I’m Kim McLaughlin, a shamanic practitioner offering shamanic healing treatments and trauma-informed counselling. I practice mostly in Canada and Scotland, and my clients come from all four corners of the globe.
My goal is to help others reduce stress and anxiety and feel more peaceful and grounded in their lives, but it’s taken me 20 years to get there! I’m writing this because I know others are interested (especially in the shamanism stuff) and always want to know how I “got into it”.
My combination of counselling and shamanism also tends to raise a brow in Ayrshire. In Toronto where I’m from, it’s a common combination, but here in Scotland, things are more traditional. Counselling is only now starting to become mainstream (starting being the operative word here) and shamanism barely registers a blip on the mainstream consciousness.
But things are changing -even in rural Ayrshire – and I’m happy to share how I tumbled into this world in case it inpsires you – dear reader – to move forward in your own journey.
How I found my shamanic teachers
I grew up in Ontario, Canada. My mother was born in North Ayrshire and immigrated in the late 1960s, and my father is Acadian from New Brunswick. I spent much time in Scotland growing up and have always been inspired by my people, our native language, our history and our traditional spiritual ways. I love to tell people how I’m from this long line of strong women on both side, but then again, aren’t we all?
I have always dreamt, and I have always had spiritual awareness, but that was something my family didn’t talk about. Ever. My mother was spiritual too, but it frightened her, and so became a taboo topic. But that didn’t stop my dreams or my experiences.
I was thrown into healing journey back in the early 2000s when I was sick for 12 months and couldn’t work or look after my family. At the time, I was 28 and had been working in politics as a staffer and was living and raising my son in my first apartment in downtown Toronto.
Whatever this illness was, it threw off my entire career and my life. I remember there being days I couldn’t take my son to school, and although I had my GP, my infectious disease specialist, my rheumatologist, and my Traditional Chinese Doctor all talking to each other about me, not one of them could explain what had actually happened to me.
But during and after that year, everything changed. As I got healthy again, I saw things differently. I felt that much of my illness was detoxing the terrible work environments I had endured and also some of the unreasonably high expectations I had put on myself.
During that time, my traditional Chinese doctor, Doctor Sayeeda, was amazingly supportive and would explain so much of how she operated to me. While the concepts behind TCM are different than what I believed at that time, having a young professional talk to me about energy moving in our bodies and that mind-body connection validated what I had always felt but always suppressed. Her teaching left an indelible mark on my my… gosh, everything – my awareness, my spirituality my very soul!
So after that illness, and still with Sayeeda’s support and friendship, I choose a different path, one that would see me embrace and empower my spiritual nature and land me in a supportive corporate job (I’m looking at you, Korn/Ferry!) and a supportive spiritual community.
A few years later, I was adopted into Toronto’s First Nations community through Anishnawbe Health Toronto (AHT.) The whole experience was connected to my son, first and foremost, and my dreams – the vehicle that brought us there.
The elders explained it to me that, for my Indigenous son to never question the ‘white’ side of him, he needed to witness my full inclusion in The Community. They also explained that traditionally, the teachings should pass through the parent to the child, so the responsibility was on me to model them, and they would help me.
Looking back, I’m glad I was young at the time, as it made me more open to what I perceived as a massive plot shift and an intimidating duty to a community I knew little about. And in retrospect, so too were the elders and oskhabewis who all came together to make this happen. We were all uncommonly open-minded about it, and while we were all excited about the prospect of coming together to teach a young one, it was done in this demure way that didn’t overwhelm my son (or me), and gave me the space and autonomy I needed – free of pressure – to carve out this new part of my family’s life, and this new part of my own identity.
It was an incredible thing to be this single mum in downtown Toronto, worrying about my son’s lack of male rolemodels, and suddenly for an entire community to show up, saying “Don’t worry, Kim, we’ve got him. It’s what we do. And by the way, we’ve got you, too.”
The AHT community taught me many things over a seven-year period, but the most important teaching was that we all carry spiritual gifts that are for the healing of our communities. It’s not special per se, it’s normal. This community also taught me that no one culture or spiritual way is more ‘authentic’ than another. Every culture has its spiritual traditions and they are all sacred.
The Creator gave spirituality to all people equally, so no matter where you come from or how broken your spiritual traditions may be (this is a big thing in Scotland), you are as spiritually ‘powerful’ and sacred as the next person, and those traditions, although harder to recover, are just as powerful.
These teachings challenged and transformed me, and so too did my relationships with others during that time including my family, colleagues and friends. The most important relationship that came out of it was, without a doubt, my relationship with the land. I had always had it, but now I had a language I could use to honour it. I also understood the need to honour my own gifts by sharing them with my community in a good way, or I will lose them. This teaching is the reason I started CedarLight Healing in 2016.
I suppose it should be no surprise that, throughout my years at AHT, when I was being taught and participating in that culture, I was simultaneously inspired to find out about spirituality from my own background.
It was so strange; I came to this journey through dreams, and during this time, when I dreamt, the symbolism was this mix of Indigenous, which made sense as that’s what I was surrounded by at the time, but also Celtic cultural refrerences. I would dream of my aunties and my ancestors, strange (at the time!) spirits dressed as golden birds, and powerful land goddesses who brought fertility to my family. I was having big dreams alright, and I would take them to the medicine people who, at times, would be like, ‘this is from your culture, you need to speak to someone from your own culture to find out’, but really, who could I talk to about that?
