind of as a teenager walking through life thinking like, oh my god, I'm actually really stuck here. I'm trapped here. I'm gonna have to figure this out on my own, and it wasn't until a little bit later in life that I realized that that that my unique family experience was part of my mission on earth, so that came later in consciousness. So I love that you had that at such a young age.


Christine Mason  16:56  

It wasn't like a nice thought, I have to tell you, it's like, it was like, I can remember, like, having an inward eye roll these


Christine Mason  17:06  

parents that I got. I love them and bless them.


Christine Mason  17:09  

Okay, so, you know, then there's this piece where you start off, not really with an academic intention, but then you end up going to Cornell and doing anthropology and going to Kenya, and when you wrote about the Kenya piece like that, was so alive for me, and was alive in two ways. One is your willingness to sort of navigate these extremely different cultural conditions, like sleeping on a cot and having to go fetch water, and you know, and navigate that with such grace, but also your personal fortitude. Like to walk back to the village by yourself alone, like there's such a persistence in that chapter of your story, like a tenacity and a hunger that, like now, that stays with the rest of the story. So thanks for placing us in Kenya. Tell me a little bit about how that laid another plank


Vonetta E. Taylor  18:01  

in your spiritual path. Going to Kenya was the first time I had ever really traveled internationally. My family, I don't know if you know, a lot of people from Boston and even from Wakefield, where I grew up, but a lot of people from Boston actually never leave Boston. And so it was, it was a big trip for me to travel across the world, to Kenya and to Africa, and also being from an African American family, there has always been this desire to know the roots from which my family came, and most people who are of African lineages come from West Africa. So it was a really unique choice for me to go to Kenya, but I was so certain that that was where I needed to study and where I needed to be, and I it was such like a rich awakening. I feel like Kenya on my spiritual journey. What Kenya gave me, more than anything, was a connection to the truth of humanity in a way that I had never seen in my young in all my 21 years that I had been living. And this connection to humanity, I discovered was so deeply rooted to the earth, was deeply rooted to song, was deeply rooted to rhythm, was deeply rooted to food. It was so interconnected that it gave me this sense of understanding myself in the world that I it was hard for me to actually come back to America. I love that Kenya is the chapter where most people are like, wow. Like the book changes, because it really was like I was living in a black and white world before, and then I land in Kenya, and all of a sudden the world is in Technicolor. For me, that's how, like, welcoming and rich of an experience it was. Yeah, I was hungry for for discovery, I was hungry to learn. I was hungry to understand the world. And it was, you know, going back to that village was such an important. Teaching on so many levels, just what like the level of fear that I experienced of being finally feeling for the first time in my life, that I was the most alone ever, and that no one on earth knew where I was, and I could disappear from this planet, and no one would know, or even know how to experience that, and then to shift within like moments into such celebration, to have that contrast of emotion, and for me to be able to hold that I think was necessary for my journey, but also the experience of Kenya, it gave me this opportunity to get really, really quiet. So even though I had this incredible scholarship and I was doing research in Kenya, I did go on sojourns and I would I took a trip up Kilimanjaro for six days by myself, and in that time, because I had disconnected and severed my relationship to God, and became a self professed atheist. I finally just started asking God if you're real, show me. Show me who you are. Show me who you are. And that became a living prayer as I was walking the earth there. And then eventually God began showing up,


Christine Mason  21:18  

this, this surrender and inquiry like, you know, show me that's so beautiful. I feel like that attunement. Then what you speak later about meeting, was it bhaktilanda? Yeah, brother bhaktananda, bhaktimanda, Bhakti devotional, the joy of devotion. That's such a perfect name, even coming off the Kenya piece like that, that begins like an opening period of, like, Oh my God, there's so much more possible, and I'm so much more agentic in my life. And I'm not stuck in Wakefield. In fact, I'm not stuck at all. Show me what else to forgot, and I and so like, just to go, there's so much in the book that I hope people will read, but like, it's, it's now I'm gonna go inward. Now I'm gonna go and become, also go outward and become a graphic designer and self teach myself a whole nother profession and win an Emmy for that. And you know, just like this whole bursting open of potentiality and how that can snake in many different directions,


