What holds the warrior 🔥🤲🏽🌱

I’ve been quiet these past few weeks as I recovered from being under the weather—grateful now to feel restored. While my body was in recovery mode, I found myself reflecting on something deeper: what it really means to walk the warrior path when you’re sick, injured, or forced to take a break.

It’s easy to associate the warrior archetype with movement, action, and vitality—the kind of visible energy we often equate with progress or power. But this pause reminded me that warriors aren’t forged by the fight alone—they’re shaped by what holds them.

In many Indigenous and precolonial cultures, warriors weren’t trained in isolation or handed weapons without context. They were shaped in relationship with the land. Mother Earth was their first teacher—not just a symbol, but a living curriculum.Warriors learned to read the signs of the tides, move like the animals, feel the rhythm of seasons. Their training was shaped not just by action, but by listening, waiting, and honoring cycles.

They were also guided by elders—often women. Healers. Babaylans. In many precolonial Philippine communities, babaylans were spiritual leaders, community healers, and mediators between the human and spirit worlds. They held deep knowledge of herbal medicine, ritual, and the unseen forces that shaped communal life. These spiritual protectors didn’t just nurture warriors—they passed on embodied codes: how to protect without hardening, how to grieve without collapsing, how to walk with fear without letting it define you. They prepared warriors for the battles within—the ones no one else could see.

Not all of us had that kind of guidance growing up. For many, it wasn’t something passed down—disconnection, assimilation, or loss interrupted that transmission. Some of us have had to find these codes ourselves—or are still learning them. And yet, I believe they live in us, woven into how we move through stress, how we breathe, how we come back to ourselves—and how we let support in.

Because healing isn’t something we force. It’s something our bodies already know how to do. Our systems—body, psyche, spirit—are always orienting toward wholeness. It’s part of the same deep intelligence that mends a wound or carries us through grief. And sometimes, that remembering doesn’t come through thought—it comes through sensation, stillness, being held.

For those of us in the diaspora, disconnected from the ancestral lands that once shaped our people, this reconnection can feel like an ache we don’t always have words for. But when we mother ourselves—or tap into the mothering archetype by caring for others—we’re also repairing a bond that was severed between us and Mother Nature. We begin to remember how to belong again—not just to land, but to life.

This matters, because warriors disconnected from the Earth—from the living world that holds and shapes them—can become soldiers for empire. But when they’re in relationship with something greater—land, ancestors, the healer within—their path shifts. They begin to protect life, not power. Warriors were never meant to stand alone. Their strength is shaped by what they’re rooted in. And when they remember what holds them, they remember what they’re here to protect.

Across the many cultures of the Philippines, warriors and shamans were known by different names—mandirigma, babaylan, and more. These roles were specific, sacred, and deeply respected. Babaylans are real people—Indigenous spiritual leaders chosen by their communities and by spirit. We honor them without claiming that title, and we’re mindful not to romanticize roles that carry ongoing struggle, responsibility, and complexity.

But the energies they embody—the warrior and the healer—were always in relationship with Mother Nature. Both were held by her. And those energies live within all of us. Especially in the diaspora, where so much has been interrupted or erased, these archetypes are rising again—not to replicate the past, but to help us live more fully now.When braided together, they return us to wholeness—and remind us what we’re truly here to protect.

This past week reminded me that softening isn’t weakness—it’s what makes the warrior sustainable. Letting ourselves be held is part of the practice. It’s what gives our spirit a place to land, to heal, to remember what it’s fighting for.

So wherever you are in your rhythm right now—fired up, resting, or somewhere in between—may you remember this:

The warrior and the healer are not opposites. They belong to one another. And that’s the kind of warrior we’re remembering how to be.