From Africa to Ayurveda: a journey to healing in Cyprus

Why a ‘modern medicine woman’ left the road and settled on the islandMiriam Erne is in what might be called a transitional phase. At 36, “I have lived through some stuff,” she says – vivid stuff and sometimes terrible stuff, images she’ll carry with her to the end of her days. Right now, however, her website calls her “a modern medicine woman” and she’s liable to be found, once a month, on the beach, leading spiritual seekers in a ‘full-moon ceremony’. “I feel like I don’t need these extreme adventures anymore,” she admits in lightly accented English. No regrets, “I’ve seen beautiful things. I’m very grateful for the opportunities life gave me. “But at some point you also realise you’re full – you’re satisfied. I wanted to go on the inner journeys. I wanted to connect to higher things.” We meet at Bardo, a specialty coffee place near Saint Lazarus church. I’m late due to traffic, a growing problem. We both agree that Larnaca’s changing – though in fact it’s her first full year here, since September 2025. She was here before (including during Covid), on and off for the past eight years – but never staying long, forever travelling. “I guess back then I thought ‘This is not enough’,” she muses, thinking all the way back to her teens. “I wanted to see life before I settle.” She could see, as a child, what settling down looked like, “how one generation after another is doing the same thing”. This was near Lake Constance, an especially beautiful part of southern Germany, in a tiny village of about 800 people, surrounded by Nature. One uncle kept bees, she recalls. Another had cows. “My family still lives in the house of my great-grandparents. And my brother’s into local politics.” So everybody stayed. “Everybody stayed. Just me… I left for love.” There was a man, of course (there always is). He and she were very compatible, “we both had a strong sense of freedom”. They were together for 15 years, “since I was 19 years old”. Miriam sighs: “Yeah, it was big love. I guess I kind of expected to be together with this man forever”. The couple spent a year and a half living and travelling in a truck The couple ran their own online business and travelled often, working remotely. Then they decided to kick it up a notch, and bought a “truck” (more like a mobile home) so they could travel full-time. The thing was a monster, “completely self-sufficient, we could be anywhere for two weeks without water or electricity”. They lived in the truck for a year and a half, 2022 to 2024, a year of that spent in Africa. They began in Dubai, where the truck was delivered, then roamed Arabia and took a ferry from Saudi to Egypt, where “we crossed the Sahara with a local guy – for one week on old camel-road tracks”, the desert studded with the dusty remains of old WWI airstrips. The plan was to head south, all the way to South Africa: “But when we reached Zambia I had to take a break, because I was done”. It was the ‘upper countries’ that exhausted – not to say traumatised – her, Sudan and especially Ethiopia. “If there’s one country I’ll remember for the rest of my life, it will be Ethiopia. I saw the worst there, when it comes to humans.” The country – though intensely beautiful – was unsafe to begin with. The Tigray civil war (which killed hundreds of thousands, as many as in Gaza or Ukraine) was supposedly over, but still simmered everywhere. “We didn’t see any actual war. But you see on the road everywhere – y’know, children, six years old, they are carrying guns. Everybody on the road in Ethiopia is carrying guns… I was afraid sometimes. I was scared for my life.” Most of the men were drinking heavily, or smoking khat. And the women – that was a whole other story. “I guess when you’re a Western girl,” muses Miriam, “and your father loves you, your uncle loves you, your brother loves you – and then you see the girls there, [who] don’t have much worth… That was really horrific, to see that a woman’s life is not worth much. Literally the goat in the garden is worth more to most of the men than the girl.” An old German lady in Zambia – married to a friend of Miriam’s grandfather, who’s been in the country for decades – put it succinctly: “If you see a woman in Africa, it’s basically one child is in the belly, one child is on the arm [i.e. a baby] and one is on the hand [being held]”. Another older traveller, a German named Rainer – met on a campsite in Kenya – who’d worked with Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan, told them stories of what happens when women try to forge their own destiny: Sound healing is just one of Miriam’s practices “He said that very often, when he was in the hospital, there’s young girls coming in, and they’re completely beaten up.” What happens, says Miriam, is that “as soon as these girls bleed” they get married off to some old man. Some then try to escape – and this is where it feels so strange to be a German girl whose father loves her and uncle loves her, because these girls’ own relatives hunt them down “like an animal” and beat them almost to death, then stand outside the hospital room (said Rainer) threatening the doctor if he doesn’t release them back to their husband. Meanwhile, the couple kept on working full-time, from inside the truck – which added to Miriam’s exhaustion but also supplied a bitter irony, because they were working in the dating industry! The online business (which they ran together for 10 years) wasn’t exactly a dating app but provided analysis, “helping people find the right dating site”. Germany, after all, is a big place with lots of different apps – not just Tinder, but specialised sites for Muslims, vegans, and so on. Miriam’s job, in other words, was helping Western women find their special soulmate – even while being surrounded by African women who were living like beasts. That’s one reason why the trip became oppressive. Another was perhaps that – like most inveterate travellers – they were outside observers, seldom connecting with locals on a human level. Not that people weren’t friendly, says Miriam, “but to be honest – um, if you’re in Africa as a white person, you are a walking ATM. That’s all you are…” She, as a woman, was even less than that. Men wouldn’t even talk to her, directing their answer to her boyfriend if she asked a question. But the biggest reason why Miriam finally broke down (and she did break down, fleeing first to Europe, then India, and eventually splitting up with her partner though they’re still “on very good terms”) was perhaps her own hypersensitivity. ‘What were you like at 18?’ I ask at one point. ‘Were you very carefree?’ “Carefree…” she repeats – then shakes her head. “I think I was never really carefree, because – I feel deeply. It’s a gift, but it’s also sometimes not easy. Because when I’m surrounded by people, I can feel all their emotions… “I think I was always like that, but I didn’t know it. I always wondered why I feel so much more than other people – because a lot of these feelings are not my feelings… So when I come in a room and there’s, like, heavy energy, I can feel it all over my body.” After Zambia she took a break, some time in Cyprus – she vividly recalls laying on the sand at Finikoudes, and “this feeling of being safe” – but her body rebelled, making her sick as if refusing to go back on the road. (She’d actually been unwell for years, worn down by the travel lifestyle.) An ayurvedic doctor in Switzerland passed her on to a colleague in Kerala, where she spent three months studying and healing – and wondering, too, about the difference in energy. India, after all, is also poor – so why is it so serene, compared to Africa? And what about here? What’s our own energy? “I feel that Cyprus has a very high-frequency, and a healing energy,” replies Miriam, though she also observes that “a lot of foreigners who move here, in the beginning they have some problems. They feel a bit depressive, they feel low”. The cliché people tell themselves is that they need to adjust to a slower pace (the infamous ‘siga-siga’) – but then why, she wonders, would that make them depressed? Her own explanation is that the island’s energy is indeed “high-frequency”, and it takes time for newcomers to adjust their own frequency – though of course this is where our conversation may get a little airy-fairy for some tastes. “I think Cyprus is becoming a very spiritual island,” she notes. “A lot of spiritual people are coming. I remember eight years ago, when I came here, I could hardly find a yoga studio.” She herself – it’s all on the website – does ayurvedic consultations, sound healing & reiki, personal yoga and more. Not to mention the monthly full-moon ceremonies, which are becoming increasingly popular. The full moon ceremony What does it mean to be a ‘modern medicine woman’, though? And why is there resistance from some (not too many, anymore) who may claim it’s all nonsense? “If people knew how many tools are out there which are not pharma pills,” sighs Miriam – “but we don’t know. We don’t have access to it, right? So this is the only thing we know. We go to the pharmacy and you say ‘I have a headache’, they give you a pill.” One might say there are three layers of medicine. The first is the pharma layer: if you have a headache, take a pill – which she’s not necessarily against, “if you have too much pain, or you put your body under too much stress”. But then there’s the second, ayurvedic layer, working with herbs and spices, or breathing techniques. Miriam, for instance, has a lot of ‘pitta’ (fire) energy so she gets a lot of headaches, especially in summer. “So I chew some cloves, for example. If you have some cloves in your mouth, and chew them when they get soft, it’s a wonderful remedy in Ayurveda for headache. Or you go to the shower and you make a cold-hot shower, only on your head”. Really cold, then really hot, she instructs, only on the head, three to five rounds of 30 seconds each – then “you lie down for five minutes, and your headache will be most of the time gone”. Most would go along with this second layer. It still sounds like medicine, only it’s natural rather than pharmaceutical. But then, for instance, I also ask about the stone hanging round her neck – and she says it’s an opal, “a specific stone in my birth chart that’s helping me”. Gemstones and crystals have energy, but it works best in conjunction with astrology. Thus for instance Libras “always have difficulty in making decisions” – and wearing amethyst, or sapphire, can help with that. This is where some people might check out – but perhaps “they’re not ready for it yet,” muses Miriam. Hindus and Buddhists, after all, say that all life is suffering, in the sense that only when you have a crisis will you learn to think outside the box – and that’s true for her too. “I studied Ayurveda because I suffered, and I wanted to get better.” The full moon ceremony is held every month There’s another sense in which helping to heal others also helps to heal Miriam Erne herself – because her work is subtly woman-centric. The full-moon ceremony attracts mostly women (though some drag their husbands along, “which is very sweet”) – and it’s no surprise because the Moon is “the feminine”, just as the Sun is masculine. Miriam’s Instagram also calls out to ‘Women Done Bypassing Their Pain’, and declares: ‘I Help Women Getting Back Their Superpower’. Is her healing work unconsciously also trying to encompass those poor women in Africa, in a kind of vicarious sisterhood? Maybe – just as Miriam’s belief in reincarnation helps her deal with the unfairness of being born here, not there. (Having said that, “all pain is valid,” she affirms: “We don’t have to earn anything”.) Africa had always been a dream, she muses, she’d always wanted to go there and help. “I didn’t help, in the end… But I dunno – maybe this was all I could do.” Meanwhile she lives life in Larnaca, striving to be good to her body and swimming in the sea every day (it’s “so grounding”) – though she does sometimes miss the German forests, and can see herself back “in a green country” in the far future. (Like we said, transitional.) “I have some dreams… But I think I’ve kind of let go of desires and wants.” She’s seen half the world, and had adventures – and perhaps learned perspective, or the beginnings of wisdom. “I always wanted to be free. I wanted to be free and independent – and to see the world was my biggest dream… “But when we have this urge to see the world, and we’re chasing something on the outside, often what we want is to chase something on the inside,” she says – then shrugs, as if to say ‘All in good time’. “But maybe we don’t have the tools yet.”