Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo: Limpias Espirituales of Ancient Mesoamerican Shamans - Erika Buenaflor M.A. J.D. 2018
Coming into Being: A Modern-Day Xicana Curandera
The Intersection of Experience and Research
My early childhood was full of stories of my great-great-grandmother, who was a very well-known and respected curandera, in Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution (1910—1920). She was a short, large in frame, gregarious woman who, in addition to being a curandera, was a saloon owner and a bold businesswoman. People throughout Mexico and the Southwest came to her for healings and magic. She was known to be a no-nonsense, perhaps a bit gruff, curandera who wore a patch over her right eye. She had injured the eye when making a concoction that required many roses. She was reaching deep into a thick rose bush when a thorn punctured and damaged her iris. Although she was able to prevent infection, she was unable to repair the damaged iris and had to wear an eye patch. It eventually became her trademark, and part of her persona. She had her saints decorating her saloon and the private room where she worked with clients individually. She offered sobaderismo treatments, worked with various plants, and relied on platicas (heart-straightening talks) to help clients release and heal and to diagnose what needed to be done. She was also able to do divination through cooking, specifically by making tortillas. Her daughter, my great-grandmother, whom I was very close to, had the same skill. As a little girl, I was always amazed by how my great-grandmother would tell me who was coming to the door by the way the tortilla landed, and to my surprise she was always right.
It was said among our family that one day the rambunctious Mexican rebel Pancho Villa came into her saloon and began harassing one of the waitresses. My great-great-grandmother immediately greeted him by placing a shotgun to his head and ordered him to leave. A man who had evaded the Texas Rangers for years, and who was known for taking and doing what he wanted, meekly followed her orders. He left and never came back.
Although she had a hardness to her, my great-great-grandmother healed many people who were unable to pay with money. Even if they were penniless, they would pay her in the manner they could, with, for example, food, livestock, or clothes. Nonetheless, whether it was due to respect or fear or a little bit of both, people always paid for their drinks.
My great-grandmother, her daughter, also knew how to heal and work with plants. But her daughter in turn, my grandmother, felt the pull toward a more modern life and pursued nursing instead of curanderismo. She eventually dropped out of nursing school to get married and become a mother. My great-grandmother lived a block from my grandmother, so I had the opportunity to be around my great-grandmother quite a bit. She told me many stories and shared many tidbits of curanderismo wisdom with me during my childhood.
My father was shot when I was two years old. He was a foreman engineer at a maquiladora (factory) in Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. At that time Mexico wanted to demonstrate that its border towns were a good place to invest in—with resources that could be polluted and full of cheap, docile labor. The maquiladora where my father worked was trying to organize a union independent of the government union. My father allowed the organizers to talk to workers during their breaks, because this, he held, was allowed per the Mexican constitution. According to the police, the nongovernment organizers came in armed, held up the people they were trying to organize, and shot my father. The story is ludicrous, but as I learned when I got to college, this kind of incident was quite common at many places of employment.
Much to my grandparents’ surprise, and displeasure, their widowed twenty-two-year-old daughter, my mother, wanted to be the first in her family to go to college. Perhaps she was inspired by my father, who graduated from college with an engineering degree at the age of sixteen, making him the youngest graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso at the time. Whether it was from inspiration, despair, a desire to continue moving up the ladder of modernization, or all of the above, my mother started the family trend toward going to college. Because she was busy studying or working, I was able to spend more time with my great-grandmother, so as a young girl I was influenced by her stories of curanderismo.
We moved to Los Angeles permanently when I was about nine. The move was very difficult for me. I was an only child, was incredibly lonely, and endured many years of sexual and psychological abuse by my so-called stepfather, a man my mother married after my father’s death. Fortunately, at a very young age, I became captivated by her metaphysical books, particularly those by Carlos Castaneda. Out of necessity and curiosity, I mastered the art of astral projection. When he came into my room, I left.
My childhood and adolescence can be described as periods of extreme duality. The sexual abuse went on for almost a decade, until I spoke out against it. It was “remedied” with an apology to my mom and me and a day trip with my best friend to my favorite theme park. The psychological abuse from my so-called stepfather came in many forms, including having this Mexican man constantly berate and ridicule anything I did that reflected Mexican culture, such as speaking Spanish. He constantly told me that people would assume I was a “wetback” because of my last name, Hernandez. When I was about twelve, I begged my mother to legally change my last name to her maiden name, and she did. I had been programmed to believe that her name did not make me sound too much like a wetback. Growing up, I never spoke Spanish, constantly dyed my hair to make it lighter, and got blue-eyed contacts as soon as they were available. It took a very long time and a lot of healing to love and adore my dark brown eyes and hair and olive complexion.