Vonetta E. Taylor  22:14  

I love that, yeah, and it's interesting that my journey has had this polarity of expansion contraction, expansion contraction. Because at the same time that I met Brother bhaktananda, that I stepped into the world of graphic design, and that I was given so many incredible opportunities that, you know, I just kept saying yes to I was also dealing with extraordinary grief of my son's father leaving us and witnessing this pattern in my family of just, you know, this disconnection between the mother and the father and the child that I experienced that I want like grew up saying I never want to be a single mom. I never want to grow up in a broken family, and then here I am, smack dab in that same experience and recognizing my god, the strength of these patterns of our family lineage, and I have to move through it in some way. And so me actually becoming a graphic designer was because I had to take care of a child I was, I was a stay at home mom, and then, like, quickly lost all of my financial support, and had to motivate, and fortunately, you know, I feel like I've, I've been gifted with resourcefulness that I, that I and prayer. At that time I was, I was connected to a deep sense of prayer,


Christine Mason  23:36  

yeah, and then willingly going into the inquiry, into the self


Vonetta E. Taylor  23:41  

yes into the inquiry. And so, you know, it's interesting what you were saying about brother bhaktananda, how he showed up. Because I was a young mother, a single mother dealing with extreme heartbreak. I cried every single day for two years after I put my son to bed because our because I felt like I had made a poor choice and fought and choosing his father because his father couldn't, you know, couldn't rally to be with us in a healthy and wholesome way. And I was seeing all of like the addiction pattern showing up in my life and all these things. And so brother boxananda came into my life and gave me practices that helped me become disciplined, where I could focus my mind and bring myself into peace, to be able to show up in the way that I needed to, to be like a graphic designer who can, like, run teams that do win, that do facilitate Emmy award winning projects and Super Bowl campaigns, and still be the, you know, the mother to my son that I wanted to be. Yeah, it was, it was brave. Thank you.


Christine Mason  24:47  

And there's peace in the way you did your career that I would like to tell every mother to just read, because there's a piece about settling in and doing it at the pace of your nervous system and what. Son needed, and not chasing the platinum ring, you're already getting somewhat of a gold ring. But like, you know, like, what's enough to maintain your own spiritual development and your healthy relationship and development of yours, of your child? So very beautiful. I want to move into this idea of the shamans apprentice is a whole, like, there's so many components in it, like some people study shamanism. So there's the question of, like, what's the difference between apprenticing and studying? And then there's the other thing around, like, you had the bhaktananda influence. You had this Brian from the Gaelic tradition. And you know, you've had the sort of shamanic influence, but you yourself have become Shaman. So you, instead of calling yourself like becoming shaman or something like that, you very humbly, I feel put it as the apprentice. So let's talk about sort of, why that component of your very diverse, you know, growth trajectories became the one that you emphasize in the


Vonetta E. Taylor  26:00  

book, yeah, it's really interesting, because at the end of the book, I am the shaman. I am facilitating the work. But I called the book The shamans apprentice, because I do feel so grateful that I was chosen by my shaman, that he passed on much of his teachings, and a lot of the the inner wisdom of his knowing of his lineage. And so to answer your first question about the difference between studying shamanism and becoming an apprentice, the studying of shamanism is that there's lots of theories of shamanism. And there's shamanism that is, as a whole, a way of being and living. It's a philosophy, it's it's a practice, and it differs depending on which culture you're working with. So there's Mongolian shamanism, there's African shamanism, there is Peruvian shamanism, there's Native American shamanism, there is is Israeli shamanism, and so you can study the the teachings and the rituals and the technologies and and the philosophy behind each of those. And becoming an apprentice was more of a lived experience. So I was in a living classroom every single day. I had direct access to my to my Shaman. Anytime I had a question, I would I was I had the ability to text him 2030, times a day. I was able to get on the phone with him anytime I had a question. How does this work? What's going on? What does it mean with the heart? Why? Why is this happening? I mean, I was I had that opportunity, and he gave me full access to his knowledge and his wisdom. And then on top of it, he shared with me through the physical experience of witnessing him and being in relationship to these other realms that that I got to have an embodied experience of living knowledge. And so for me, it was such a gift. It was it's not something that I sought after. It wasn't like I just said one day, like I was very clear, I'm going to study cultural anthropology. I made that decision with my full conscious self. But becoming the apprentice was something that invited me. It was a calling, a dharma, that it kind of surprised me. I wasn't even seeking it. I didn't even know. Like he used to say to me, who's gonna be my apprentice? And he would point at different people, and I'm like, I think that one's gonna be your apprentice. And the whole time he was he was inviting me in a very playful, gentle way that only my my soul could only receive it that way. And so I call myself the shamans apprentice, because it has been my dharmic path to show up and to be the student of my teachers, to learn their ways, because I also am not indigenous to Peruvian shamanism. So I had to learn through someone who was indigenous. Now I'm indigenous to my own lineage, to Cherokee lineage, which through this door that opened up shamanism. The first thing my shaman did was share with me Cherokee music, which in my entire life, I had never even learned before. So it through this door. It opened me up to the wisdom of my ancestors. I began understanding the particular healing gifts of the of the women and of the men within my own lineage. And so it has been such a gift, and so I really needed to honor that gift. And I do, like you said, you know, like I feel like the story isn't finished, but my story goes up to 2018 and I do feel like I have a second memoir to share that shares more of the mature aspects of me as a shaman. And, you know, the. Learnings that continue, as you know, we don't stop.


