The Day I Grew Jaguar Teeth
On anger, ancestry, sovereignty and the wisdom of our wilderness
I mean it.
I grew Jaguar teeth.
Bleary-eyed, I opened my two eyes to take a little look around my bedroom. My eyes hadn't quite adjusted to the light and I knew I was in for another day of hard work, shamanising and powering up.
My mouth tasted of blood.
Blood? I thought. Did I cut my gums?
I sat bolt upright in bed as my dreamtime slowly descended back into my conscious awareness. As it did, I ran my tongue across the top row of my teeth and noticed just how sharp they had become. So much so that I jumped out of bed to check what they looked like in the mirror.
They felt as though they had been sharpened into the shape of a big cat's teeth.
And that taste of blood? Well, there was no blood. No cuts.
But a word trundled around my heart as a gentle dreaming anchor.
ANCESTRY.
The word haunted me for some time as I hopped back into bed, still a little concerned with the transforming shape of my newly found Jaguar teeth.
And why Jaguar?
Well, maybe I should start this story a little earlier…
Here I am, early in my days of learning about shamanism and the deep roots of its practice. Jaguar was the very first 'public' Spirit ally I connected with through a very moving soul retrieval ceremony I had performed for a clan member of mine. I say public because you will hear the common utterings about some helping Spirits remaining quite anonymous to anyone other than the shaman or practitioner working with them. And then there are others, like my dear friend, Grandmother Jaguar.
She made no big song and dance about hiding her presence, and one of her earliest teachings was not to fear that which simply cannot harm us. The light of our soul shines brighter than our solar sun, and for all the time we remember this simple but profound truth, the threads of someone else's negative thoughts or conscious attempts to cause harm simply burn in the great holy fires of the heart.
This, at least, is how I have come to understand and experience her medicine.
And so I have never, to this day, hidden Grandmother Jaguar, who so lovingly showed up in my world not only to support me, but also the clients she and I have subsequently worked with. Without her, I would not have embodied half the soul lessons I have walked through.
As the years passed by and my long and challenging shamanic training deepened, so too did my relationship with Grandmother Jaguar.
Which leads me back to that fateful morning when my teeth became sharpened to the point where I genuinely felt the tips of them shape-shift. This phenomenon continued for the entire day and, as anyone would, I spent most of it checking with my tongue to see if they had gone back to normal!
I'm a human being, not a big cat, I thought!
And I certainly know I have not lost my marbles!
In my experience of shamanism, shape-shifting is something I have come to know through both practice and experience. The question that has always caught my attention, though, is the wonder of what our true forms are beyond these moments of shape-shifting in the name of healing for ourselves or another.
Shape-shifting, through my eyes, is a way of expanding our awareness of current life perceptions of reality, of stretching our consciousness far beyond the edges we could possibly imagine. For me, the merging and deepening of my relationships with key and loving ancestors and allies has provided my heart, and my clients, with the medicine needed to take the next step upon the healing path.
My experience of shamanism has always been built upon the relationships we hold with the Spirits. We are the ones who must work wisely with the Spirits who are here for the harmony and light of this world, rather than those who intend to cause separation and harm.
This pathway of shamanism that I had knowingly stepped upon has continued to show me that miracles do indeed happen.
Now, back to those teeth.
This occurred during one of my shamanic practitioner training weeks, where a rather in-depth initiation was taking place.
It touched upon the light and dark reflections we all hold within us, the ones that occupy our blind spots and the ones we parade around with egoic bells on as well as the reflections of our true-selves, a great seership of our luminous souls.
During these days of dancing with shadow and light, something about those days had really disturbed my psyche and my soul.
Something within me had to shift and be released.
Something needed to be let go of, explored, listened to.
On this particular week, I met my old friend, anger.
Now, anger and I hadn't had much of a relationship up until this point. Those who know me will attest to the calm demeanour I hold and the calming presence I tend to bring, but rarely will you see anger pour forth from me.
I have had my reasons for this, which are personal and deep, and as I have shared in a previous blog, no therapist or healer is perfect.
We are all simply walking each other home and learning the best we can along the way.
After a series of long, hard days of training that had truly stretched me to my core and beyond, I finally reached a very uncomfortable day where I could take no more.
I was ready to burst!
I was ready to bite someone's head off.
Thankfully not literally, with the newly found teeth I would discover the following day!
So, for the first time in all my years of never pushing against authority, I said no to my teacher, my guide, the shaman.