Despite this grave cultural disassociation within myself, I knew even as a young girl that I had the don, the gift of healing, and was a curandera shaman; this knowingness kept me strong. Although my mother had allowed that man and others to stay in our lives, she nonetheless served as a source of inspiration. I knew that being a widow, being the first in her family to go to college, and learning how to speak English in school was no easy feat. I always admired her for that.
I did not grow up with any type of religious affiliation. My mother was forced to go to Catholic school, but as an adult she did not identify herself as Catholic, nor did she require me to adhere to any religion. Nevertheless, as a young girl, I was very spiritual. I knew there was more to life than the naked eye could see and always felt an incredibly strong bond with angels, fairies, Buddhas, and saints from various traditions. I sensed the divine, and I knew I was loved by all that is divine.
When I got to college, I began to experience an awakening of my spirit as a Xicana feminist. With the help of many Xicana/o classes, I finally had an opportunity to reclaim and love my history, culture, and ethnic identity. I had an opportunity to shine, and I did. I got As or A+s in most of my classes and got into an honors program at UCLA, which allowed me to take many graduate-level courses, giving me the freedom to choose what I wanted to focus on. I also sharpened my critical and analytical skills to an art and questioned everything. I became acutely aware of the many forms of institutionalized discrimination and sexism, the health issues with genetically modified foods, the assortment of atrocities committed by First World countries, and many other types of injustices. I wanted to be of service and help to eliminate these injustices, so I decided I would become an attorney. But I also shaped my curriculum in a way that began to feed my hungry spirit and soul. Alongside studying political theory and the recent effects of economic globalization, I studied curanderismo.
Law school was another period of stifling duality. I stuck through it because I was unaware at the time that I could create other possibilities for myself. My spirit was awakening, but my psyche was still very much wrapped up in a dualistic prison. Perhaps it was enduring thirty-plus years of repeated cycles of incredibly challenging traumas that motivated me to be diligent in continuously seeking out curanderas/os and shamans that were willing to train me and enabled me to be incredibly disciplined in studying, learning, and carrying out their assignments.
MY TRAINING WITH CURANDERAS/OS
After I survived my second year of law school, Breata, a high school friend, and I planned a trip to Cancun to unwind and relax. We were both in school, and finances were tight, so we could not by any means afford a five-star hotel. Nonetheless, we spent a little more than expected in order to stay somewhere that still appeared to be a tropical paradise.
On the day we were leaving for our trip, Breata’s car broke down, and we missed the flight. We were a little disappointed but were still in great spirits. Missing our flight enabled me to meet Rob, a very interesting gentleman who helped make the world of curanderismo accessible to me again.
At first glance, I never would have thought that this man, who continually identified himself as a “gringo,” would have served as my first bridge back to curanderismo. Rob was in his late fifties, about six feet one, with short gray hair, a large belly, and very skinny legs. He had buck teeth, which peered out a bit even when he closed his mouth. His eyes were full of life, but the layers of bags beneath his eyes suggested that he worked late too often. He was incredibly friendly and sparked a conversation with us immediately on the flight to Cancun.
After establishing where we were going and what we did, Rob told us about his properties in Puerto Aventuras and Tulum and entertained us with fascinating stories about these then-quiet cities.
Rob also told us about his restaurant on the beach of Tulum. When you walked in, you were greeted by a white pathway adorned with hundreds of different kinds of orchids, coconut and banana trees, and a few casitas (small houses) to the left that were still being constructed. The restaurant on the beach was covered by a giant palapa (palm roof), reminiscent of a traditional Maya house. He also began to talk about the book The Celestine Prophecy. At the time I had never heard of it. I had had my head buried in books on torts, constitutional law, and civil procedure for what felt like an eternity, and I welcomed hearing about something uplifting and beautiful.
When the pilot announced that we were about to land in thirty minutes, Rob offered his beachfront house to us. He told us that he only intended to stay for a few days and that we could continue to stay there after he left. He proclaimed that we were not going to like Cancun; it was too busy and overrun with tourists. As much as we loved his stories, we were not sure if he had ulterior motives or whether his stories were actually true. We immediately responded with a gracious thank-you and turned him down. He then drew a map to his restaurant in Tulum on a paper napkin. This is where he intended to be most of the time and where we could find him in case we changed our minds. The map did not have any street names; rather it was all landmarks, including the second tope (road bump) where we would make a left to find the strip of new construction that housed his magical temple restaurant. I took the map and put it in my purse. When we landed, we said our goodbyes. Although I was grateful for meeting such a colorful, upbeat, and entertaining storyteller, who took the sting out of missing our first flight, at the time I did not think I would be seeing Rob again.
