Ceremony, kinship, and the tending of the sacred — founded and stewarded by Adi Marie.
Tended without interruption since 2010 · Southern California · Serving worldwide
The Animist Apothecary exists to restore right relationship between people and the living world — through ceremony, counsel, kinship, and the tending of the sacred. We accompany those who are being called into their gifts, and we steward the old ways with reverence, safety, and sacred reciprocity — so that what is received in the otherworlds returns as goodness in this one.
The Animist Apothecary rests on an understanding older than any of its offerings — older than the hands that tend it. The Earth is alive and sovereign. The cosmos and the stars, the plants and the animals, the waters, stones, mountains, winds and fire, the ancestors and the elemental forces — all carry personhood, agency, and sacredness. We do not treat the world as a resource. We know it as a relative.
From that knowing, everything else follows. The spiritual life is fundamentally relational — a continuous, ceremonial direct-relationship with the living forces of creation, in which communion is real, mutual, and reciprocal. Ceremony is how that relationship is made tangible. Not metaphor. Practice.
We live in a season of severance — raised inside a story in which the Earth is inert, the dead are gone, and the sacred lives somewhere far away. The loneliness, the unspent grief, the unraveling of the living world: these are not separate problems. They are the symptoms of broken relationship.
And yet — everywhere, the gifts are waking. Sensitivity that will not be numbed. Dreams that arrive with instructions. A pull toward the unseen that no amount of productivity can silence. More people than at any time in living memory are being called — and they are waking inside a culture that has forgotten what they are for, without the villages, the elders, and the ceremonies that once received them.
‘The earth is asking for healers. The times are asking for those willing to go into the underworld and come back with something real. This work is my answer to that call — and it is an honor to walk that path alongside those who are ready.’ — Adi Marie
The Apothecary exists for this exact moment: to restore the old relationships, and to accompany those being called into their gifts. We hold, with our whole hearts, the premise of an entheogenically awakened society — so that what is received in the otherworlds returns as goodness in this one, shaping how we live and play and create and love.
The world is more porous than the world insists.
The calling arrived before the language for it. Long before training, before lineage, before the medicine basket — there was a felt sense of the world being more porous than the world insists. The dead were not gone. The land was not silent. The body knew things the mind had not been taught to translate.
The first formal door was the hands. Licensed bodywork in 2010, the somatic foundation under everything that followed. To work with the body honestly is to apprentice to a way of knowing that does not lie. From there the path opened — initiations into traditions that had been waiting, study with elders who recognized what I had been carrying since childhood, ceremony as the structure beneath the work.
Sixteen years on, the work has gathered itself into a practice. Solo sessions. Community ceremonies. Long arcs of accompaniment. The same intention threads through all of it: to meet what is real, to hold what others cannot hold, and to walk alongside those whose own calling is asking something of them they cannot yet name.
Adi Marie is a shamanic healer, ceremonialist, and somatic medium with sixteen years of practice rooted in Southern California. What began as deep hands-on bodywork and therapeutic touch evolved — through initiation, study, and the relentless demands of a genuine calling — into something far more encompassing.
She is a first-generation American of indigenous Mesoamerican and Caribbean heritage — her ancestral bloodlines descend from the Maya, Chorti, Nahuatl, Lenca, and Pipil peoples of Mesoamerica, and the Arawak and Taíno peoples of the Caribbean. The ceremonial, divinatory, and healing practices of these peoples are not techniques she adopted; they are her direct cultural and spiritual inheritance, born into and deepened across a lifetime.
Her calling was not self-appointed. It was received, witnessed, and confirmed — independently, by recognized diviners and elders across the traditions that hold her.
Her medicine basket is vast and carefully tended. But what defines her practice is not the accumulation of techniques — it is the quality of presence she brings to every session, every ceremony, every threshold crossing. She has the rare ability to hold space at the edge of the known world, where the personal becomes mythic and the mythic becomes liveable — and she is known for her ferocious love, her uncommon insight, and her capacity to hold the full spectrum of the human experience without flinching.
She works with doctors, medicine people, therapists, artists, and leaders whose decisions shape the trajectory of this earth ship — united by one commitment: healing that changes the shape of a life, not just its surface.
Based in the canyon lands of Southern California, Adi Marie offers private sessions and intensives in person, and is available worldwide for virtual sessions, private travel engagements, and select community events.
An interview from the practice — on the work, on lineage, and on what these times are asking of us.
Adi Marie's practice has been tended without interruption since 2010 — sixteen years of devoted service, more than a decade of formal initiation and study, and an ongoing apprenticeship to the wild lands of Southern California. The foundation was laid as a licensed massage therapist and somatic bodyworker, and every layer since has been added one initiation at a time.
She is an initiated diviner and medicine woman of the Dagara tradition of West Africa — a lineage carrying ancient technologies of ancestral connection, elemental medicine, oracular divination, and communal healing — received under the mentorship of recognized lineage elders. Within this tradition she carries the ceremonial responsibilities of a priestess of the wilds and of the waters, working through oracular divination, trance, song, ritual, and offerings. Her relationship with the lineage and its elders is ongoing — divinations are read, ceremonies are kept, and the medicine is returned to the living web that gave it.
She has received the nine rites of initiation of the Andean and Quechua Munay-Ki lineage. And she carries, through ongoing practice and mentorship, the inherited Mesoamerican spiritism and curanderismo of her ancestry — the ritual use of water, candles, flowers, and sacred smoke, limpias (spiritual cleansings), and ancestral altar work.
Her formation continues across multiple disciplines — entheogenic medicine facilitation, generative hypnosis, expressive arts as ceremonial tool, ritual architecture, and the botanical healing arts. She trains with elders and lineage holders, and apprentices to the medicines themselves.
Ceremony is how the web is tended.
The Animist Apothecary is a ministry — a religious and ceremonial body, not a commercial enterprise. Its vocation is pastoral, and its duties are kept the way sacred duties are kept: with devotion, with discipline, and with accountability to lineage.
The ministry’s economic life is ordered by sacred reciprocity — tiered pathways of offering, held so that no one is turned away for reasons of financial incapacity. And it is held with a clear understanding, spoken plainly to every person who enters: this work is not medical or psychological treatment. It is a ceremonial and somatic journey into the depths of being — slow, relational, and sacred.
Those who give at the patron tier do more than enter the work — they endow it. Every arc held in abundance keeps a seat open at the fire for someone in a thin season. This is how a ministry sustains itself without becoming a marketplace: the circle carries its own.
Beyond the one-to-one work, four currents run alongside — places where the practice meets writing, teaching, public speaking, and the slow gathering of a journal.
Reflective essays, poetic transmissions, and candid meditations on the nature of healing, initiation, and the living world. Gathered now — published in installments to come.
Receive the Dispatches → For PractitionersWorkshops and intensive teaching programs for those developing their own ceremonial and healing practice. Animist cosmology, sacred breath facilitation, ceremonial design, ancestral healing, somatic awareness, expressive arts as ritual. Private engagements available for groups of six or more.
Inquire About Teaching → For Event OrganizersSpeaking engagements, panel participation, podcast appearances, and ceremonial leadership at events. Animist worldviews, indigenous wisdom in contemporary healing, somatic intelligence, ecological grief, ceremonial culture as collective medicine.
Inquire by Email → A Living DocumentRecurring threads — the grief of the living world and why we must feel it; what the body knows that the mind hasn’t caught up to yet; the difference between spirituality and spiritual bypassing; canyon medicine, and what the wild lands teach those who listen.
Read on →The wheel turns; the work remains.
Rooted in Integrity ✶ Guided by the Living World ✶ Held by Community ✶ Offered in Service
If reading this stirred something old in you — that is not curiosity. That is recognition. The web of relation you just read about already includes you; the only question is how consciously you want to live inside it. Send a note. We’ll find an hour, hear what you’re carrying, and see where the work meets you.
Schedule the Conversation