THE THREADS OF MY STORY
Every initiation, teacher and wild place has woven another thread into the woman and medicine I am today.
Read more of my story below.
The upbringing and curiosity that shaped my path
The upbringing and curiosity that shaped my path
Returning to the Earth as teacher, medicine and home
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The teachers and traditions that shaped my medicine
Bringing wild wisdom home to the modern woman
Weaving medicine, ceremony, sisterhood and community
The Calling
I have always felt connected to the magic of life.
Growing up in Durban, I felt deeply connected to plants, animals, the elements and the unseen. I sensed things I didn't always have words for. In a world that dismissed magic as childhood imagination, I kept this inner world quietly within me.
At the same time, my empathy drew me towards people and community. As a teenager, I became involved in youth leadership and community development. In 2011, I served as Mayor of the Durban Youth Council, represented youth at COP17, and worked with organisations including Greenpeace and Touching the Earth Lightly.
At UCT, studying Politics, Philosophy & Economics and as an Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellow, I continued exploring how we might create meaningful change through social enterprise, alternative food systems and community-led development.
But one question kept following me:
Where does the wound begin — and how do we heal it?
I began to see that the disconnection I was witnessing in the world around me was also something we carried within ourselves — from our bodies, our spirit, one another and the Earth.
The patterns we were trying to change externally were often rooted in our inner worlds: in our bodies, our families, our beliefs and our relationship with nature.
I realised we could not change the outside without tending to what lived within us.
And I realised I wasn't going to find the answers in a lecture hall.
I needed to go deeper — into myself, into nature, and into the traditional lineages that had been carrying these questions for generations.
Read the next chapter: Following the Threads of my Dreams below.
Following The Threads
I followed the calling of my heart to the Garden Route, where I began exploring traditional forms of healing, ceremony and alternative ways of living.
There, my first teachers introduced me to older ways of relating with the living world — the healing power of prayer, fire and water, plant medicine, the food we eat, sweat lodge and practices such as yoga.
Then my dreams began calling me deeper.
They led me to the Eastern Cape, where I entered a traditional twasa apprenticeship with Mama and Dada Dlamini.
For a year, I lived simply in a shared rondavel in the village — fetching water, tending gardens, learning traditional medicine and participating in the rhythms of village life and ceremony.
I learnt that healing isn't something separate from our everyday lives.
It is found in how we live.
How we eat. How we pray.
How we gather. How we care for one another.
How we relate to the land.
I began to understand that medicine is a way of life — not simply something we reach for when we are sick.
Read the next chapter: Coming Home to the Wild below.
Coming Home To The Wild
The deeper I went into my initiation, the more the wild called me.
I wanted less electricity. Less technology. Less separation from the living world.
I wanted to remember how to be truly human.
I spent six months living deep in the forest, learning to listen to plants, dream my medicines, and deepen my direct relationship with the ancestors and spirits of the land.
From there, I was called into my deepest initiation — a month-long vision quest in a sacred cave along the Wild Coast.
There, in solitude and deep communion with the Earth, I received some of the most profound teachings of my life about medicine, healing and what it means to be human.
I began to remember what it truly felt like to know in my body that:
We are nature. We belong here.
The Earth is not simply somewhere we visit.
She is home. She is teacher. She is provider. She is medicine.
I saw how much of our modern suffering is rooted in the ways we have separated ourselves from our true nature — from natural rhythms, primal movement, interdependent community, the raw elements, wild seasonal food and our original nomadic lifestyle.
Coming home to the wild became one of the deepest medicines I had found.
And it became a calling I received to share with others.
Read the next chapter: Walking the Lineages below.
Walking The Lineages
After meeting my greatest teachers within myself and in nature, my calling continued to weave me through diverse traditional healing lineages across Southern Africa and the world, helping me to deepen and refine my approach to medicine.
I apprenticed with Gogo Timzimkulu in Swaziland, learning the art of divination and ancestral healing. I travelled through the Northern Cape, Namibia and Botswana, learning from pathfinder Craig Q7 Beckett and Indigenous San medicine keepers. I studied Ayurvedic medicine and marma therapy with Pooja Sheth and Dr Manoj Chandrasekharan, while also beginning to explore my own Northern ancestral lineages of medicine, ceremony and magic.
Through my time learning from these diverse Wisdom Keepers, I began to recognise a common thread at the heart of all medicine lineages:
The ability to listen.
Listen to the body.
Listen to the land.
Listen to the plants.
Listen to the ancestors.
Listen to dreams.
Listen to Spirit.
I came to understand that medicine isn't something we simply collect from other people.
It is something we learn to listen for.
The weaving of these lineages, together with what I received through my own inner journeys and vision quests in the wild, began to shape my unique path and approach to medicine.
I came to understand that being a medicine woman isn't about what I know.
It is about listening deeply enough to hear what is being calling for, and guiding others to the medicine that is already within them.
Read the next chapter: Embodying My Medicine below.
Embodying My Medicine
Returning to my hometown in the city brought its own initiation: learning to ground what I had received through my initiatory path into the way I lived and showed up for my family and community.
I began exploring what it meant to nourish and heal the body in an urban environment — sourcing natural food, supporting the body with herbs, finding ways to rewild and reconnect with the elements, creating spaces to gather intentionally, and staying rooted through daily ritual in a modern world.
My journey into women's health deepened here too.
After experiencing PCOS and painful bleeds when I returned to the city, I began learning to tend my womb and body with the sensitivity a woman's body asks for. This journey led me deeper into the study of hormones, womb healing, sacred sexuality and feminine embodiment — and into a deeper understanding of pleasure and the feminine body as pathways to the divine.
I realised that spirituality was never about leaving the body behind.
My body was the temple through which I met the divine — within myself, within others and within the living world.
I began to experience my whole life as a ritual.
Each breath became sacred.
My daily routines became rituals.
Each relationship became a gift.
Each emotion became a teacher.
Every moment became an opportunity to meet life more deeply.
I came to understand that magic is found in how we choose to meet each moment.
With presence.
With intention.
With reverence.
From dancing wildly around a fire to standing in a queue at the shopping centre, the sacred is always present for those with open hearts and open eyes.
This became an essential part of my own medicine and what I share with others.
To remember what it truly means to live your life as a ritual — to meet the divine in all forms, and to live as a fully embodied soul embracing the wild and beautiful experience of being human.
When we meet life in this way we awaken our full life force and are able to realise for ourselves the the deeper connection, fulfillment, and joy we so often seek outside of ourselves.
Read the next chapter: Gathering The Threads below.
Gathering The Threads
And so the threads of my journey began weaving themselves together.
I began offering women’s circles, rites of passage, land ceremonies and seasonal gatherings in my community — learning to create ceremony not only from what I had been taught, but by listening to what the people, the place and the moment were calling for.
I also returned to my calling as a community weaver: bringing people together to heal, connect and create change.
Through my community circles, I witnessed what becomes possible when people come together, share their wisdom, recognise one another’s gifts and activate our co-creative power.
Today, my offerings weave together traditional healing, women’s wisdom, rites of passage, rewilding and community weaving.
The young dreamer who wanted to change the world has become a wiser woman who has learnt to recognise the gifts already present — and weave them together.
HER is my offering to my community of women.
It is the tapestry of everything I have learnt, lived and gathered along my path.
I founded HER as a sanctuary for women...
to embrace their bodies as wise and beautiful, come home to nature, weave circles of sisterhood, honour life's rites of passage and meet life with deeper pleasure, purpose and presence.
It is the deepening of my calling: to support women to discover their own medicine, embody their magic, and bring their unique gifts and dreams into the world.
Follow Bianca
"Our life is shaped by the dreams we dare to follow and the courage to write our own story.
What story will you write?"
~ Bianca Vernes