When we got to Cancun, it was exactly as Rob described. Our hotel felt cold, not just from the uncomfortably blasting air conditioners, but from its artificiality. It was nothing like the natural tropical paradise we imagined. Although our room was nicely furnished, it had a lingering moldy smell that made me ill. They moved us to two different rooms, but the mold smell lingered throughout all of them. The town, with its dizzy happy hour of howling and whistling, was also not what we had in mind. After the second night, we decided to drive down to Tulum to visit our friend. Although we told each other that we were just going to visit, we packed our bags and took our luggage without any mention of why. After all, if we did not care for his place, we would immediately leave and come back to the room we had reserved and paid for. We headed down to Tulum in our little rented Volkswagen.
The drive itself was invigorating. We were surrounded by gorgeous, lush green fields and were heading to a possible adventure that sounded ideal. We laughed at ourselves for following a napkin map with landmarks, but we kept going, singing to our freedom. We got to the first landmark, the sign to Tulum, a very popular ancient Maya site. Then we simply paid attention to the road bumps, turned down the street to the beach strip that contained all of the new construction, and found our way to Rob’s Maya temple restaurant.
We were amazed. It was as gorgeous as Rob had described it. We made our way down the white path to the restaurant. Breata and I looked around and saw we were the only potential customers. Almost immediately we were welcomed by Pancho, Rob’s right-hand man. We asked if Rob was around, and Pancho confirmed that he would be coming shortly. In less than five minutes, we heard Rob singing our welcome, incredibly joyful that we had decided to visit him. He had his staff prepare the most amazing dishes for us and simply spoiled us.
Over lunch, Rob mentioned his curandero friend at the lighthouse who worked with herbs and many other tools, such as candles and eggs, to do cleansings for people. My attention became fixed on his comments about this curandero. He realized that I was captivated by what he was sharing, and he told me that he also knew a few curanderas who worked with massage and herbs. He promised to introduce us to the curandero at the lighthouse and to arrange for us to meet the curanderas as well. Two years of law school had starved my barely awakening spirit. I was thrilled at the chance to nourish it, and to move beyond reading about curanderas/os to actually being in their presence again.
After lunch, Rob introduced us to Puerto Aventuras and his beach house. It was in an interesting little gated community with its own streets, a small downtown, and a place to swim with the dolphins. (Rob, however, immediately dissuaded us from swimming with the dolphins.) His beach house was breathtaking. He had a large private pool that overlooked the sea, and impressive glass walls providing full views from the bedrooms, the sunken living room, and the kitchen. We had not mentioned that we would be staying at his house. He nonetheless showed us upstairs and simply handed us the keys to our individual master bedrooms. That night he took us into Playa del Carmen, showed us around, and treated us to dinner. The whole time he was funny and a perfect gentleman. He appeared to be happy to be seen in the company of two pretty young ladies that were mesmerized by his stories and laughed at all of his punchlines.
The next day, as promised, Rob took us to the curandero at the lighthouse, Don Tomas. He apparently had taken and referred many people to Don Tomas. On our way there he told us more stories about the curandero’s miraculous healings for various types of ailments, chronic pain, depression, skin rashes, scars, and much more.
When we got to Don Tomas’s house, he was busy attending to someone, with another person waiting to be seen in the living room. Don Tomas’s house was very minimal. The combined living and dining room was furnished with an old couch, a television that looked as if it was from the 1970s, a rocking chair, and a dining table with chairs. His nephew was also in the living room, glued to the television, hypnotized by the cartoons. The nephew acknowledged us for a quick second and went back to watching his cartoons. The wall had a couple of crosses, a Sacred Heart of Jesus painting, and a Virgin of Guadalupe collage. There were no visible altars. We sat at the dining table. A door next to the television led to what appeared to be the backyard. What caught my attention were the many vases with different flowers he had throughout the room.
After we were waiting for about thirty minutes, Don Tomas came out. He was instructing the lady he had just attended, apparently reminding her what to buy and where and how she had to place it under her bed. He shook her hand and said his goodbyes with a common Catholic salutation, “Vaya con Dios” (go with God).
Don Tomas was a short, stocky man with a warm, gigantic smile. He knew a little English, and when Rob introduced us, he made sure to let us know that he also spoke Yucatec Mayan by teaching us how to say hello and greet people in the language. From our first interactions and many thereafter, I got a strong sense that he loved his culture and was very proud of it. Rob asked him to give us the limpia especial (special). After taking care of the payment for our limpias, Rob turned to us and told us that he would be back for us in a few hours. Breata and I were completely comfortable with this and smiled in gratitude and agreement.
