La Limpia de Oaxaca

This week I was graced with the opportunity to work with an indigenous Curandera just outside of Oaxaca de Juarez. After some back and forth communication, it was decided we would start our time together with a traditional limpia and temezcal in the mountains outside of the city. La Limpia translates into “the cleanse”, Energetic cleansing, ritual, ceremony, healing ... the word may be different but the purpose is the same: to restore calm and protect the spirit. This practice is a deep-rooted inheritance from Aztec lineage, as they believed everything in this world had a spirit. Today, it’s still commonplace for the elder - especially in rural or mainly indigenous communities - to resort to spirits and implore their intervention to obtain good harvests, produce rain, cure illnesses or to avoid misfortunes.

As I approached the opening Limpia, I had very little expectations. I was feeling very lucky to connect with an authentic healer in a time so full of western new-age romanticism. I was instructed to stand in the middle of a ring of local flowers outside the temezcal. The ceremony began with a very heavy copal cleanse, heavy enough I started to feel nauseous and short of breath. I was instructed to breathe with a deeper heaviness, this heaviness invited me to enter a trance state.

As I began to let go of mental chatter and the urge to come back into control of my experience, Lorena whispers in-between her prayers "Confia en ella" (Trust her). My breathing begins to deepen naturally. Lorena now guides me through a process of prayers, whipping with plant bundles, spitting plant remedies on my face and back and touch.

She identifies a blockage in my stomach, something that had been brought to my attention by shipibo maestra Olinda in the amazon a year prior. She felt around and told me;

“You've carried with you an event, something you will not be able to remember, but it lives here, it is your mother, the mothers before her. It's time you let go of this.”

Rather aggressively she begins to push into my stomach and instruct me to breathe deep and scream into the still and surreal mountain landscape. I scream, I breathe, I scream, I breathe, I scream. This screaming slowly reveals a very deep sobbing, my jaw opens wide. Lorena tells me to sit in the circle. As I sit she covers me in a white sheet and holds me, in a way a mother holds their child.

I am filled with this feeling in my bones;

I am whole.