Christine Mason  30:02  

Yeah, that's true. Will you put the Shams apprentice? I feel like they're like, that particular teacher has a lot of apprentices. He's trains a


Vonetta E. Taylor  30:10  

lot of people worldwide. He you know, you are, you are absolutely right. He has over maybe 500 facilitators who work with him and who he trains and has like people who have been training with him for years, even longer than me, but I called myself the shamans apprentice, because this is my unique relationship and my unique journey that I wanted to share, and I do feel like within our community, that there were aspects of and and people have shared this with me, within our community, people who work with him, who are directors with him, they've said he has shared with you things that he hasn't shared with others. And it was my duty, I feel, to share that with everyone. So that wasn't something that just was mine, that it was something that I share with everyone.


Christine Mason  31:04  

Yeah, I imagine that ruffled some feathers.


Vonetta E. Taylor  31:06  

You know, I'm really grateful to hear you say that, because I actually didn't think of it from that perspective. I never thought of it until just now. I actually never thought of it. I only thought of it as like, Okay, I'm here to be an advocate for the Sacred plants. I'm here to be an advocate for indigenous wisdom, and this is how I'm being guided to do it. The I actually had a different title for the book, and the shamans apprentice was going to be my subtitle. And then it was actually my partner, Russell, who has built, you know, a lot of very successful commercial brands in the world. And he said, No, your title is The shamans apprentice. So it was kind of like, also, just like, I didn't really go so deep into thinking about it, but I had no intention of ruffling feathers.


Christine Mason  31:53  

Yeah, I feel actually, actually, it's too, like, it's a different question around spiritual community, one that I'm kind of in my own group here, and this is like the human dynamics that arise around a teacher. It's got nothing to do with the integrity of the teaching of the person who's studying. It's that there's all these human belonging dynamics that can arise and and particularly if you're not really engaged in those things and others are like what you can get kind of shocked by that.


Vonetta E. Taylor  32:19  

I feel maybe so. And I think also that there's, you know, what I've learned from my shaman, and why my particular experience as the apprentice, I felt was so unique and personal to me was that he taught me a lot through experience and and through one on one conversations. And so I do think that there are people within the community who have bought, have gone through his apprenticeship work and he created it was a different experience for me. And so my experience didn't involve as much of the human dynamics that everyone else was invited into or a part of and so I really just for me. It was really important for me to share my experience as purely and honestly as I could. That was my intention for my story. Now, if other people want to show up and write a book called The shamans apprentice, I have, I wouldn't ruffle my feathers. You're who you are. Yeah, it wouldn't ruffle my feathers, because I I just really, I want to empower everyone's truest expression


Christine Mason  33:29  

exactly, but you're also, I think the shamans apprentice is a is also like a way of orienting toward life and toward people who are who have walked the pack a long time. I feel the apprenticing energy also around Brian. Brian wrote,


Vonetta E. Taylor  33:42  

yes, exactly, I wasn't just the apprentice to my Shaman. I mean, brother bhaktananda also took me under his wing and gave me direct transmissions and direct teaching. And then Brian showed up right at the same time, who comes from this ancient lineage of Irish shamanism in his own way, and showed up right around this similar time, and so I was an apprentice to him as well. Yeah. So I mean, for me, it's really like I am a student of life, and it's been part of my path to have a unique teacher, a specific teacher that guides me, not necessarily like to enter into a program, but someone who is like my direct person that I learned from, and maybe that's just because that's how I best learn. You know, I have dyslexia, I have all kinds of learning challenges and preferences, but I'm gonna think about this one. I actually never thought like that would ruffle so many feathers


Christine Mason  34:49  

you're learning somatically, you're learning through presence, yes, and I think there's a piece in that of life when people are real and they move slowly and He'll meet you. And like when you're that connected, that it kind of seems to transmit to the you're inside, and then you live it, and then you're able to give it back. So I feel that quality of apprenticing that you're pointing to is really beautiful, and you get increasingly available to the cosmic, to the esoteric, to the mystical realms as the book progresses, so as the book progresses, you're moving from like, I'm working with the plants, I'm working with the shamans, I'm working with meditation, into like angels and guides and sacred communication and experiences that are very mystical. And I wonder if you might speak to that progression a little bit. And do you also see that progression in the people you're guiding?