I said no to what he was asking me to do.
The fires in my gut rose and a new sensation started to set sail within me.
I came to understand this sensation as power. Not one that wanted to cause harm, but one potent enough to draw a boundary around what I felt was my limit.
Of course, my potent no needed to be backed up with my reasons. And at the point where part of me thought I might meet the end of the world, which much of my childhood had taught me to expect if I ever considered expressing my true feelings or needs, instead I was met with compassionate, kind eyes that said:
Do what you need to, Roberta.
He also gently reminded me that I am not the dark mirror that I am currently gazing into and placed before me the light of what I AM.
And so I did what I needed to.
I left the initiation and walked to the ocean.
I found myself screaming into the horizon, the ocean open in front of me and the sun beaming down.
I had no story as to what might be coming through me or why, but I trusted that I had been led to the water and that the Spirits of the water were helping me.
After I had exhausted my lungs of the pain that I knew in my bones was deeply ancestral, I slumped onto the rounded rocks covered in the most brilliant seaweed and wept my heart out.
The vision that came to me was of my womb weeping, pouring its sweet womb-tears into the arms of Mother Ocean, where one droplet became One with all.
This wasn't an 'offloading' into an already overloaded body of water that is 'dealing with enough' (more on this in another blog), but rather a welcoming home of one of her children.
It was a wild recognition of the power of emotion, of our old friend Anger who needed to have her say, to be released from the waters that were swimming within my womb.
I needed healing.
And I needed it not to come from any authority source. No shaman, no medicine man or woman, nor a clan member.
I needed nature at her best to hold me in her arms and show me that the medicine lives right here in the living world that surrounds us.
I wept until my tears ran dry, and then I finally began to notice the sun softening and warming my skin, the quiet but constant lapping of the waves in front of me.
And through all of this, not a single soul walked by me. No one interrupted my rather loud explosion of humanness upon these Cornish waters. Just occasionally, a great burst of distant cackling from the local seagulls would crescendo and then fall into silence once again, like a group of old women in fits of laughter over something only they understood.
No, it was just me and her.
The Great Mother Ocean.
Although I cannot share the depths of my personal story of ancestral healing so publicly, I can share that the energetic cleansing of my womb gave way to a greater power that felt wholly mine, born from the Spirit in which I AM.
What it took was courage to be so raw in the face of something terrifying.
And for me, it was our old friend anger.
Anger frightened me until I understood her real name.
Anger was, in this case, an unheard story. A suppressed rage that had been covered from sight, and by deaf ears her pain had never been heard.
How much compassion arose within me that day. Within my own understanding of ancestral healing, I felt that every step I took upon my healing journey reached far beyond me too. In this case specifically, I felt the presence of ancestors who were long gone, and yet were still reaching for the threads of their names to be re-membered once again.
And indeed, my own true name, the true shape of ‘me’, was in need of being re-membered too.
In this case it was the re-membering that I belong to nature, and that nature lives within me. I am a daughter of the sea and my womb is a reflection of the Great Spirit that quite anonymously animates all of this.
This mystery is my guide for life.
I am not separate from it.
I sang as a great offering to the sea, and it seemed to me that it was not just me singing, but a holy duet emerging from my heart and the sounds of the ocean.
I felt brand new.
But what about the teeth, I hear you say!
Yes, yes. I'm getting to that.
I returned to our clan thinking that, knowing the trials I had just faced, the shaman might simply let me sit the next ceremony out.
Well, that was a great and naïve thought to have.
For when a healing such as this had come about, I was apparently in my prime for diving straight back into the work, turning up the volume of its challenge tenfold.
The shaman invited me into one of the most challenging Spirit merges I had ever experienced.
I couldn't fathom how I was going to manage, let alone be 'enough' for my clan brothers and sisters after releasing such a deep and powerful healing thread of my own path. I felt as though I was still recovering, and yet the position the shaman had invited me to step into became the integration medicine I needed to embody the next step.
I fulfilled that healing, and to date I believe it has been one of the most powerful spiritual merges I have experienced, along with some of the most profound information that has ever flowed through me from this particular Spirit guide.
What is interesting to add here is that the Spirit was male and represented many of the things that 'frightened' the woman I believed myself to be (or indeed not to be!).
It wasn't that the Spirit was bad. Far from it.
He embodied a strong knowing of who he was and what he was not. Anger was nowhere to be found, and in its place was a strong and authentic healer who knew when to draw the line and how to do so with the utmost respect, love and compassion for the ears that were listening.
He delivered harsh truths with the power of the divine masculine but with the heart of the divine feminine.
I managed to channel all of this into a personally transformative experience because, on this occasion, I learnt when I needed to say no, as I had when I requested to leave the initiation, and at what point it was in my best interest to say yes to the challenge I had been presented with.
Looking back now, something else catches my attention.
The teeth did not arrive while I was screaming at the ocean.
They came after.
After anger had spoken. After the boundary had been drawn. After I had said no. After I had experienced a different kind of power through a Spirit who did not need anger to know where his boundaries lay.
Perhaps anger had delivered the message.
Perhaps I was now being shown that I did not need to remain angry in order to remain a woman with Power...
That night I went to bed with my mind blown by the experience I had had.
I was curious about the shape of who I thought I was and the potential of what I had within me, if only I had the courage to continue breaking down the walls of my perceptions of who I am and what my capabilities are.
And, more to the point within shamanism, who I am allying with as I continue to engage with the healing path of the shaman for everyone's highest good.
I drifted into my dreamtime and, unsurprisingly, a further initiation occurred.
But this time it was at the bottom of the ocean with what appeared to me in the dream as a lineage of Jaguar shamans.
Now, you do not need to believe me, nor do I need to convince you of the reality of my dreams. In my life, dreamtime is as real as the day-dream, and what is more important is what we do with such experiences and how we engage with the information presented to us from the Spirits.
I'd prefer to keep the sanctity of that experience private, but the initiation was one where I thought I might not return to life as I knew it. Maybe I might not even return at all.
It felt primal.
The lineage I was faced with seemed to know the healing I had experienced, and they also understood that I was ready for the next stage in my personal development. One that meant making further peace with my more primal and wild nature. Making peace with all the things I had labelled as 'bad' or 'frightening' or 'evil', and considering what other purpose these experiences might have for me.
On this day it was mainly the Spirit of Anger who had much to teach me. And through the doorway of releasing this pain, I was given the opportunity to quite literally grow my own Jaguar teeth.
ANCESTRY
It would be some time before that one word returned to me with another layer of meaning.
ANCESTRY.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that I have found myself returning to this story now.
I have recently finished another Jaguar Woman painting, and as she slowly emerged through the layers of paint, so too did these memories begin asking to be written.
And with them came that word again.
ANCESTRY.
It would be some time before that one word revealed another layer of meaning to me.
I am half Guyanese and half British with a good helping of Welsh in there.
I have never lived upon Guyanese soil, and I make no claim to an Indigenous Guyanese lineage through this experience. Nor do I claim that because I dreamed of a lineage of Jaguar shamans, my ancestors must therefore have been Jaguar shamans.
A dream is not a genealogy, but they speak to a deeper current that runs within us. One that our ancestors paid close attention to. But the word ancestry had been so clear that eventually I became curious. I went looking for Jaguar in the land from which half of my ancestry comes. What I discovered moved me deeply.
Jaguar is the national animal of Guyana and appears twice upon Guyana's Coat of Arms, which was adopted at the time of independence in 1966.
One Jaguar holds a pickaxe representing labour. The other holds sugar cane and rice representing agriculture. Between them sits the shield of the nation. There is no official declaration that these Jaguars represent freedom or liberation, and I do not wish to rewrite history to make it fit my spiritual experience. But I could not help noticing the poetry of it.
My own encounter with Jaguar had come at a moment when I was learning something fundamental about sovereignty.
I was learning that I could say no.
That I could draw a boundary around what was sacred within me.
That I could possess power without using it to harm.
And here stood Jaguar beside the shield of the country from which half my ancestry came, upon an emblem adopted as that country stepped out of British colonial rule and into independence.
Perhaps that resonance is made even more curious by the fact that I am both Guyanese and British. I carry both histories within my blood. For me, this is not about choosing one and rejecting the other. Nor is my personal experience comparable to the political and historical reality of a nation's struggle for independence.
But the word sovereignty began to mean something new to me.
Perhaps sovereignty, in its most personal sense, is the re-membering that the territory of ourselves is ours to inhabit.
Our bodies. Our boundaries.
Our yes. Our no.
Our lives. And then I looked further back.
This was where things became even more interesting. Among the Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana, anthropological research has documented a cosmology in which Jaguar is deeply connected with shamanism.
