Dear Fam & Peeps,
I’ve created this fundraiser to help support me while I travel to Peru and continue to do reclamation and ancestral healing work that is too complex to fully explain with words. I’ve been going back to Peru in these last few years- giving offerings to our Apus (sacred mountains) and transmuting a lot of family traumas, painful cellular memories and past lives.
The first part of my life was very heavy, difficult and volatile. It was full of chaos, violence, and a lot of near-death and life altering intensity. I required an enormous amount of ceremony and care from my Ancestors, Orishas and Guides in order to shift and transmute this energy. Ceremony is the language I know best to rewrite destiny.
I never got to speak my story and have hardly spoken about my experience because there is not a lot of space for it in the world. And there is a particular pain that comes from living this kind of silenced and invisibilized life, a weight of not feeling seen or made room for, a fear of being forgotten or erased.
I lived with this heaviness in my heart for a long time and had to learn to connect deeply to the dark love of the night. There I learned to make sanctuary in the cave space of grief and solitude, and to alchemize the dark portals of life. One of best things that ever happened to me is that my life completely fell apart and who I was came cataclysmically undone. And in that painful empty space I found an unflinching, relentless and unshakable connection to the Cosmos, our very first ancestor.
I am now entering a very different era of life and my spiritual entourage is asking me to return to my ancestral lands over and over to properly grieve and clear the residual pain. They are asking me to tell my story all over my ancestral lands. To make holes in the earth as a resting place for my grief. To reclaim my personal power, everything I’ve lived through and everything inside me that has allowed me to survive. To honor all of my spirits and the immense loving presence of the universe who has watched over me and taken care of me every step of the way.
I am also being asked to step into trust and take on projects and tasks that I do not fully understand. So it has been difficult to explain to others what exactly it is that I am doing in Peru. But I know I need to be there. And I know it is a portal to my future, as well as a portal to a powerful and empowered rewriting of a once painful personal and ancestral past.
I am asking for support to go tell my story to my ancestors, to our lands and to our temples. So that I have a place to put this pain and experience, and have it received fully and completely, free of judgment or projections. And experience being loved for the totality of who I am.
As many of you know, I’m a deeply private person and preferred to have this page than a gofundme. I also felt it was a much better way to share a more thoughtful update.
You’re welcome to donate any amount at any point in time, however works best for you.
Paypal: zhayra.palma@gmail.com
Venmo: @the_help_of_community
CashApp: $Zhayra
Zelle: 510-610-7925
Thank you for supporting me in any way. Your love and empowered intentions for me are always always felt. I will be speaking your names and sending you love from all over these lands. Much love to you all.
Logistics & Updates
I’m leaving for Peru June 22nd and will be in the north, in Anqash for roughly 7 weeks where my father’s side of the family is from. I’ll be there giving offerings to our mountains, visiting our sacred lakes and placing my bare feet on my family’s lands. And continuing to be immersed in my ancestral Quechua dialect.
In August I’ll be going back to the Sacred Valley, in the south where I have been spending a lot of time recently. And I sincerely don’t know when I will return. My best estimate is 3-7 months.
I’ve started a fair-trade textile project with a small community in Peru and Bolivia. We have collectively opened a small storefront in the town of Ollantaytambo (in the Sacred Valley), where we sell textiles from local weavers, and teach about textiles that are considered endangered. Sadly, many people have stopped weaving and a lot of textile traditions have completely vanished.
The introduction of Poverty has had a tremendous consequence and our dream is to impact local culture and teach visitors to value the rich meaning and history of textiles, as well as create consciousness around equitable commerce and the historical context of exploitation in wanting to buy “cheap” goods in Peru.
I will also be finishing out my decades-long back to back Pluto transits. Which officially clears January 5th, 2025. If you think of me during this time, please feel free to send me prayers, healing thoughts, tears and laughter. I will be needing them.
My personal medicine has always been around the invisible and the obscure, the dark night and dark feminine, the stigmatized, the things we’d rather not speak, and the paradox of belonging. And through an inevitable and cosmic process of repeatedly touching deep heartbreak, I eventually emerged with a profound compassion and reverence for our most shamed and fearful places, as well as the prosperity found in our own sacred underworlds.