This ushered in the next phase of my journey. Now, instead of the teachers coming to me/discovering me, it was up to me to discover my teachers and present myself to them. And this was tough, because in Indigenous culture, you don’t do that! For years, I was stuck in a maze of protocols, traditions and judgment (a bit of external judgment perhaps, but mostly my judging myself).
Shamanism – a new chapter
In this phase of my journey, I studied with the late Tira Brandon Evans who taught me the stories of the Celtic-Gaels, stories that hold the secrets of our ancient traditions and knowledge. I was drawn to Tira’s bardic style of training because the steeping of teachings in lore was familiar to me from my time in the Indigenous community.
It was a slow but very deep way of unfolding knowledge over time that you just don’t see in the main-stream world anymore. Now it’s all “Learn shamanism in a weekend with Udemy!” But Tira was old-school.
She died a number of years ago, and unfortunately her impressive body of writing and teachings have never been shared. I tried to share them with permission of her estate in the years following her death, but grief is a terrible thing, and I think it’s fair to say that her family were not comfortable with seeing her work in the mainstream like that. But I was not her only student, and I have hope that one day, people will have access to Tira Brandon-Evan’s many books, courses and spiritual teachings.
I feel like Tira was a bridge for me. Her supportive no-nonsense style was similar to the elders’ style at AHT, and it helped me feel confident exploring spirituality outside of the Indigenous world. She opened me up to a way of thinking and being that is unequivocally “Celtic”. This was like medicine for my soul. I hardly knew the woman, but I miss her direction and the inspiration she provided.
After Tira, I studied under Daniel Leonard, who himself studied under Sandra Ingerman, and is a well-established shamanic practitioner in Canada. Daniel taught me how to actively use my shamanic healing gifts to empower others, at times waiving tuition to ensure I could participate and giving me access to an entire community of spiritual healers who were powerful, honest, hilarious and supportive. I’ve had many teachers, but Daniel is the person I consider my life-long teacher in that proper traditional way. He’s the one I call when I need spiritual support or guidance, and he’s the one who always picks up the phone. He’s the safest man I’ve ever met.
Moving to Scotland – what the hell did I do?
In the summer of 2020, I moved to my family’s hometown in North Ayrshire, Scotland. My mum had died in 2016, and the following year I visited my cousins for Christmas. On the winter solstice of 2017, I stood in the middle of the stone circles at Machrie Moor on the Isle of Arran and the spirits spoke to me. “Move here, ” they said. “Bring the people back to us. In turn, we will support you.”
It took a few years to make the move. One year to make sure there was nothing holding me to Canada, a second year to get my citizenship and another year again to save money and go through half a pandemic.
By the time I arrived in my seasdie flat down in Irvine Harbour, I was ready to Heal People. Sure, I was traumatised by the move, and sure I was in a little bit of culture shock, but I was used to adversity and quite sure that, as long as I worked hard, I could make it happen. I could make anything happen.
This is the part of the article where you imagine a tumble weed rolling down my street, cause no matter what I did, I could not make it happen. And this time, I didn’t have the resilience to see it through. I was too tired from the move, too tired from Toronto, too tired from the pandemic, just …tired. The Spirits were looking me square in the face and saying: REST. So I did. I didn’t not see clients for years; my freelance marketing work kept me going.
A new practice, quietly taking root
During that time of rest, I got an allotment, my medicine garden. I don’t suppose that actually sounds like rest, but it was, spiritually. For the first time in many years, I focused more on the phsycial world than my inner world, and I focused on myself rather than clients.
People came out of the woodwork to help. My engineer allotment neighbour helped me clear the plot, build paths, compost containers and raised boxes. Today I grow sweetgrass, eastern white cedar, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, mullein, pumpkins and tobacco. And of course, I grow potatoes, just to keep it respectable. This is Ayrshire, after all.
I also got a pair of whippets and together we roam the forests, hills and beaches. And I got a job! A steady role with a good company that lets me be creative and supports my life and hobbies, and this job empowered me to buy a cottage flat with the tallest red cedar you’ve ever seen in the back garden. CedarLight indeed.
And slowly, throughout those years, as I cultivated the medicines, walked the same streets that generations of women in my family walked, hiked the same paths and swam in the same sea, slowly, my mind quieted, and I began to ground.
I began again. But this time, differently. With less fanfare but more experience. Last year I started doing community ceremonies here in Ayrshire, and I do see the odd client, although one to one healing work is done on a case by case basis.
My corporate job provides outlets where I can offer coaching (albeit it in their approach – but it’s good approach) and I’m a few years deep into studies towards a counselling accreditation in trauma-based counselling that will go well with Shamanism, and feel a bit more familiar to the people here.
My community shamanism work tends to low-cost if not free, and I find it rewarding and surprisingly energising. Daniel still encourages me to take on teaching again, and I will eventually, but for now, as I juggle work, studies and dogs – plus the occassional suggestion of a social life – this pace works for me.
Strangey, between the community crcles and the medicines I grow and gift to other practitioners who are doing a lot of one to one work, I’m fullfilling the true purpose of shamanism; to bring healing to our communities. It all feels very Right.
