​

​

​​​

​

​​​​​​​

​​​​​

To be a medicine maker is to be deeply present and participate in the alchemy of the moment. I enjoy all the things that take time and ask me to slow down. I love the makings that take months, years even. There’s a lot to benefit from a quick turnaround, too, a sense of accomplishment and completion. And the slow, involved, meticulous process is really my jam. Maybe the feelings are akin to “losing myself in the process”, or perhaps the feeling of time slowing to a stop is more the metaphor that delights me. At any rate, I feel most connected to the Divine, to Source when I’m making. My mind opens, focuses and then relaxes, and I become part of whatever is. This is a gift for me and for others. The ones who receive the medicines I make are also receiving my mana (my essence), because the energies they are made with influences their outcome and integrity. Clarity and a surrender to the plants, to hear, listen to and honor their teachings and be in resonance with their energy is very important. In short, the ceremony of life becomes intentional. 

 

All of life is ceremony. There is no real separation between what we call mundane and what we call sacred beyond our awareness and intent. Medicine making shines a brilliant light on this, or it easily can, anyhow. We all have lived examples of rushing through a project only to need to come back, refine, rework or even scrap it entirely and return with fresh energy and begin again. Years with plants and Master Plants, especially, have cultivated a timeless softening in me, like stepping into a deep hot bath and feeling the body relax bit by bit.

 

Truth is, the Master Plants really want to be in relationship with humanity. They thrive in healthy, reciprocal relationships just like us. Making powerful consciousness altering medicines is not a 9-5 workday sort of calling. It requires a consistent melting of anything we can try to put into a “mundane” mental packaging and rings the temple bell into every breath, action, belief, challenge, growth, shift, change, resistance, surrender, peaceful acceptance, all of our concepts of alone and supported, ad infinitum. This is my soul’s work. When I doubt myself, they call me back to the now, now, now.

 

Each of us has our own soul’s journey and work. I am gifted as a medicine woman, and I know these ways are not for everyone. It is a privilege, especially in the times we live in, to be able to spend days in solitude, with no distractions, no traffic noise, outside of the collective busyness, in the forest on an island in the Pacific. I recognize my privilege. I bow to it, daily. I bow to my sacred self and the choices, deep trust and surrender this path has required over the years and to what it takes to sustain this commitment.

 

I have spent the majority of the last 6 years hermitted away, mostly separated from people and society. I live on a one lane dirt road near the south point of the Big Island of Hawaii. Pretty darn remote. My journey to peace with myself and my soul’s work as a medicine woman initially meant that the container I provided for ceremonial work and as a Master Plant medicine maker needed to be very very private. I cultivated quietly. I created containers that felt secure, safe, tucked in and sealed. I kept a sacred cloak tightly wrapped around my circles. This has been beautiful and was necessary. Now, I realize that I cannot grow into my full calling in this small container. The world needs the medicine of the Master Plants, access to deep life changing ceremonies and makers who are dedicated in their prayerful integrity to providing the medicines. The time has come to remove the cloak. The Master teachers, Ancestors and Elementals will guide the ways of safety. Their cloak, not mine. I’ve been aware of what needs to change in me and my relationship to my soul’s work for the last few months, around the beginning of 2026. I’ve recognized and declared my acceptance and readiness even while not knowing exactly how to step forward. I will let Spirit guide. I will share. I will make. I will use my words and open. I will be a servant and celebrate the freedom that stepping into visibility offers and be shown the way.

 

Because, without a doubt, the time for the medicine of Ayahuasca and other Master Plant medicines to be sung clearly and without reservation has come! I will stand by her and the family of light and touch my own torch to the beacon and offer my light into the world. We are so much more than our concepts of the mundane and our small physical bodies on earth. The time for remembering, healing and celebrating the brilliance and vastness of our souls is here. As we each awaken, the support is with us.

