Filmmaker, Ancestral Healer, Wise Leader
Naomi McDougall Jones sat down with Sami Bass to talk about more than just “the films" as there is so much life that goes into creating and telling stories with impact.
Like many of the reGEN filmmakers, you work both as a healer and a filmmaker/storyteller. Can you give us an idea of the range of work you do in both these areas and talk about how you see both sides of your work supporting or interacting with each other?
Yes, absolutely. I love getting asked this question because I’m still figuring it out myself, and every time I answer it I feel like I’m at a new understanding of the fission between the two and am left in awe.
I’ve dedicated so much of my life to being a healer, it shocks me even now to reflect on it. I came to healing through my ancestry. My father was a healer, but more importantly, I found myself on the path to being a healer through necessity.
My father and I don’t have the sort of relationship where I was going to be “taken under a wing.” In fact, for the early part of my adulthood, I wanted to do everything to separate myself from his legacy rather than embody that lineage within me.
But healing from trauma has demanded me to go head first into the modalities necessary to take my life back, and then discover myself as a healer on that path. I’m an ancestral healer, and although I’ve spent ages studying in schools of theory, college, and training programs, the foundation of my work is the ability to channel.
For those who don’t have channeling in their cultural zeitgeist, I think the easiest way to explain it is “referring out to god”. Our ancestors, the spirits that surround us, and even our bodies if we choose to see them as ancestors are imbued with god energy that is egoless and wise beyond what our thinking minds are always capable of holding.
Since I was young, I was able to see and hear the energies and communications from these “beyond the veil” contributors. But since training as a healer, I have honed the ability to hear into more of a dialogue that helps me understand how to best work with those I cross paths with.
Instead of flinging spaghetti at the wall and hoping that’s the thing that works, I ask the ancestors and guardians on the paths of my clients to inform which modalities they’re seeing as effective, which traumas are being asked to have further inspection, and sometimes, point blank, if they have any advice we need to take into account.
The worldly modalities I use merge and flow with this wisdom. I think of myself as being of service, rather than being a healer most of the time. I understand what I do as a gift and hold the responsibility of using it to the highest good of all I can. This influences how I hold space for people imbibing plant medicine (my favorite being cacao, and if you haven’t sat yet call me immediately and let’s chat), to how I curate retreats, to the body work and movement sessions I do.
It’s really challenging to explain in language how this all works… bear with me for a moment.
Imagine a traditional mandala: all of the circles connecting through one another back and forth. Now imagine these shapes take 3D and are intertwining because they are in constant movement. Instead of static circles connected, they’re actually dots of energy flowing so fast through one another it looks like circles.
This is the closest I’ve come to explaining how information is processed when I channel. The ancestors point at a circle, I tap into that energy, and some information comes through. But the client I’m working with is an entire mandala, and that’s just one piece of them.
When I work with story, the story is the mandala. The energies that influence the story, the characters, the background, move and shift in the same ways as when I channel allowing the story to evolve through multiple facets of understanding. This is me trying to explain how my brain works, and maybe not totally helpful. What matters to me is that I don’t see the two things as separate. When one energy is repaired, the mandala looks different; stronger.
The stories I tell, the teams I put together, the art I create, all use the same channel of inspiration rooted in healing. Afterall, we humans are the story of our lives; spirit filtered through experience that forges individuality. That’s art.