Vonetta E. Taylor  35:47  

You know, it's very interesting. The very first, the most mystical experience that I feel I had when I was being attacked. And I share this in the book, so I don't want to spoil it, but to me that was so powerful, because it was something that I saw with my physical body, and not something that I just experienced on an inner plane or a different plane of awareness. So when and then that also happened, right before I met my shaman, that I had another mystical experience where I did have a physical connection with an angel that was felt in the physical realm. So that doesn't happen very often, where there is an actual physical shift, where something physically shifts. For a lot of people, when they're communing with angels or with guides or with supernatural energies. It can happen on an internal level and a multi dimensional level of awareness. And so even before I met my shaman, I had had some physical things, and then I meet my shaman, and that opens up the door for this depth of inner awareness. And it took me on a really deep journey. But also, once I met my shaman, I started just studying everywhere else. I was on the internet. I was learning. I was meeting other teachers. I was meeting other people. I was being invited to different kinds of meditations, and experiencing all of these profound experiences that kept opening the doors of awareness, opening the doors of truth. And in my own work, what I see with people is that those people, there are people who we all have these gifts. We have these gifts of clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience, where you can either see or you can hear or you can feel, but not everyone can see. I do work with some people who they're just working with clearing clutter from their mind. They're working with being in the embodied experience of love and presence. And that is enough, and it gets challenging sometimes when you're in a community with people like me, who can, like, see aliens, and I can see this and I can see that, and that's why it was really important for me to share in the journey. When I was sharing an integration like I saw these things, and my shaman shut me down in front of 65 people and said, Don't listen to that. We came here to open up our hearts. And this is the most important aspect of this work. And so there are people I when someone comes to me and their intention is just to be present, I hold that with so much love and reverence, because at the end of the day, like I've actually come back to the other side, where I don't invite my angels and my guides into all of my experience, it's just me in pure presence.


Christine Mason  38:41  

I love this that you're bringing it just back to the heart. Just back. I want to open my heart and live in my heart.


Vonetta E. Taylor  38:46  

It's just back to the heart. It's so simple. And what's so amazing is that also, you know, getting activated into a shamanic path. I then began going to different conferences where I would meet indigenous leaders from around the world, and I did this for years conscious conferences to just expand my awareness and learning and knowing and understanding of what's happening. All every single I can share this with absolute truth, every single indigenous elder that I have met, they have all said the same thing. It all comes back to the heart.


Christine Mason  39:21  

You wrote a little bit in the book about wanting to do these circles of 12, getting this inspiration for circles of 12, is that something that you're moving toward, to be honest?


Vonetta E. Taylor  39:30  

Yes, that was such a profound moment for me, a healing moment i It was like the first time I actually became connected to goddesses of the earth that I was given this very specific guidance. And so the first circle of 12, I want to say it happened in 2014 for my birthday, on the summer solstice. And it took me a while to really step into it. But now, with every circle I lead, I'm. Intention is always to create a circle of 12. And when that happens, it's very powerful, especially when I can do women's circles of 12 men circles of 12 couples. So yes, I've led multiple circles of 12 all over the world. And for the last two and a half years, once I came to Bali, I was I was given this guidance to create a leadership mastermind and bring leaders from around the world to support each other in this time of awakening in their leadership. And that is also a


Christine Mason  40:30  

circle of 12, beautiful. See, there's something about that number. Yeah, wait, I wanted to touch on this briefly, as I was reading it, I noticed, you know, we talked a little bit about this at dinner too, on the through line around blackness, sometimes you name it in the book, and sometimes it's implicit, and you have the ancestry component and also some family stuff. So I'd love to ask you about how you're holding that, but if it feels like it's something you want to speak to. But if not, I just left that. Yeah.


Vonetta E. Taylor  40:57  

You know, growing up as a black girl who does not look like a black girl, but was told she is a black girl. I grew up with a lot of confusion around my identity, and even though I grew up feeling that there's nothing inside me but being a black girl, I grew up with this identity of being a black girl and growing up in a black family, growing up as a black girl, I felt that there were not very many models or representations of black femaleness that represented me. I was very interested in sciences. I was very interested in the arts. I was very academic. I remember being a young black girl, even when I was a young young adult living in Los Angeles, all I heard from people, do you want to be an actress? Do you want to be a model? Do you want to do this? Do you, you know, there it was. It was very binary. There weren't that. There wasn't, like a plethora of of inspiration, of women who shared stories or lived lives that I felt were extraordinary, that that actually resonated with me. And it wasn't until I went to college and I began reading black female literature and Zora Neale hurston's book, Their Eyes Were Watching God was has been one of the most influential books of my life, because she was a black woman who was raised in the south and then became a cultural anthropologist. But she didn't do it the way that the white institutions wanted her to do it, which was to go and, you know, go to Africa, or go to Papua New Guinea, and go study some like foreign culture, she wanted to study her own culture. And to me, what I learned from that, because my family comes from the south, it was the it was one of the richest experiences of my life. And so I feel like writing the book is also to, I wanted to write to those black girls who were like me, who want to have a different kind of role model to aspire to be that isn't just part of celebrity culture. Yeah, this is beautiful. Thank you. There's still so much and there's so much complexity in the blackness as well.


Christine Mason  43:16  

And how you when you finally saw that, how it helped you reframe some of your early childhood stuff, not just as your direct family experience, but into a more cultural context, and how that softened blame I love, oh yeah,


Vonetta E. Taylor  43:33  

yes, yeah. I mean, there's so many levels of that that I could speak to, but definitely growing up as a black a young black girl growing up in an all white community, I definitely think that our textbooks were different than the textbooks that my Cornell colleagues were growing up with. So when I got to college, I was far behind everybody else in knowing black history and like the actual history of black Americans and African Americans, it was revelatory for me, just to understand from a socio political economic understanding, what's been going on with black culture that expanded just My own feelings, because I actually grew up with shame around being black and so to actually learn, oh my god, this isn't just my family and something that we can't figure out as a small little band or tribe. This is something that is generational. This is something that is also cross cultural and that it is systemic and built into the very fabric and nature of American life, through slavery and systemic racism.


Christine Mason  44:50  

I mean, okay, so this is, this is one thing I like about that, on a meta level, is that you know you're in it. You go into the identity. You go post identity in. To the spiritual into the excavation of the heart, and then you take that heart opened gaze back on systems and cultural institutions, and have a new framing. So it's like doing the inner work comes back around in a healthy person, to integrate the spiritual back into the material culture that we're living in, and then changing that with this new like open hearted sensibility. It's a very different thing than, like, being in the small eye and fighting, yes,


Vonetta E. Taylor  45:27  

yes, yes, absolutely, yes. I'm just like, you


Vonetta E. Taylor  45:33  

got it? Like, that's exactly what, what it has. But, and it doesn't stop. Like, there, you know, it doesn't stop, because the patterns still continue within my family, and I still feel that not I'm not trying to fight a system, but I'm trying to evolve into a higher expression of myself and my truth with all of the history that I come from,


Christine Mason  45:58  

yes and bringing your Sister, literal sister, and I'll go with you, yes, as much as I can. The last thing is, I love how you show up for the women in your life, and how so many stories in the book are not just about you in solitude, but about gathering with other sisters and like just speaking a little bit to community and how we lean into each other and sort of the right relationship between personal work and communal work.


Vonetta E. Taylor  46:24  

You know, in my family, when you read about my story, you can see how challenging these these dynamics were between my mother and my sister, and you mentioned this word congestion like it did, feel so difficult, and so I actually didn't, I don't think I grew up with the healthiest awareness of the power of sisterhood, but once I started this shamanic path, and the door opened up to show me just the power of healing and transformation within community, and then I stepped into leading that work, the more I stepped in, The more I saw, the more I just wanted to be an advocate for deep community, healing, transformational work. And how we started doing the women's work was that I was working with one community near Oakland, and that within that community, it just kept showing up in our community, in our in our ceremonial work that we needed to heal our mother wounds, all the women were dealing with very similar mother wounds, and that we could not do that with the presence of the men. And so we just naturally galvanized and began working together. And through that work of bringing the women together to heal the mother wound, we began to gather the collection of wisdom that came from each one of us, because we had women from Sweden and women from Brazil and women from all over the world, and each of us with our own personal journeys and our own curiosities of trying to navigate our way through Life and find these places of empowerment within the world as women. And so we what we realize is that there's so much wisdom when we come together, and there's so much nourishment that we find in sisterhood. And so yes, it even though at the same time that I was developing these incredible bonds with the sisters in my community. I was still struggling with my own sister, and I did my very best to try to bring my my sister along. And at this stage, we are such we are so tight. I'm so grateful for all the work that's been done and so the personal work, I think it has to happen within community, because we not only are we individuated souls of sparks of spirit, but we are individuated sparks of spirit that came together and live within community. And so we have to we heal, we transform, we evolve together. There's no other way through this. I'm gonna


Christine Mason  49:03  

say your commitment to evolution reminds me of a tantric teaching that incompletion is a sign of spiritual maturity, your ongoing growth and evolution and and there's like an erotic aliveness and things not being finished, baked and done and and to see how much you've already expanded and what's coming next. Who knows? It's so beautiful. I'm so happy to know you.


Vonetta E. Taylor  49:30  

Thank you. I feel the same. You want to leave people with about


Christine Mason  49:33  

your current work and how they can find you, or just sort of like one wish you have for humankind at this moment in our current time space continuum.


Vonetta E. Taylor  49:42  

I mean, my single prayer for humankind is that we recognize each other as human family, that we stop seeing the other as another or as the other, and we actually start to see each other as part of one big human. Family, that we can let go of race and and move into a more shared understanding of who we are, and begin to speak from those places and share and connect and CO create from those places. That's my prayer for humanity. You know, in terms of working with me or meeting me along the journey. My partner and I, we recently created this vitality reset, which is an alternative to New Year's resolutions to help activate your ageless vitality. And so that's a program that will be ongoing. And I'm also I'm in the development stages of my shamanic practitioner certification course, which is directed to support healers and therapists and spiritual curious, if that's a word, but and psychologists to embrace indigenous understandings and technologies and rituals and tools for healing and transformation, and so that my prayer is that it's available March 21 but it won't be released until it's ready. And so it is in the oven. But yeah, I'm very excited about sharing that, and I have some other like this projects in the works. And so yeah, people can find me through my Instagram and reach out to me. It's at Vonetta E Taylor, and then my website. You can also send me contacts and messages. I'm I love hearing from people.


Christine Mason  51:32  

Thank you. I'll put all those the show notes Geneva and I will make a good list. I have to say, both Spotify and Apple podcasts do a pretty bad job of formatting on the show notes. So you want to find the real links with all the embeds and stuff, then you should come to my site, Christinemariemason.com, and look under podcast. It's the best way to find the Rose Woman Podcast stuff in general. Plus a lot of people who have been on the show offer promos and those get truncated on some of these other platforms where people that people are listening up, well, let's send a big amend that wish list to those blessings and gratitude to all of our lineages, like to the Self Realization fellowship to everybody that's touched our paths. This like you have an increasing sense that we aren't at all like individuals, but we're like these, like weaving processes from the unseen seen birth, and then it comes through, through our DNA lineages, like we're arising in consciousness and declining in consciousness as this continuing edge of evolution, like I can feel now even like thinking about you the strains of light that are connecting you to all the teachers and all those that you've touched onto your students.


Vonetta E. Taylor  52:50  

Thank you. Yeah, I feel like we're we're all here together to be in this experience of life, to remember who we are, to be our highest expression. And there's no coincidences, how we all find each other, and how similar our paths are and and the weaves of connection that continue to be revealed. So it's, it's truly magical to me. I'm still like every day there's, I do have a moment of like, oh my god, I'm in awe of the connectivity. Thank you so much all love. Thank you all love to you, darling.


Christine Mason  53:32  

Thank you so much for spending time with me today, with Vonetta and I in this dialog. I hope that you are committed to your evolution and your expansion to, as my friend Patrick says, healing the split between the material and the spiritual and really deeply inhabiting your life, Living from the heart, living from love, it's all we got, baby, it's all we got right now, is to just live from that essential truth, love, joy and beauty that is at the heart of creation, And to be contagious, so that those who aren't seeing it can feel it in you. This is what I wish please come and find me at christinemariemason.com I have a lot of stuff coming up this spring. My Course, which I only run twice a year, a couple of retreats that are very, very fun, the new books and things like that. And rosewoman.com for all of the body care products you need great skin care tools, etc. So wherever you're at all love all the time .

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Geneva Tolentino
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