Rumi Warmi

Coming at the end line of seven children and growing up in rural New Zealand/Aotearoa I was the ‘weird’ kid in school who on scheduled vaccine days shuffled up to the front of the class to give the parental note declaring ‘my daughter shall not be taking the vaccine’. Colds, headaches, bumps, scratches, illnesses and aches throughout childhood and adolescence was always punctuated by adjustments to the spine and shifting of body and muscle with a reassuring knowing, often in the form of laughter or smile, to the tune of ‘everything is fine, the body heals itself, one just needs patience and trust’. From a young age I was massaging dad’s shoulders and back after his long days at work, lost for direction after completing high school, he recognized my talents and suggested I take up a massage course at a school for therapies in Wellington. I felt unsure about it so instead worked in his Chiropractic practice a while before accepting a friend’s offer to meet a fashion designer in Wellington and accepting work in her store and workroom. I found release on the dance floors of nightclubs on the weekends from otherwise superficial competition involved in nine to five retail work which was only counted by the independence of leaving home. The self-exploration that comes with creativity, the finer detail side of fashion design and art of workroom practices in pattern making, pressing and finishing kept me going until the crucial meeting of a world renowned Tai Chi master took place, resulting in the introduction to the energetic worlds in weekly classes with her.

Master Shi Mei Lin was a transparent force of light and compelling in everything she did. She spoke very little English but said everything beautifully. It took a solid two years of every day practice and twice a week classes at the Taoist temple on Cuba Street, above Aunty Mena’s restaurant and delicious golden veggie balls, with regular weekend demonstrations to learn the full Wu style form. Mei Lin taught every new student that came to her with patience and great care, having studied martial arts from the age of seven and taught everything from Tai Chi to Kung Fu to Sword form Shaolin all her young and adult life. Through the 1970’s and 1980’s she toured internationally with the Wushu/Tai Chi Shanghai team and studying with the greats like Jet Lee, she was a Martial Arts delegate after winning international championships five times and being a champion of China, touring, tutoring and competing all over the world. Discipline is implicit when one wields that kind of grace and power.

I left the fashion world to study Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Victoria in Wellington. Feeling Tai Chi shifts in my internal world, and that academia was a lot of learning how to learn and not much living in the radiant joy of creation, in my second year I went off to honor a connection with a Taiko-player fire-spinning performer with a Japanese mother and New Zealand father I met during my first semester at University and who had travelled back to Japan to spend time with his mother. We timed a ten-day water fast together before I left; me in New Zealand and he in Japan, meeting excitedly in hyper space and in the dream worlds meanwhile communicating in physical reality via hand-typed haiku poetry sent in the post with a good whiff of magic and waiting with anticipation for words from the land of the long white cloud to Samurai’s island of Rising Sun, until I arrived at the family house passed down from generation to generation in a village outside of Hiroshima.

In the days after my arrival I was invited to join a scheduled daily training with another master by the name Kumasan (‘kuma’ meaning ‘bear’ and ‘san’ meaning ‘Mr’). Every morning at day break I rode a bike to Kumasan’s house as my practice demanded punctuality and was not be taken lightly, although the urine therapy was optional, I was there with great enthusiasm to learn as much as possible. The training was primarily in Chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture, Thai/Shiatsu massage, CTM (Chinese Traditional Medicine) acupressure points and meridian lines and Kumasan’s special touch of Hatha yoga acquired by him in India. Practice was regularly 1 hour, but more often than not 3-4 hours in the morning with a fresh cup of chai tea and history lessons afterwards. I always followed this with an independent Tai Chi practice at the local temple, on one occasion a few locals saw me practicing and inquired if I would teach them. When I called Mei Lin to ask if I was at a level to teach and transmit the Wu linage, she giggled and said ‘you can teach when you can teach’. This felt encouraging and so I started to share the wisdom of movement.

I returned to NZ to finish my degree, fully opened to the natural healing path laid at my feet by a second master with his experimental techniques of inserting acupuncture needles into the eye ball and burying one in hot sand, (as in the sixteenth-century old tradition of detoxification for cleaning the blood and lymph systems), supporting me. Having taken up a steady practice of meditation after sitting in the first of what would become three ten-day Vipassana mediation courses I would do, I went on to complete a postgraduate in linguistics and accept an arts and culture scholarship in Indonesia.

And thus, opening me into the spirit world were also traditional dance and Kamelan orchestra, Bahasa, batik art and Wayang puppetry. In between intense training and technical court dances with masks, sweeping tiny foot taps, finger twists and neck shakes all beautifully timed to the Kamelan music, some random spirits shook the bed at night coinciding with regular wind storms that were felt by locals as spirit(s) that had been upset. Absurd as it sounds, Javanese spirituality spilled out from the praying temples as the indigenous ghostbusters were advertised on the TV and the Sultan I danced for had two seats to his side: one for his spirit wife, and one for his physical wife. Kamelan was for me like Japanese stories and mythologies; capturing life’s journey into inner worlds. A few years after the scholarship I travelled again to live in Japan, this time occupying a tiny apartment in Tokyo center. The skills and experiences acquired in designing clothing, teaching English and Tai Chi, were with me wherever I went, building me up for South America.

By the time I left Japan, ayahuasca was calling, and I flew directly to Salvador, Brazil. Whereas trains and buses arrive and depart on time to-the-second in Tokyo and most of Japan, in fact, in Salvador one could wait a whole day for a bus that may or may not arrive depending on the weather, service condition of the bus, or festive spirit of the day. I’d entered a much slower pace for reality and it felt great. Almost a full year of travelling the length and breadth of South America solo saw me at a crescendo point in my final month on the frontier of Ecuador and Peru on Punta Sal beach front requesting a place to stay. A local guy was called for me by the name of Geraldo who went by the nickname of Jerry, having spent more than twenty years driving cabs in New York City and just recently returning to Peru to bury his father and take care of his inherited property. It is with Geraldo I took my first dose of ayahuasca as he happened to be a curandero in training from a jungle family in Pucallpa. I was initiated into the plant spirit world with trust solidified by a totem stick he carved with my initials only hours before we had met for the first time. There are no coincidences on the medicine path, but rather synchronicities prevail.

It wasn’t until my third ceremony where I drunk alone with Geraldo checking in on me intermittingly that he discovered I was speaking in tongues. At that point his vision opened up and addressing the Mayan spirit of the ancient language I was speaking, both of us were transported back to Mexico and Geraldo beheld me as being the embodiment of a Mayan Princess named Natashiaye some five hundred years ago. Natashiaye was me, (and I was her), and she had fallen in love with a warrior that her royal family could not rightly approve of. Irrespective of her bloodline, she stood by her beloved warrior, facing being outcast by her family as a consequence.

A few days later, I had a birthday and was asleep outside the house, when I woke up to a large mare standing majestically by my side. Jerry took me over to it and said it was my birthday gift, to my surprise and bewilderment branded large on its hind were my initials again ‘RW’. I pressed my forehead to the horse’s and as our spirits rose together so strong I felt the impulse to ride. Jerry gave me a wee boost up, I jumped on its back, bare as the golden sand, and we merged: the wind carrying us away and landing us close to the water’s edge, we galloped full speed up and down the beach most of that morning.

I journeyed back to New Zealand again not long after my introduction to ayahuasca, finding work designing wardrobe for film and, more than anything else, meeting and connecting to a true spirit family. I embarked on a raw food and nutritional path at this time, which lead me to Europe, where Sardegna Italy became my home. I lived close to the earth and fires, biking each day to morning swims in the Mediterranean, teaching English and Tai Chi, making sustainable clothing from scraps and remnants of fabric rolls, painting and drawing for the fist time and taking the cheese-bread-and-pasta loving community of Alghero through nutritional courses, teaching vegetarian, vegan and raw food. The Sunset’s Community Gardens became a place I and a group of young students who had the inherited land that was the gardens, began teaching workshops to children on how to plant, harvest and make edible delights from their own grown foods and it served as a place to share the raw foods, too.

London called some years later much to my surprise, leaving Sardagna to visit a dear friend in Russia and attend and volunteer at fruit festivals in Denmark and Europe meeting and chatting in seminars with some legendary raw-food hero’s including Dr. Douglas Graham. In London I found myself working at organic juicing outlets, vegan cafes and restaurants and also with the raw nutritional framework, I become a live-in raw chef, experimenting with techniques and strolling the markets for inspiration and health.

