Bio

Seraphina Capranos is a clinical herbalist, homeopath, and initiated priestess with a practice spanning across two decades. Her journey on to the path of healing was inspired by her mother, who was a healer herself. Like many cast onto the path of healing and spiritual training, it was pain and suffering that led her into the forest to seek the answers to life’s big questions. First, it was an injury that left her bed-ridden with debilitating pain as a teenager, and just a few years later, the intractable disease then sudden tragic death of her father that set her on a spiritual quest at such a young age. At the age of 14, Seraphina began learning alchemical practices from shamanic practitioners she met by accident. From the age of 16 until age 18 she apprenticed with a medical intuitive, and then embarked on the priestess path in 1998, at the age 19. She spent ten years in an Toltec apprenticeship, which radically shifted her perceptional world. She has held countless circles, classes, rituals and ceremonies, her greatest teachers still to this day are the students and patients whom she is grateful to work with. She is continually in awe of the strength of the human spirit.  As well as being a deeply engaging teacher and speaker, she has a clinical practice on Salt Spring Island. Her unique blend of gifts straddle the vast worlds of plant medicine, homeopathy, and ritual and ceremonial magic. She is a sought after international teacher and a co-founder of The Center for Sacred Arts. 

Show Notes

This was such a special conversation where I got to sit in a seat of reverence for my beloved partner in the Center for Sacred Arts and truly bathe in her deep understanding and mastery of ritual. In this episode Seraphina Capranos explains what a ritual is, the importance of ritual, the role of a ritualist and how in many cultures this sacred pause has become harder to find. 

‘A ritualist is somebody who holds space and as a guide for other people to enter into the conversation of what is sacred. And that's really what I see this role is as a guide’

She takes the time to detail what a ritual is

‘a ritual is entering the conversation of all things, and listening’

‘it's a sequence of actions designed to awaken a powerful emotional or psychological response’

Seraphina shares how she came to this calling, and how her formative years informed and almost pushed her in this direction

I have my family to thank because my grandfather, my mom's father, he could always sense and feel things in the, you could say the other world, maybe he had a touch of clairvoyance. So I was raised in a culture and my family were feeling the edges of other realms was not unusual. And I'd say it was when I was a teenager, probably around 14, maybe maybe a little younger, but around the age of 14, where I just began to feel things and sense things like another being in the room, or I knew if the phone would ring before it did, and I just began began to be more open and more aware to the realm of what you might call the non ordinary.

One of my absolutely favorite parts of the interview is when Seraphina shares the benefits and importance of ritual in our modern day lives, and how the deficit of ritual may be affecting our souls

Ritual allows the soul to catch up. And it allows a soul to make sense of things that sometimes we just can't make sense of, in our normal mental processes of the modern world.

It's a way in which we all feel like we can belong.

Sacred pauses are a moment to remember that we are part of something larger.

I feel passionate that it's this break in our culture that contributes to so much pain and suffering, both physiologically but also psychologically and emotionally, that we don't get to live in a sacred pause and have our culture acknowledge that.

Seraphina skillfully relates the components of ritual to common modern day moments most of us have experienced, a wedding, graduation or funeral, where we’ve likely experienced heightened emotions. She guides us to further understand why that may be. She goes into the importance of changing our ever present mental processes and dipping into a playful child like state.

It allows the mental processes to quiet and it brings us into what I believe Starhawk calls the child mind the imaginal realm. So again, if we think about a graduation, a wedding, a any kind of rite of baby shower, there's usually a moment built in, where there's this moment of ecstasy where we get to be kids again, we get to laugh or dance or, or sing and come into that ecstatic way of being, meaning joyous because that is part of our human nature.

Seraphina reviews what cosmology is, and how cultural rituals help people make sense of how we fit into the sacred order of all things.

What every culture around the world has is their own cosmology. And a cosmology is an understanding of how the world works,  of the sacred order of things, of the invisible realm of ancestors, and the dead, and the stars and the moon in a cycle and how we fit in all of it, and how we are nature, not just connected to nature.

Towards the end of this interview, you are in for a treat. Seraphina gives us a taste of what it is like to participate in a ritual, a moment to see how our nervous systems attune and stop to listen, and a gift of a sacred pause.

Thank you for this Seraphina, it is a gift.

Luv
Karley 

Socials & Offerings:

For more seasonal rituals, join our Community at www.centerforsacredarts.com 

Follow Seraphina on her website or social media at seraphinacapranos.com & https://www.instagram.com/seraphina.capranos/

Charity of choice: Raven Trust https://raventrust.com/

Charity of choice:
Raven Trust https://raventrust.com/