Meet Laura Yates

Honouring my teachers, both in this realm and beyond

I teach from my own lived and embodied experience. Over many years, I have taken time to be in deep, devotional relationship with nature and the cardinal directions, allowing life itself to be my teacher. Through seasons of challenge, change, grief, and growth, the directions have become living companions rather than abstract ideas. Through this ongoing relationship, the “wheel” has become my compass.

I have lived and worked with the directions not as a concept, but as a breathing, relational practice. They have met me in moments of disorientation and clarity, sorrow and joy. I have turned to them repeatedly as an inner compass when my life felt uncertain or tender. Walking with the wheel and the spiral has been profoundly healing for me. Through this relationship, I have learned how to soften into self-acceptance, to meet my own humanity with compassion, and to trust the deeper rhythms of life.

This work has supported me in rebuilding trust in the divine—not as something distant or external, but as an intimate, living presence woven through the land, the body, and the cycles of life. The wisdom of nature has offered me steadiness when I felt lost, belonging when I felt alone, and a deep remembrance of my place within the greater whole. My authority in this work arises not from theory alone, but from years of lived experience—of returning again and again to the directions and allowing them to shape my healing, my trust, and my way of being in the world. My life, lived in relationship with nature, has been my greatest teacher.

When I use the term Medicine Wheel, I do so with great respect and appreciation for cultures across the world that honour the spiral, the circle, the seasons, and the wheel of life.

Lineages and Teachings

I teach from three primary places of lineage and learning:

1. The Peruvian Andes
Through the guidance of my Andean teachers—specifically Maestro Puma, Maestra Jemmita, and Maestro Edgar. These teachings are similar to those shared by the Four Winds Society, pioneered by Dr. Alberto Villoldo.
I also honour other teachers who have supported my path, including Johnson Chong and Lisa Davis.

2. The Celtic traditions of the British Isles
This wisdom arises from my Scottish and English heritage, through lived experience and through teachings received from, Sons of Asgard, Weaving Remembrance, Sam McLaren and Mari Kennedy.

3. Ancestral teachings and relationship with land
With a strong focus on honouring ancestors and the land itself, this wisdom comes through my upbringing, the Zulu women, the land on which I—and many of my ancestors—were born, and my mentor, John Lockley.

Aside from the teachings rooted in the UK, you will notice that my work is largely Southern Hemisphere–based.

With the support of these people, places, and lineages, I have lived and worked with the directions over many years as an inner compass. The wheel and the spiral have been a source of great comfort along my life path—offering wisdom, healing, compassion, self-acceptance, and a deep trust in divine guidance.

Clarification on North American Medicine Wheels

I wish to be very clear and respectful here: I do not profess to have knowledge of the cultures or teachings of North American Indigenous peoples. I have not learned from those lineages, nor have I been given permission to teach them. Therefore, I do not teach any North American teachings in my trainings.

According to Bob Joseph of Indigenous Corporate Training (Canada), the original name for what are now commonly called “medicine wheels” was Sacred Circles. The term Medicine Wheel was coined by non-Native Americans in the 20th century, following attention drawn to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, the largest of its kind in North America.

When I use the word Medicine, it is not to appropriate any specific tradition, but to honour and illuminate the shared wisdom that echoes across cultures worldwide. This understanding of medicine is in harmony with plants, the land, the seasons, and the greater cosmos. It reflects a way of knowing life itself as medicine—nature as ally, not something separate from us.

This is a deep soul-remembering carried by many cultures: that unity consciousness is medicine, and that this remembrance brings clarity, healing, and wholeness.