My name is Shamanicka Boykins. I am the eldest daughter of a young father and a young mother who would eventually become the mother of five children. I was raised in Compton and South Central Los Angeles, in the beautiful state of California. My family lineage spans Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Jamaica. I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work from Sacramento State University, where I also became a member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., Zeta Nu Chapter, in the fall of 2005.

I first decided I wanted to become a social worker because I wanted to give abused children a voice. I wasn’t aware that I, too, had experienced abuse until I began my social work studies and learned the language to identify and understand the experiences I had endured growing up.

I also remember when my mother had just given birth to my baby brother and was confronted in her hospital room by a social worker who accused her of being a drug addict. The social worker assumed this was the reason my baby brother had a low birth weight. No one had asked my mother any questions before this woman entered her room. They simply saw my mother, an African American woman with a small baby, and assumed she was using drugs.

I was 13 years old, watching medical personnel and a social worker place a device on my baby brother’s ankle as they aggressively informed my mother that they would be conducting a blood test on her baby and that she had no choice in the matter. I remember thinking, I would have handled that situation so much better if I had been the social worker.

My mother would ultimately give birth to one more child before passing away from stomach cancer in 2011.

My mother’s death left five children motherless, shocked, stunned, and confused. From that point forward, my life began shifting in ways I could not have foreseen. Life would take another drastic turn for my siblings and me in 2022, when our brother, my mother’s middle child, also passed away. He was only 29 years old, but he had been battling health challenges since the age of 16. His death left the four of us who remained feeling brotherless, shocked, and hurt.

That 11-year journey took me from the Christian church into the bush of Ghana, West Africa. My ancestors began to speak, and my ears began to tune in to the frequency of Spirit. My vision expanded.

Throughout that 11-year journey, I learned about energy healing, plant medicines, herbs, bodywork, sound healing, spiritual cleansing, family, hexing, community healing, honoring Spirit, the healing power of nature, and how to see God in everything and everyone around me.

I said yes to birth work. I said yes to the work of death, dying, and grief. I said yes because the Most High gave me the vision to expand and the wisdom to understand what my community needs in this time.

If we desire to live truly full and loving lives, we must honor the transitions that life will undoubtedly bring us. My charge is to transform the spaces of transition in life—birth, dying, death, and grief—into spaces where people feel supported, understood, seen, and ultimately uplifted, not only in mind and body but also in spirit.

Today, many know me as a medicine woman, an African Maroon traditional medicine practitioner, and a mystic healer. I am the daughter of the Ancients. A daughter of Mother Earth. The prayers of my ancestors. The medicine for my communities’ woes.

I welcome you to my medicine bag: a collection of the wisdom, knowledge, and practices I have gathered throughout my lifetime, offered with the intention of helping African American people and humanity live well and be well—spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically.