We Wouldn't Burn Our Grandmother. So Why Are We Burning Hers?
A 76-year-old singing, dancing, laughing great-great-grandmother asks the wellness world one honest question — and then invites you home.
by Bunny Sings Wolf Engberg | IndigenousHealing.io
✦ ✦ ✦
I want you to hold two pictures in your mind at the same time.
The first: your grandmother. Dancing. Laughing. Healthy and vibrant, in good relationship with life — honoring life by being fully alive, carrying her wisdom forward to the generations coming behind her. Whole. Useful. Beautiful.
The second: that same grandmother. Cremated. Burning before your eyes after a long, hard illness.
Which one do you choose for her?
The answer is obvious. Of course you choose the dancing grandmother. Of course you choose the laughing, growing, singing one who gets to live fully and give everything she has to the people who love her.
Now I need to ask you about another grandmother.
Her name is California White Sage. And right now, in the name of healing, we are choosing the second picture for her.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Healing Industry's Honest Mirror
We live in an age of healers. Coaches, apps, practitioners, intuitives, wellness brands, ancient modalities repackaged in modern containers — every one of them offering what they say is the key, the method, the missing piece that will finally bring you into wholeness.
I do not doubt the sincerity of most of them. I believe the longing is real. I believe the desire to help is genuine.
But I want to ask an honest question — the kind only someone who has spent a lifetime actually examining healing is qualified to ask:
If the tools we use and the way we go about healing are built on colonized viewpoints, competitive systems, and profit-driven processes — can we truly call it healing?
No matter how new age the branding, no matter how ancient the lineage claimed — if the foundation is division, delusion, and the economics of scarcity, we are not in a healing paradigm.
We are in a market.
And the California White Sage burning in your smudge bundle is the proof.
That plant is a grandmother. She has been in good relationship and resonance with her relatives for centuries — making the hills and valleys beautiful wherever she stands, giving her fragrance freely to everything that passes, growing slowly and purposefully in the one narrow place on Earth she calls home.
And today, in the name of the healing industry, she is being chopped down at the roots. Poached. Confiscated. Bundled and tagged for profit. So that the rest of us can perform the feeling of being cleansed.
What strength or wisdom can a grandmother give to us after she has been taken from her earth that way?
None. A dead plant carries dead medicine.
Life resonates life. This is not poetry — it is quantum physics.
Resonance is where healing happens. And you cannot get resonance from a product built on the destruction of relationship.
What We Have Been Told to Accept
There is another grandmother in this story. The human one.
We have been told — subtly, persistently, from every direction — that certain things are simply what aging looks like. Wheelchairs. Medications with names that take three syllables to say. Tubes. Dementia. Diabetes. Alzheimer's. Fibromyalgia. Shuffling. Forgetting.
We have been told that dis-ease, disconnection, and exhaustion are the normal human inheritance of growing older.
And here is the cruelest part of that story:
Why do we spend ourselves totally determined to look young, look beautiful, look healthy — when we have never been so unhealthy?
When our spirits are lined with division, separation, judgment, and broken promises to ourselves and to one another?
We are working harder than any generation in history to look our best on the outside.
And we are sicker on the inside — in our hearts, in our relationships, in our communities — than perhaps we have ever been.
Beauty has always been called skin deep.
But it needs to be heart deep.
Soul deep.
Living deep.
Because here is what is true and what every ancient healing tradition has always known: we are rampantly ill in our hearts. And until we recognize that fact — honestly, courageously, without blame but without flinching — we cannot change the politics, the separations, the broken systems, the wars that are rampant in our world right now.
The healing the world needs is not a new protocol.
It is not a better smudge bundle.
It is the healing of the human heart.
And from that healed heart — we can heal nations. We can heal the world.
Heal a Heart. Nations. The World. This was never just a tagline.
I am seventy-six years old.
I am a great-great-grandmother. I have fourteen great-grandchildren. I am a singer-songwriter with more than four hundred dream-gifted songs. I get up every morning and I sing, and I dance, and I work, and I create, and I laugh, and I live — and I have spent decades looking hard at every healing modality, every ancient practice, every piece of evidence about why human beings end up in their later years telling each other: we're just getting old, and that's why all this is happening to us.
I refuse to look at life that way.
Life is a gift. Not a punishment. Not a sentence.
A gift.
Our ancestors — before scarcity wars, before the severing of relationship with the land — before fleeting relationships and rampant divorce, lived well into their hundreds.
Not shuffling.
Living.
If that is possible — and the evidence says it is — then something in our current model is wrong.
Not slightly off.
Foundationally, structurally, systemically wrong.
And the California White Sage grandmother being burned in wellness studios while her sisters are poached to the root is a small but perfect mirror of that larger problem: we have accepted that it is normal to destroy the very source of what we claim to be nurturing.
Sometimes I think I am discriminated against for being a healthy seventy-six-year-old. It makes people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired uncomfortable to see that it doesn't have to be this way.
What Relationship Actually Looks Like
Our ancestors did not use plants without relationship. They did not take without asking. They did not burn what they did not understand.
When an Indigenous elder gathered sage, she went to stands her grandmother visited. She sang first. She prayed. She took only what was needed — and gave thanks for what remained. The exchange was reciprocal, careful, and alive with respect for the grandmother plant who was giving something of herself so that the human ceremony could be held.
That is relationship.
And relationship is what quantum physics now confirms is the operating system of all life: resonance, connection, the recognition that everything is in relationship with everything else, and that the health of the whole depends on the health of every part.
When we chop down a process — when we sever a relationship in the name of producing a product — we do not get healing from that product. We get the performance of healing. We get the smell of something that was once alive and fragrant and whole, now reduced to smoke.
Life has a fragrance that is sweeter when it is living.
It need not be chopped into pieces, burned, and appreciated for its dead smell. The living smell is the resonance.
And resonance — living, breathing, growing resonance — is what our ancestors were enthralled with. It is what kept them in health and in wonder and in faithful relationship with life for generations.
What are the tools we are using?
What are the belief systems we have quietly absorbed from a system that values things over resonance, products over relationship, profit over the dancing grandmother?
One Faithful in the Little Things
There is an ancient teaching that says: one faithful in the little things, marks a person who is capable of faithfulness in the great things.
The California White Sage grandmother is a little thing. Small, silver-green, fragrant, growing slowly on a California hillside that most people have never seen and never will. She is not the United Nations. She is not a treaty. She is not a sovereignty claim.
She is a small living being. A grandmother. A relative.
And how we treat her is exactly how we treat everything else. The same system that chops her down at the roots for profit has told us that our own grandmothers belong in wheelchairs. The same thinking that turns a sacred plant into a commodity has turned our own bodies into problems to be managed rather than gifts to be nurtured, nourished and celebrated.
If we cannot honor the life of a plant — a grandmother who gives freely, grows slowly, and asks only to be left in relationship — how will we ever honor the life within ourselves?
One faithful in the little things. This is where it starts. Not with the grand gesture, not with the certification or the new modality.
With the grandmother in your hand — and the honest question: do I actually understand what I am holding?
The Invitation From a Singing, Dancing, Laughing Grandmother
I am not telling you this to make you feel guilty. Guilt is not a healing modality either.
I am telling you this because you deserve to know. Because the longing that made you reach for a smudge bundle in the first place — the longing for something sacred, something ancient, something that connects you to a world bigger and wiser than the one on your screen — that longing is beautiful.
That longing is the beginning of the walk.
And Nature's 4 Steps of Healing — Balance, Harmony, Abundance, Peace — are here to walk it with you. Free. Always free. Available to every living being on this planet as long as there is breath and blood flowing through the veins.
Not because I invented them. Because Nature did. Because they are the operating system of life itself, recognized in every healing tradition that has ever turned a human being back toward wholeness.
IndigenousHealing.io exists to call us out of the fog of dis-ease and separation. To help us see — clearly, gently, without shame — the light of a living being.
The light that is still in us, still available, still waiting to be chosen.
I am seventy-six years old. I sing. I dance. I laugh. I work. I create. I have fourteen great-grandchildren and more than four hundred songs that came to me in dreams — and a vision for a gathering at Mato Tipila in 2028 that will circle the ancient Tree of Life located within the Sacred Heart of Turtle Island with 1,400 Life-honoring Resonance Walkers from around the world.
I am not telling you this to impress you. I am telling you this so you know it is possible.
So the part of you that has been quietly told that your best days are behind you has a living, breathing, laughing counter-example to hold onto.
If you want to come along — singing and dancing and laughing into your seventies and beyond — the circle is open. It has always been open.
Come in.
The walk has already begun. 🌿
✦ ✦ ✦
🌐 Join free: IndigenousHealing.io
🌿 Read: The Sage That Comes From Trees
✦ ✦ ✦
Mitakuye Oyasin — All My Relations 🌿
Bunny Sings Wolf
Indigenous Wisdom Keeper · Dream Song Carrier · Ambassador, Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation
0 Comments