Hey friends.
This week for my Magicians series on Living the Spiral, I sat down with the truly inspiring Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin. Aki is a medicine woman, a storyteller, the founder of Minka Brooklyn and Minka Mystery School, and she writes Field Notes from the Inbetween on Substack.
She also, by her own description these days, is a cosmic slut.
🎧 Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:
On claiming a new identity after divorce
Aki told me the identification with the term cosmic slut came to her post-divorce, after years of thinking she was asexual inside a monogamous marriage. What she landed on instead was something way bigger than sex alone:
“I am so hopelessly in love with being alive, being in the process of alive, and other humans. And other things… the rock and the tree and the river.”
“I only get to live as who I am once, and I’m so tired of all of us trying to pretend that we shouldn’t be fully alive.”
On work as an offering rather than a role
I asked how she brings this into her teaching, her writing, and her sessions. She said it’s less about output and more about a felt sense she tries to work from in everything:
“My commitment is to fully understand what I feel like, not as a feeling like an emotion, but what I feel like as a felt sense, as an essence of who I am. And do everything from that place.”
She talks about having reverence for a laughter-filled dinner with her kids with the same energy as teaching a class. Both count as the same frequency to her.
On what magic really means
This is the one question I’ve been asking everyone in the Magicians series, and Aki’s answer went straight to Mary Magdalene:
“Magic is in being fully present to all the things that’re available to us. Visible, invisible, all the sides of us, all the tools that we have, and to be able to utilize it accordingly in order for us to co-create what we would like to see.”
She tied being fully human to being fully divine at once, where we can hold the fact of dying and the fact of being eternal in the same body.
On liberation and undoing separation
Aki’s work gets described as decolonial and collective-liberation focused. Aki traced it back to something simpler:
“Colonialism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all of that is the process of creating more and more separation. Then we have to understand that is the complete opposite of doing spiritual practice.”
And on why she uses big, fancy words for what she calls a very simple process: “I wanna claim it!”
On desire as a creative engine
The center of our whole conversation, really, was about the deep power of unshaming desire.
A friend of hers said she had been having a hard time dreaming, and it stuck with Aki as something larger than one person’s creative block:
“How we create this world is through our subconscious and through our dreams, and through our desire, claiming that we want it. And we are living at a time where things seem so impossible... that we are forgetting to desire to dream.”
She said the antidote is simple and hard at once: “I want us to desire fully. And if we don’t get what we desire… fuck it. We’re just gonna desire again.”
On trauma culture and what comes after naming it
We got into how the last few years seem to have shifted collectively from an obsession with trauma to asking “What’s next?” Aki connected the freeze that can follow trauma awareness to a wider cultural fragility:
“We stop living because we are afraid of getting hurt. That is in the same vein as I don’t love because I’m afraid to grieve the loss of love.”
On love as a brave act
Her closing thought on this one has stayed with me since we talked:
“To love is to grieve at the end of the day, no matter what it is. Even if I were to stay with someone for the rest of my life, somebody has to die first.”
She told me about falling for someone who was leaving the country in two weeks, and choosing to love them anyway. She called it one of the most romantic experiences of her life.
🎧 Tune in to our full conversation in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts:
About Aki of Minka Brooklyn
Aki Hirata Quetzalyolotzin (also known as Jewel Moon Medicine Woman) is a multidisciplinary energy healing facilitator and community organizer whose work centers on decolonial spiritual liberation. She has dedicated her life to studying mysticism, philosophy, and various healing systems.
Aki is a lives between Japan and the US, and is teaching this summer in LA, the Berkshires, and New York. She’s running a Young Witches School for teenagers learning to work with intuition and oracle cards, and offering a Reiki training during the Lion’s Gate portal built around what she and her teacher call Earth Evolution Reiki. You can find her writing at Field Notes from the Inbetween on Substack, follow her on Instagram at soulflowermedicine, and find her teachings at Minka Brooklyn.
Follow Aki’s writing here:
About Alison of Living the Spiral
Alison is an ecosomatic astrologer, Human Design guide, breathwork practitioner, and creative sovereignty coach based in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives under the name Hearth & Spiral, where she blends astrology, Human Design, somatic practice, and myth into a path back to the body and the land.
She hosts Living the Spiral as both a podcast and a Substack publication, where she’s currently walking through all 64 Human Design gates as the Sun moves through them across the solar year. She co-created ELA Map with her partner Jackson, an astrocartography and Human Design cartography platform, and works as a consultant and practitioner there. She also offers one on one coaching through her Tending the Flame container.
Alison draws on Celtic seasonal traditions, the I’Ching, and goddess mythology, with a longstanding devotion to Inanna’s descent. You can find her writing at Living the Spiral on Substack, follow her on Instagram at @hearthandspiral, and book a session at hearthandspiral.com.
Interested in being interviewed on Living the Spiral: Magicians? Send me a DM!