Don Tomas took the other lady, who was there before us, to his working room and attended to her. I was curious, so I tried to listen to what he was doing in the other room. But the volume on the television was too high for me to hear anything. Breata and I sat there waiting patiently and were in awe at the amazing turn of events. We were grateful that we had missed our flight and sat next to Rob.
Approximately an hour later, Don Tomas came out and instructed the lady about what she needed to do and buy to continue the work. Breata and I had decided that she would go first, so he took her into the room. About twenty minutes later, he went out to his backyard and came back inside with a handful of plants. I could hear him preparing something in the kitchen for her, which took about fifteen minutes. Then he went back to the room with a pitcher containing what he had apparently concocted with the plants. They came out an hour later. Breata was wrapped up in white sheets. Don Tomas was leading her to another room to rest.
Then he came for me and took me to the room where he did his work. Inside there were three main altars with saints: the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Simón, and another one that was cloaked with scarves. The altars were all decorated with different items and offerings, including water, earth, coins, flowers, corn, pictures, and petitions. He sat me down at the small table in the room and began a platica. At the time, I knew there was something missing in my life. But I had spent a lifetime burying my traumas deep inside and was unsure of what or why something was missing from my life. I told him that I did not have anything specific I wanted to let go of or heal. He asked me what I was currently doing with my life, and I told him. He basically said the same thing that all of my Xicana/o professors had said when I asked them for a letter of recommendation for law school, “What? Why would you do something like that?” He insisted that I was in the wrong career and that the road to this realization was going to be very challenging for me. He told me that he was going to send a few additional guardian angels and saints my way with the limpia because, according to him, I would be needing their help.
He got a bottle that smelled of cologne, herbs, and flowers and began to sprinkle the liquid inside all over me as he was saying his prayers. He then handed me a bucketful of herbs and instructed me to get in the shower and douse myself with what was inside the bucket. Thereafter I had to rinse myself off with very cold water. He explained to me that cold water dissipates dense or negative vibrations and that I should always shower with cold water if my spirit felt heavy. Afterward, I was to wrap myself in a white sheet he had waiting for me on the bathroom counter. I did as he told me, but even though it was a very hot day, washing myself off with very cold water was not enjoyable in the slightest.
When I came out of the bathroom wrapped in the white sheet, he led me to the other room where Breata was lying down and sleeping. I also fell asleep. When I woke up, there was some cold herbal tea waiting for me next to my clothes. I calmly drank it. Breata’s comment, “Wow,” exactly reflected how I felt. Rob came for us a little while after we got dressed.
The rest of the week was very much how Rob had indicated it was going to be. He would be gone, and we would have access to the house with all of its amenities; it was what we were hoping for and were ecstatic that it happened the way it did.
When I came back to Los Angeles, I had a spark inside of me awakened. I wanted to return to the Yucatán as soon as possible. I remembered that Rob mentioned he wanted to rent the house when he was not there but did not have time to do so and had not found a person he trusted to help him do so. My instincts kicked in. I called him two days after returning and offered to rent out the house if he paid me a commission. This commission became my ticket for the next couple of years to allow me to return regularly to the Yucatán and begin my mentor-ship as a curandera. After I became an attorney, I was able to fund my trips to continue my mentorship.
From 2000 to 2005, I returned to the Yucatán every four to six months. During this period, I principally studied with Don Tomas and another curandera/sobadera, Barbara. I also attended various sweats and would spend a few days here and there learning from curanderas/os who facilitated the sweats. I also began to learn Mayan divination using the tzol’kin calendar.
The other set of master teachers in the Yucatán were the buildings at the Maya sacred sites. Every time I went to the Yucatán, I spent at least one day at the sites, meditating and journeying, receiving the wisdom they so gracefully shared with me. Sometimes the buildings taught me about the ceremonies that had taken place there and about the multilayered reasoning behind the ceremonies.
One of the most profound visions was seeing in my mind’s eye various Maya and Mexica images of body postures, which gave me an understanding of their physiological and spiritual effects and providing a way to tune in to the energies of particular deities or sacred conduits. I felt these effects when I sat on top of a rock at Tulum while allowing my body to contort into various asanas for a few hours. Then I was guided to sit down and look at myself swimming in the sea as some kind of water serpent. I saw the etheric outlines of a sea serpent and knew that it was me out there gracefully coming up from and into the sea. My most intense visions have been typically induced by prolonged periods of meditation and yoga.
Almost a year after going to Don Tomas for limpias and consultations, he told me I was a curandera like my great-great-grandmother. I knew he was right, but I did not see a way of putting my knowledge into practice given my enormous and growing law-school loans. After he told me this, he asked to begin to mentor me. I jumped at this opportunity.
Don Tomas taught me how to heal with plants, how to clear maldades,*6 and the basics of doing divination work with plants. He let me sit in when he worked, typically with clients who only spoke English, where I served as his translator and assistant. Don Tomas, who worked a lot with plants, taught me the essentials of picking plants for limpias: the number that should be taken, where to pick them, and the importance of leaving offerings for them. He also taught me how to dry and store the different plants. He had spaces in a little shed where he had various hanging plants. He also put some underneath the beds on top of a window screen, and he had the sturdier ones in cardboard boxes and grocery bags.
Sadly, in late 2004, after not visiting him for more than six months, I found that he was no longer at the lighthouse. The entire area, house and all, was fenced off. At this time the property values in Tulum were beginning to skyrocket. I got the sense that he may have been forced off by someone who saw the financial value of a piece of land with an extraordinary view of the city. I sensed that whoever took the property paid Don Tomas for it, but likely nowhere near what they sold it for. This feeling was confirmed in 2008, when I drove around the area with friends who were real estate agents, when the small hills of Tulum had been turned into pockets of plush gated communities.
Barbara, the other curandera with whom I worked intensively during my first mentorship period, was from Mexico City. When I met her, she was fifty-two but looked incredibly young. Barbara had been trained in both Aztec traditions, as well as in Yucatec Maya ones. She was the one who would invite me to many of my first ceremonies, including my first peyote ceremony. During the first two years that I worked with her, I hired her as a sobadera, partly because she had amazing healing hands, but also because I wanted to learn from her. Hiring her was the best way to ensure that she would teach me, as she was very popular in Puerto Aventuras and neighboring upscale gated communities. Rob was the one who first introduced me to her.
On one occasion, when I returned to Barbara sometime in 2003, my energy and light had been vastly depleted. I was representing the partners in my law firm in a malpractice lawsuit, which would have been OK if they had not been at each other’s throats. There was a time when I actually called two grown men into my office and asked them to stop coming to me with chisme (gossip) about each other. And the gossip was the nicer part of it. The first year or so was tolerable, but when the malpractice suit was filed, all hell broke loose. When I came to Barbara, she was disturbed to see that I had rashes all over my body from the stress. I admitted to her that I was in a state of shock and was terrified at the thought that I would have to work in this profession for any extended period.
After seeing me in this sad state, she began to teach me her limpia methods, as well as different techniques to release stress from my body. From my treatments with her, I had already learned acupressure techniques to relieve pain from an aching back and shoulders. But after this point, my training began to encompass the magical side of sobaderismo. I learned the different ways to release and heal traumas within the body and using the elements, such as water and heat, to facilitate cleansing. She also invited me to my first temazcal ceremony, which eventually became a common practice every time I visited the Yucatán. She also taught me about curanderismo soul retrieval and working with the gifts of the cardinal spaces or skybearers to retrieve lost sacred essence energy. I loved working with Barbara. In early 2005, she got married and moved to Kauai.
Along with my Yucatán mentors, from 2000 to 2005 I took many other alternative healing classes and became certified in quite a few when I was in the States. My interests were rather eclectic—everything from mindfulness meditation, tantra, shamanism, crystal healing, and sacred geometry to various energy healing modalities. I was also an avid yogi and went to an average of two yoga classes a day. But at this time I saw my passion and love for integrating various healing modalities as a curandera mentee as ultimately a mere hobby, something I did on the side.
In May 2005, a catastrophic injury changed this view and led me to fully embrace my don, the gift of healing given by God. On May 15, I decided to go to Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas. I was in Las Vegas for a work convention, but I did not want to gamble afterward; I wanted to do something peaceful and go hiking. A few days before, when I was still at home, I had been walking to the kitchen carrying some plates. I saw a vision of myself in a wheelchair. I dropped to the ground and let the plates fall out of my hands. I knew this vision was going to happen and cried out, “No, God, not like that.” Then I snapped out of the vision and went to get ready as if I had not seen it.
Nevertheless, before the trip, I mapped out the two Bikram yoga studios in Las Vegas and found out about Red Rock Canyon, which was very close to the hotel where I was staying. On the last day, the convention ended early enough so that I could do a little exploration at the canyon. Some of my close friends had a tradition of activating spin cycles at particular earth-energy nodes. Despite my vision earlier that week, I felt compelled to go, as if the canyon was calling me. Although it reminded me somewhat of the Red Rock canyons of Sedona, the energy felt very different and dense. After hiking for thirty minutes, I sat down to meditate. I envisioned the earth’s crystalline inner grids, and at the particular points where I was, I saw the intersections begin to spin.
After what felt like fifteen minutes, I looked at my watch and became alarmed. I had been meditating for more than two hours, even though I had only intended to stay at the canyon for about an hour. I must have resembled the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, scrambling in a state of panic, worried that I was going to miss my flight. I slipped and fell off a cliff that was over thirty feet high. A couple of hours later, I woke up as I was being airlifted out of the canyon.
I was in and out of consciousness for the first three days. On the third day, when I was lucid enough, the doctor told me that my fall had resulted in a skull fracture, a brain hemorrhage, a left acromioclavicular joint separation, two fractured vertebrae, a shattered coccyx, three fractures in my left leg, and, on the right leg, bones fractured from the knee down, one of which came out of my heel. Six weeks later I also got severe osteomyelitis in my right heel and lost a third of the bones in my heel. I was also given a diagnosis that I would be in pain the rest of my life from the shattered coccyx and was told that if I walked again, it would only be with some kind of assistance.
The first day I received these dire diagnoses, I knew it was time for me to decide who I was and to fully embrace my don. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would be 100 percent free of pain, would walk with a completely normal gait, and would be dancing again. The next time I heard any dire diagnoses—and this was quite often—I would look at the doctor and ask when I would be able to return to doing my yoga. The doctor would usually give me a puzzled smile and walk away.
I was stuck in the hospital for a couple of months because of the severe osteomyelitis. After the third debridement, the doctor came to tell me that it was very likely that they would be amputating my right foot that evening. After the doctor left, I heard a voice tell me that I needed to stay grounded and work with the earth’s energy grids, because there was going to be an earthquake. I got upset. I silently responded, “How I am supposed to stay grounded after I’ve just found out that I am going to have my foot amputated?” Right then, I felt an incredible lightness come over me and was told to use the blue ray. I felt without a shadow of doubt that it was the Archangel Michael who had told me to use the blue ray. I had been exposed to a lot of different healing modalities, but at that time I had never had anyone tell me to use the blue ray. I snapped out of my self-pity, surrendered, and became the blue ray. The next thing I knew I saw a flash in my third eye, felt myself outside of my body, and saw myself shape-shifting into Krishna, Archangel Michael, El Morya, and other beings who embodied a divine blue light. I went into surgery late that night.
The next morning, I finally got to leave the hospital, get off the intravenous antibiotics, and, the best part of all, I got to keep my foot. The infection had changed in less than eight hours. I did not have to return to work right away, which gave me an opportunity to completely dive into the world of curanderismo. I put into practice many of the healing methods I had been studying. I applied them to avoid having to take pain medications and to manage pain, release stress, and prevent my muscles from going into atrophy. I had been in a wheelchair for almost a year. After this time, in less than two weeks, I was walking with a completely normal gait. I was also completely pain-free.
During the recovery period, what made me the saddest was the thought of returning to work as an attorney, rather than the thought that I might not fully recover. (I knew I was going to fully recover.) Prior to my injury, I had gotten to a point where I was really trying to make the best out of a situation I felt stuck in. I even started to tell myself that I loved what I did. But I knew this was a lie.
In November 2006, a month after my last surgery, which removed the hardware from my left knee, and a few months after returning to work, I returned to the Yucatán. On this trip, I met my next mentor, Malina. Malina was a resident curandera at Laguna Bacalar. When I met her, I was with a group visiting the Maya sacred sites of Quintana Roo and northern Belize. And yes, I climbed up all the temples at the sites, including the great pyramid of Calakmul, which is 148 feet high. The ability to release fear in this manner, and to sit with my ancestors once again, was both exhilarating and incredibly healing. At the end of the day, my feet looked like swollen potatoes. But I knew rubbing techniques that would help with the swelling and discomfort. One of the places we stayed at the longest on this trip was Rancho Encantado. At the time, Malina was a curandera there.
The first time I met Malina, I felt an immediate bond with her. She embodied gentleness and exuded power and strength at the same time. Interestingly, at that time I went by the name Malin, short for Malintzin. We both had taken on the name of a Mexicana-Xicana mythical archetype, who acted as Hernán Cortés’s translator and diplomat and helped to defeat the disliked Mexica. Even though hundreds of Mesoamerican peoples allied themselves with the Spaniards to defeat the Mexica, for hundreds of years she was the one identified as the whore and traitor who sold out her people. When women do something that is out of favor or unsavory they are labeled as malinche or malinchistas. I took on her name to reenvision this archetype in a different light, one beyond the simple dichotomy of whore versus virgin.
As a curandera, Malina had a very eclectic healing practice. She was from New Mexico and incorporated New Mexican Navajo ceremonial healing practices and would mention them when it was appropriate. She had lived in Maui and had studied native Hawaiian balanced movements that could clear and raise energy, among other practical benefits, such as staying centered and focused. She had also been to China twice to study and advance her qigong practice. The way she honored and worked with saints and the soul essences of plants integrated Mexica elements and Yucatec Maya practices. Although I never had the opportunity to watch her dance, according to Don Fernando, another mentor to whom she introduced me, she was an extraordinary Aztec dancer. She was very sweet, tender, and stern, all at the same time.
During my first visit at Rancho Encantado, when we were eating, I always made my way to sit next to Malina and listen to her stories. She talked about her training in northern Mexico and her experience with plant medicines. Once she told me that the following day was her day off and invited me to visit with her. Kimi, another lady from our group, and I decided we would pass on going to Kohunlich with the group and stay behind to hang out with Malina.
The next day, Kimi, Malina, the then-owner of Rancho Encantado, a few other people that worked there, and I sat together for breakfast. As everyone was sharing stories, Malina instantly drew me in with the cadence of her voice and the look of her eyes. She asked me, “So, Malin, are you living your bliss, joy, and happiness?” She looked into me, into my very essence, as she asked the question and waited for my response. I was thrown off-kilter. A simple question, yet she pulled me in a manner that I had never experienced. I stuttered a bit and responded, “Well, yes, I am a happy person. I am a very happy person.”
She refused my meek, fumbling response. She then pulled me in further. Among a table full of people, for moments that lasted for an eternity, we were the only ones there and there was nothing else. She asked again, “No, I asked are you living your bliss, joy, and happiness.” She stressed “living” as she drew me in further. I was completely dumbfounded and unable to answer her. Nothing came out of my mouth. She smiled and continued to share more stories. That day we walked around the grounds and talked about the healing properties of the lagoon and the hundreds of orchids at the property, and she showed me some balanced-movement steps to gracefully clear energy. Her question, however, was still lying on the cusp of my subconscious.
Every night I kept hearing her question and seeing my inability to respond. A couple of months later, I realized that I could no longer live a lie. I knew that I definitely was not, by any measure, living my bliss, joy, or happiness, even after a near-death experience. I decided to pursue what I had become incredibly passionate about. A month later, I managed to sign up a group of people to take an extended energy-healing class with me and also to tour the Maya sacred sites of Quintana Roo. As soon as all the people in the group put their deposit down, which was rather immediate, I called Malina and told her my plan. I was taking my first group of people to the Maya sacred sites in April 2007 and was planning on quitting my job. I was not entirely clear about what I would do in the other months or how I would pay my mortgage, hefty student loans, and all the other bills. But I was very sure I was leaving.
One morning, I remembered a job offer I had gotten a couple of years previously to serve as a private tutor to help people pass the California Bar Examination. This was nothing close to my ideal, but I wanted to secure some kind of income and work part-time. I felt the pull to pay a visit to the people who had offered that job on the same day I remembered the offer. It just so happened that a tutor had recently quit and they needed someone to help them, so I resigned from my full-time job as an attorney.
In 2007, I used my very flexible schedule to return to the Yucatán quite frequently and work with many new mentors, including Malina. Malina taught me various effective ways to clear and raise energy with touch and movement. I also started to learn Nahuatl medicine songs that were sung during sweats. Most importantly, Malina taught me the importance of discipline—the discipline of self-love, a discipline that gets easier and easier. She never put up with any of my B.S. and cut through it very swiftly and with strong love. I remember one occasion when she sent me to work with a curandera she admired, Don Fernando. I was whining that Don Fernando had ordered me to sleep in a hammock hovering over a candle and other sacred tools for clearing work. I was not fond of the idea of sleeping outside with the insects and the wildlife that roamed the area at night. Disappointed, Malina looked at me and asked, “Do you want his help or don’t you?” I nodded. She responded with an obstinate look and said, “Well, do as he says.”
Next to Malina, Don Fernando was the mentor I studied under the most during my second mentorship period. Don Fernando was Yucatec Maya and spoke fluent Spanish and Yucatec Mayan.*7 At the time he was the principal caretaker of Kohunlich, a Maya sacred site south of Chetumal, a few minutes from his house. When I first started going to him for limpias, he always made sure to do something radically different for me and always explained what he was doing and why. I never told him that I wanted to study under him, but he knew. Eventually he began to invite me in when he worked with certain clients and would teach me. He would ask me to return the next day with items from the botanicas of Chetumal and some rare herbs he did not have in his backyard. I always complied.
From Don Fernando, I further developed my skills in conducting limpias and doing readings from them. He taught me how to read the yolk after doing an egg limpia, how to read a puro (cigar) after doing a limpia with one, and how to read the residues from a fire-based limpia. He taught me a lot about the magic and cleansing power of doing velaciónes (candle work), which included the candle formations and their purposes, the uses for the types and colors of candles, and when and what type of offerings to make. He also taught me sortilege divination. He would lay out day signs from the tzol’kin Maya calendar; arrange flowers, cups, and other tools; and throw flowers or corn to determine the likely outcome of events, as well as the limpia work that needed to be done.
Although I was and still am very grateful for my mentors, I wanted to go deeper into my practice as a curandera. I wanted to dive into ancient Mesoamerican roots of my practice and understand the rich indigenous history of curanderismo. My mentors gave me some insight into the indigenous background of what they were teaching me, but I was hungry for more. I was very inquisitive. I remember on one instance I asked why it was necessary to use a pencil when writing petitions, and where that tradition came from. I was asked in turn why I asked so many questions and was then told that this is the way things were done and had always been done. I knew that generations of oral tradition were pervasive and necessary in our curanderismo traditions for many complex reasons, including survival and protection from the Inquisitions. But I was also aware that many of these ancient curanderismo traditions had been documented by early ethnographers and that there were precontact codices that had survived the Spanish fires. I wanted to further develop my understanding of the shamanic and ceremonial practices of the ancient Mesoamerican shamans, their methods, the tools used, who had access to these things and why, and the complex meanings behind these practices. I prepared to apply to graduate school late in 2007.
After meeting with Karl Taube, a well-known Mesoamerican scholar, and a few other professors from the University of California at Riverside, I had my eyes set on this university. I was accepted to attend the following year, in September 2008. Until then, I continued to visit the Yucatán, took people on spiritual tours to the Maya sacred sites, and continued to study with my new mentors.
While in graduate school, I gained access to an immense amount of information about ancient Mesoamerica. I went to school two or three times a week, and every time I came home with a cartful of books. I read them all and was loving it! While in graduate school, I continued my practice as a curandera but was very private about it. I basically went to school to get books. I also continued my trips and training in the Yucatán. Although I loved reading and studying, I did not care for graduate-school politics. I did not want to study curanderas/os; I wanted to be a curandera and practice what I was learning. I did not see graduate school as a place that would appreciate this desire, so I decided I would stop once I got my master’s degree.
After I obtained my degree, I returned to practicing law while I figured out how and whether I would make the shift to practicing as a curandera. Although I had an opportunity to work on matters dealing with social justice—“good cases”—I found the work to be less and less satisfying by the day. I was able to get my clients money for being harmed. But this money was not going to help heal the wounds that had formed as a result of the harm. I became aware that bridging these two worlds, curanderismo and being an attorney, was not going to be possible, nor did I really want to anymore. I remember a case of a family who had lost a father and husband because the nurses became nervous and failed to perform the Heimlich maneuver in the hospital cafeteria. As a result, my clients’ husband and father died there. Yes, we got the family the full value of the case. But after I had come to know this family intimately, getting them money for their loss felt incredibly empty. I eventually walked away from my career to pursue what I loved, curanderismo.
The books I gained access to in graduate school shaped and informed my practice as a curandera. I read all of the early postcontact codices, as well as various books on the few Mesoamerican precontact codices that had not been destroyed by the Spaniards. I had been studying curanderismo since 1996, in academia at UCLA and out in the field, so I was very familiar with curanderismo practices and could identify them when they were described in the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century ethnohistorical records.
Coming fully out of the closet as a curandera was, however, a process. Although I had been working with many clients since 2003, for some reason I was still sometimes hesitant to identify myself as a curandera. In 2014, our love for the grandmother plant, ayahuasca, inspired my husband and me to take our honeymoon in Peru. After several transformative ceremonies with grandmother and a very powerful private conversation with the shaman Diego Palma, I finally decided to embrace my don, my divine gift of healing, on a whole new level. I came back to Los Angeles with many layers of my psyche healed and fully stepped into my power as a curandera. Thereafter everything began to fall into place, and my practice almost immediately blossomed.