I made it back to New Zealand once again after London and Europe, travelling further north out of the city, living in communities and building gardens for elderly as a source of wellbeing for them, while promoting natural spring water and painting watercolor in between. I also become a self-determined Sovereign, which took a great deal of legal research in order to break free from the system that owns people from birth without them knowing. I remained in Aotearoa until Platon and I met and we started our journey here to work with plant medicines and Shipibo maestros, caught in the loving embrace of Maestro Cesar Soimetsa and Mama Dina.

Much of my journey into spirituality and healing has been self taught and intuitive with short bursts of masters showing the way, three main things have been inherited in this journey for me so far; first being the foundational trust in a pioneering father and healer in his own right who taught by way of example that the body is a self-healing organism. Dad studied at the only Chiropractic school in the world at the time: Palmer College of Chiropractic, in the 1960’s, he returned to Aotearoa after his graduation and many long cold winter hours working and studying to sustain a young family of two young children and mum who had flown over to join him in Devonport Iowa. He had a successful practice in the Hutt Valley of Wellington and became a founding member on the New Zealand Chiropractic board establish in 1960 shortly after the Chiropractic Act was passed in Aotearoa. It was only recently I discovered Germanic New Medicine/knowledge that works with the five biological laws, which also underpin Chiropractic therapy, that it all come together in a profound way.

The essence of New Germanic Knowledge being that our bodies’ response to conflicts are biological; they manifest to heal us emotionally and spiritually. A conscious response to this process is the main factor either towards healing or away from it. If one can accept the body is always in a state of healing and that physical symptoms of internal conflict/ shock or trauma are a sign the body is in a pharse of release and in fact repairing a conflict, we are on the path to healing instantly. The other end of the spectrum is a medical diagnosis for the symptoms of repair, which can form a sense of what might be happening physically only if we can accept the self-healing premise and take the medical information in objectively. However more often than not the self-healing awareness is distracted by medical information and diagnosis interrupts the healing process by bringing forward more internal conflict, usually around existential fears and life purpose. When more conflicts arise for healing they can constellate into a crisis or become terminal, not from illness or dis ease per se, but from the sheer mental resistance of ones’ own biological adaptation process i.e., opposite to the relaxation and stillness needed for true healing.

Dr Hamer who, through observation established the new knowledge around the body in the 1940’s. After his son was killed in a car accident, he received an insight into how emotional trauma causes illness, as shortly afterwards he developed a tumor-like lump in his testicles. As he watched and observed his physical and emotional state move through the grief and shock, he noticed two things; not only that the tumor dissolved on its own accord without intervention or medication, i.e. organically, but his testosterone levels also greatly increased which caused the swelling in his testies from excess sperm and the lump as a symptom of repair. His body, when looked at on a biological level, was healing the loss of his son by building the body up to create another offspring through increasing the very thing needed to do so. When the emotional conflict of the loss of his son was healed, the tumor that a diagnosis would have suggested as cancer no longer existed.

The second aspect inherent in my journey into spirituality and healing is movement; as it defines stillness, which is the main principle of healing without resistance.

The third aspect is good nutrients, water being primary medicine above all else, as the brain is cerebral and the body itself almost 85% water. All three factors feed the spirit into positive assurance to make this paradigm shift into self-healing and mastery in consciousness possible.

I was blessed to meet Platon in Ceremony in Aotearoa, he was serving medicine, I was being called by ayahuasca while he was on his way to Peru in four-days time, having waited almost a year due to covid circumstances to get confirmation of his flight nothing could have stopped him from his path. After our first ceremony with a dear friend where we saw a glimpse of our capacity to heal together, we had only one more medicine journey before he left, it was just the two of us and the medicine was showing us the way, so we bowed down and listened. It said ‘love is the key, good things do happen if you follow them, trust in the spirit and medicine more than anything else and jump whenever and wherever you can into new states of growth and learning, no matter how high the mountain is or how steep the drop feels’. Needless to say, I did jump and so did Platon, I drove him to the airport shortly after our last ceremony together, only to be collected by our beating hearts at Lima airport almost three months later fully ushered over by medicine family on both our sides. Cachiayau has been our home and sanctuary the past few years leading us to plant dietas, mountain adventures and healing visions beyond anything we could have dreamed. We can’t wait to share the time of lives, mystic rivers and saturation of spirit with you. You are there by cordially invited to Cachiyacu Kano Shobo Retreats.