Anthropologist Lewis Daly describes Jaguars, kaikusi, as archetypal shamanic beings capable of moving between different levels of the cosmos. Human shamans, pia'san, are described as communicating with and transforming into Jaguars.
I remember sitting deeply with this information. My dream had involved an initiation with what appeared to me as Jaguar shamans. I had woken feeling as though part of my human body had transformed into that of a Jaguar.
And I had heard one word.
Ancestry.
I want to be careful here. This does not tell me what my dream was. It does not tell me that I belong to the Makushi people. It does not tell me that my ancestors were Jaguar shamans. And an experience arising from my own spiritual practice does not give me ownership of an Indigenous tradition that is not mine to claim.
But it did leave me with a beautiful question…
How often do the symbols that arise from the mysterious places within us have roots that reach further than we consciously know?
Perhaps sometimes we discover those roots in our ancestry. Sometimes the psyche speaks through symbols it has gathered throughout a lifetime. Perhaps Spirit has another explanation entirely.
I don't know.
And I have become increasingly comfortable with the mystery of not knowing.
What I do know is that Jaguar belongs to the living ecology of Guyana.
Jaguar lives within the cosmologies of some of its Indigenous peoples. Jaguar stands upon the Coat of Arms of independent Guyana.
And somehow Jaguar had also found her way into my spiritual life.
The Jaguar Skin
There was another story I encountered during my research that stayed with me.
Anthropologist Tarryl Janik worked with Patamona people in Paramakatoi, Guyana, exploring cultural stories and representations of Jaguar.
One of the stories documented through this work concerned a yamata, a Jaguar-skin coat.
In the story, a man discovers the coat and, by putting it on, becomes a Jaguar. In this form he is able to hunt successfully and bring food home to his family. He can put the Jaguar skin on and he can take it off again.
Until one day something changes. While in Jaguar form he kills another fellow hunter.
He tries to remove the Jaguar coat, but this time he cannot.
He remains a Jaguar.
This is a Patamona story belonging to a cultural tradition that is not mine, and I do not wish to impose my own interpretation upon it.
But reading it caused me to reflect upon my own experience. Perhaps integration is not about solely becoming our wilderness, but rather it is about developing a relationship with it.
Maybe there is wisdom in knowing that we have teeth without needing to spend our lives baring them to the world.
And this brought me all the way back to that morning in bed. Back to my tongue tracing those impossibly sharp teeth. Back to Grandmother Jaguar.
The Jaguar teeth were a great gift of power from my allies.
Not to harm another. No.
Please do not misunderstand their symbolism.
These teeth were the power of the Jaguar's survival. They were her medicine.
Just because a big cat has sharp teeth, does that mean she must use them on every creature she encounters? No.
But possessing power that is internally yours gives you a responsibility. The personal responsibility to discern when and when not to use such power.
And maybe that was what Jaguar had been trying to show me all along.
For much of my life, anger had frightened me. Somewhere along the way I had learnt that the safest way to be was not to bare my teeth at all.
But having teeth does not mean we must bite.
Having anger does not mean we must or will cause harm.
And saying no does not mean we have ceased to be loving.
The real power lies somewhere within that discernment.
Knowing that the teeth are there, that they belong to you, that you have the capacity to protect what is sacred within you, to draw a boundary when one is needed, and also knowing when those same teeth can remain quietly resting inside your mouth.
I feel that this was the deeper meaning of sovereignty that Jaguar had been teaching me.
Not power over another or domination, but the freedom to inhabit myself fully enough that my yes is mine and my no is mine too.
I had spent so much of my life believing that having teeth meant I would bite.
Perhaps Grandmother Jaguar was teaching me that I was indeed allowed to have teeth at all.
Shop Artist Signed Prints of Grandmother Jaguar by Roberta Orpwood
Sources & further exploration
For those wishing to explore some of the cultural and historical threads woven through this story:
Lewis Daly
The Roar of the Tapir Tiger: Cosmos and Conservation in Human-Jaguar Engagements in Amazonian Guyana
Research exploring Makushi relationships with Jaguar, including shamanism and transformation.
Tarryl Janik
Research with Patamona people in Paramakatoi, Guyana, including the yamata, or Jaguar-skin coat, shared within this story.
Guyana's Coat of Arms
Official Guyanese sources on the history and symbolism of the national Coat of Arms adopted at independence in 1966.
These sources helped me explore the cultural and historical threads that emerged from my own experience. They are shared here for further exploration rather than as explanations for the mystery itself.
Banner photograph: Jaguar photographed by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash