Amanda Amour Lynx
Amanda’s website: http://amour-lynx.art/
“Amanda Amour-Lynx is a queer, Two Spirit, Mi’kmaq First Nations interdisciplinary artist and social worker living in Tkaronto, Ontario, on Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. She was born and grew up in Tiotia:ke (Montreal). She received a BFA from OCAD University in Drawing and Painting, minoring in Indigenous Visual Culture. Interested in the intersections between art and activism, Amanda focuses on Indigenous storywork and socially engaged approaches to explore healing trauma and unearthing collective truths. Spirituality, connection, and community are at the root of wellness. She is interested in an embodied practice that fuses physical and emotional healing through hybridizing interpersonal, land-based epistemologies and western therapeutic models of counselling and wellness.
She is interested in how cosmology and ethnobotany can be incorporated into the wellness paradigm. Resurgent practices are important to her; including cultural acts of making, ceremony, language revitalization, plant knowledge, cultural transmission, land-based wellness initiatives, bushcraft, two-eyed seeing, shapeshifting, and how western ideologies offer us tools to form dialogue and pedagogy to recover and enliven the old ways.
She wants to imagine a future where intergenerational healing can occur and where traditional ways are honoured and informed through the lens of Indigiqueer futurism, and youth truth-telling.”
Amanda on Instagram
Michelle Beausejour
Our previous conversation on the podcast(2019).
The Birch Trail on Facebook and Instagram
Michelle recommends this article
Further Reading
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Indigenous Wholistic Theory: A Knowledge Set for Practice by Kathleen Absolon King
Christi Belcourt
Schumann resonances
MICHELLE’S BREAD SPELL:
– Bread Intention Spell –
Find your favorite basic bread recipe (google is your friend). I usually use a bannock or a french crusty loaf but you can also use an egg bread recipe to further promote luck and manifestation (using the egg as a symbol for fertility/manifestation). Return the egg shells to the earth as a symbol of planting your “seed/intention”.
Think on the intention you would like to bake into the bread and collect the appropriate herbs to include (usually 1/2 or 1 teaspoon of each herb is fine). Try not to go overboard on herbs, limiting it down to 4 herbs will do just fine.
– Examples of some popular herbs and their properties (remember that properties of the herbs might be different from your own magic path or cultural teachings).
All Spice: money, healing
Basil: protection, money, love
Bay: psychic awareness, purification
Black pepper: protection
Cinnamon: money, love
Cloves: love, money, protection
Garlic: health, protection
Marigold: happiness
Marjoram: love, peace
Saffron: happiness, spirituality
Rosemary: healing, love, conscious mind
Lavender: purification, peace
don’t limit yourself to just herbs either. Cheese, nuts and other ingredients can also be wonderful additions to your magical cooking
– The shape of your bread can also help with the intention of your spell.
Twists or braids can promote protection or the coming together of elements needed for your intention.
Egg shaped can promote manifestation and luck
Longer stick loaves can promote fertility (in a literal sense if you’re into phallic symbols) or symbolize the steps needed like a ladder in your own journey.
Round shapes in general are great for almost all intentions as it symbolizes “as above, so below” as a circle never ends.
– Remember to give gratitude to your ingredients before working with them and prepare your space as needed (calling in guides or ancestors into the space) you can get as minimal or extra as you need when it comes to ceremonial aspects.
– Prepare the recipe while keeping your intentions in mind. Use visualization to see your intentions manifesting, visualize the different ways they can manifest for you.
– Depending on your intention, do the recipe under the suitable moon phase and even the way you mix your dough can help increase the intention.
Full/waxing moon & clockwise mixing will grow and manifest
Waning moon (in my teachings the new moon isn’t for spell work) & counterclockwise mixing is for removal, binding, diminishing or breaking negative energy/hexes
If you want to get real extra use moon water (water charged under the full moon) in the recipe
– Use any symbols that you normally use in your practice on top of the bread by either brushing it on the top with butter or by cutting the symbols into the dough
– Once your recipe is finished thank your ingredients, guides, ancestors and leave a small offering from your loaf. Eat the bread mindfully, thinking of your intentions.
Don’t forget like with all spell work you must also make physical actions towards your intention in conjunction with metaphysical actions