 

In my first conversations with folks who want to speak with me regarding Ayahuasca and Master Plant ceremonial work, I always remind them that their call to the medicine will always be clear. Crystal clear. No exceptions. Grandmother Aya does not speak to us in a maybe kind of way. We can rest in knowing that she speaks in the ways of YES or not now. This clarity is important. It requires honesty with self. This ceremonial work is not an experience, not a bucket list sort of thing or one night stand kind of energy. It is an invitation to a life changing, life-long relationship.

In offering one on one or group ceremonies I ask a two night minimum and prefer three nights together. There is a significant difference in our commitments to self and our journey work when we enter the work knowing we will return again the next night.

​​

​

STAR JOYCE MEDICINE WOMAN & MAKER​

THE JOURNEY TO NOW

​​

​​

 

My first rememberings (and thus this medicine path) began in the garden, colors bright and faded, her back showing the gentle path of sweat from neck to waist, straw hat tied with old shoelaces shading the ground before her. This is where I began to hear the song of my purpose, watching my grandmother, “Nanny”. My legs still soft, dangling from a walker chair, hands delighted and drumming while the Earth made her way into the fibers of my being. All this to say, I grew up in the lap of the great mother alongside my grandmother.

 

I was blessed to grow up with an elder. I now see my parents as the instruments of this blessing way. Their lives and patterns with addiction inadvertently drove me and kept me close to the Divine at an early age and gifted me with a childhood unlike my peers. I was raised by a strong woman who taught me by example that we can do anything we set our hearts to and that a heart broken can grow infinitely larger and open again and again.

 

Music is my first language, my native tongue. Words came like rough rocks beside the smooth running streams of music. Singing and wind instruments were my tools to other realms of sanctuary, to the well of the soul, to the temple gates where I felt and knew I was whole. Where words could fail, music flew free. 

 

By high school I was fully immersed in music, attending Lane Tech in Chicago as a music major with a roadmap laid for a conservatory level musician. At 16, after two years living alone with my father, a man at that time steeped in addiction and long established abusive behaviors, I was given a clear choice to see my worth and rise. The untruth of his rage and belittling rang like a bell, finally. So, at 16 I moved to Florida and in lieu of a senior year in high school began college. 

 

While my extensive musical training was a layer of what once felt like freedom, entering college in central Florida (Valencia) and finding myself well beyond what was offered, I began the work of unlearning. I left my formal training for the wild expression of improv playing anywhere and everywhere. I left school and travelled the east coast with Rainbow tribe, eventually landing in the Asheville area. 

 

All along the way, the plants supported me, guiding, healing, protecting, and nourishing. By 18 my maker self was awake and thriving, offering simple medicines to my family of friends- a salve, a tea, a compress, a journey, a healing soup seemingly made from thin air, lol. Always, the abundance of the plants. Like a song given around a late night fire, I received the medicine ways of the plants directly and through many human teachers. What began in my grandmother’s garden came alive for me in sidewalk cracks, on mountainsides, backyards, hoarfrost hillsides and tree bark, woodpiles and old growth forests. A language akin to audible music but a softer, silent music invited me to dance. 

 

Then owl medicine came and brought me to deep prayer and days of vigil, showed me commitment to the sacred self and how to carve the sickness from a wounded heart and to allow the truth of love to burn and cauterize, make whole what was torn by letting go. An Iroquois teacher came, Ted Williams, and we planted a medicine wheel garden. He brought Tobaquito and snake medicines for arthritis and fear, for transformation and freedom. He gave me a path among the stars in the rural coves of Sandy Mush with the rattlesnakes and copperheads, the mice and crows, the singing stones and waterfall sprites. 

 

Another teacher, Maretta, came. She tore away the fabric of illusion and set me free, demanding I speak for the quiet shame that was eating me alive. Another teacher, Marian Starnes, came and made clear the line I needed to draw, step over and never look back upon. 

 

The Great Mother brought me Bonnie Blue and the sacred sweat lodge, sacred story telling and the invitation to speak and sing for the plants and elements, those of soft and silent voices. Patty Youngbear came and took my hand and bent me in prayer at many a lodge over the course of 20 years at Terra Nova in Cedar Mountain. Together we brought many a drum to the womb of our Mother and were born again, lili wakan.

 

At 23, Greenfire Farm was born, the first certified organic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in Western North Carolina. The focus of Greenfire was a project rooted in biodiversity that included food plants, medicine plants, culinary herbs and flowers, edible and decorative, as well as shiitake, maitake and reishi mushrooms. During this time two powerful teachers came, Wilbert Alix and my son, Hollis. 

 

Wilbert Alix was a profound and ballsy human. He and Frank Natale co-created what became Trancedance, a shamanic journey movement practice designed to access the domain of the soul through activation. They subsequently brought many very powerful spiritual ceremonial practices to life using sound, movement and stillness and breathwork for radical transformation and growth. I was blessed to work with him over a span of nearly 20 years. He challenged every single notion he possibly could as a teacher and delighted in doing so. 

 

Consciously choosing to become a mother at 24 brought me my greatest teacher, my beloved heartbreaker and fabulous human son, Hollis. Birthing into motherhood I gave way my maiden self and became the one who nourishes. That sounds nice. In reality this threshold is where my animal self devoured my youthful girl and in that decomposition a raw power began to build. The plants were always by my side. Comfrey for my birth torn body. Uva ursi, myrrh and goldenseal to heal and bring together what came apart. Poke root for removing the pain that blocked my breasts. Broths to rebuild blood. Always, these teachers come, again and again, to sing wholeness.

 

At 26 I went back to school and graduated from Asheville’s Center for Massage and Natural Health. I created a container for depth and connection, for trust and transparency in the then small community of Brevard, NC.  In 18 years of practice the scope of my work included self care focused massage and bodywork therapies, Taoist shamanism, Medical Qigong and TCM, food healing, 5 Yin Organ Qigong, Craniosacral therapy, Traeger, vibrational somatic therapy, shamanic journeywork and many many plant medicines.  

 

In 2010, I became apprenticed to a Taoist priest, Dennis Alexander, in the course of two and a half years with the International Institute of Medical Qigong, The Sentient Temple in St. Petersburg, FL.  There I completed my Master’s certification, a 1000 hour in person training commitment that included a year of clinical medical qigong treatment with patients in a wide range of disease and disorder processes ranging from cancer to deep psychological illness.

 

Master Plant teacher Ayahuasca quietly entered my life in 2006. She spoke softly. Her first teachings were about right timing, grace and allowing. She came to me through song and dance, making her presence known in trancedance and soul retrieval ceremonies for nine years. In 2013, at 39, right timing arrived with two beautiful human teachers Magdalena and Maxim carrying Shipibo medicine from Peru. Our ceremonial relationship continued for 5 years while my soul grew ready for a great change. 

 

In 2018 I moved to Hawaii and left behind a well rooted life and identity in the mountains of North Carolina. It took 4 turns of the great wheel (4 years) to gestate the version of myself that could step forward and commit to a medicine woman path. And then the Masters began in earnest to make me theirs. 

 

By the end of 2018, a teacher, John, met my soul’s growth with a gift. He gave me his legacy and taught me to be a servant and maker of Grandmother Aya’s medicine. He gave me a living relationship with the sacred Master Plant teachers he had tended for over 20 years, Banisteriopsis and Psytropia Veridis or Vine and Leaf. 

 

After many years of being gifted with presence and supporting family and friends in their death processes, in 2019 I completed a certification for End of Life Doula training in Kapa’au with the Life and Death Wellness Center with Bobbi Bryant and Dr. Charlotte Charfen. 

 

2020 brought everyone unprecedented change. That year marked a course of freedom for me (uprooting from and completing a marriage of 11 years) and a deep dedication with Master Plant teachers Grandmother Aya and Bobinsana. This was my year to sit “alone” and drink medicine (at least 6 nights each month) to stay in dieta long term and to live, breathe, drink and dance these teachers into the being I was becoming with their support and guidance.  

​

​

Gabrielle Roth wrote,"In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: when did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?"