I have so much to share about the Traditional Mexican Medicine and Sobadas (abdominal massage) workshop that I went to last weekend, but a lot of it is still settling into my system. The workshop was put on by Metzli who owns Luna Mama Services in San Diego.
There will be more stories to come, sign up for my newsletter to hear it all, but one thing that came through loud and clear was the relationship between decolonization and healing. Give me a minute, and I'll come back to this part.
For the past few years I've been obsessed with the belly's relationship with healing. How all our organs hold onto our trauma, how our diaphragm gets stuck when we go through hard things, and how gentle and specific attention to the belly can unwind years of trauma fairly quickly. There are traditions all over the world that pay special attention to healing the belly as the source of healing everything that ails us.
And yet, up until three years ago, I don't think I had ever really touched my belly. And from working with people and showing them how to do this work on themselves, it seems really common that our bellies go untouched. But they are beautiful, squishy, soft portals in the home of our intuition and passion! Our bellies hold onto everything unless there a is genuine invitation for them to put things down.
And here's where the decolonization comes into play. Before colonization, people didn't really hold onto trauma. (I've got lots of resources to back that one up if you need it. Which you shouldn’t, if you think about it for any length of time.) Trauma from accidents or weather or death happened, but communities were built to help you put that down. Through being taken care of, through ceremony, through prayers, through dancing, through drumming, and probably a whole lot of other things that I don't know about. And trauma through relational abuse was super rare, because you don't have a society where thousands of years of knowledge is passed down if elders are abusing the young. That breaks trust, and our ability to learn, and our ability to feel safe in community. Before colonization, many people experienced securely attached communities. Communities! Not just secure attachment, but the whole community supported a web of secure attachment.
Having people hold onto trauma for years isn't helpful to a healthy community. But for cities and states built on capitalism and civilization - it's actually really helpful if we're a just traumatized enough not to feel what hurts in this world. It helps us get back to work and abandon ourselves if we're numb.
So a huge part of taking in the medicine in this workshop was really acknowledging and respecting the wisdom that has been passed down for thousands of years, and understanding that for the past hundreds of years this knowledge was quietly protected, hidden from colonizers.
I was on Facebook yesterday and a woman in a mom's group asked for advice about what to do for her child's fever. Grandma had suggestions, but they were based on "myths" from her country. And I think this is part of what Metzli was getting at, that we throw away ancestral knowledge from people who aren't Western doctors. Western medicine is the only medicine that denies the emotional and spiritual aspect of healing. All Indigenous healing all over the world takes into account all three: physical, emotional, spiritual. And yet, the newest and most aggressive form of medicine is the one that is elevated above all others.
The invitation this weekend was to restore Indigenous medicine to its rightful place. To stop second-guessing whether or not there is a spiritual world, or if emotions are really stored in our bodies, or if energy protection and clearing is real. That's the short list. But it was an invitation to see to the depth of healing available when we pray, when we protect our energy, when we take into account the spirit and the soul, and from that place, tend to the physical body.
I'll add one short story, shared with enthusiastic consent.
The day after I got home from the workshop, we noticed a large rash on my 9yo son’s chest. Unclear where it was from, but it was itchy and red and angry. When he was about to go to bed I remembered Metzli talking about doing energy clearings, limpias, using eggs.
If you don't know--and there are lots of ways that people do this--you take a raw egg and put it over a person who needs clearing and make little circles with the egg in the shell, and the bad energy gets sucked into the egg and isn't in the body anymore. Then you throw the egg away (don't eat it!)
Over the years, I have heard about this from friends, from a well respected energy healer, from a healer that talked about using coconuts the same way in her tradition. I had even quietly tried this limpia a few times myself on myself and my kids. But I hadn't ever put a strong enough intention into the process. I had never put down my colonial doubt that what I was doing was "real" medicine.
But this time was different. There was a fuck yes in my body that was so clear that this wasn't "pretend" medicine and I wasn't making things up by doing it.
So I shared with my son what I was thinking about doing and why. He loves this stuff so much and said yes to the egg. I got an egg from the fridge and, because he was shirtless and it was a rash, I held the egg above his body about three inches away. We prayed and asked whatever was causing his rash to leave, to restore harmony in his body. I made little circular washing motions from his head and down his whole body. When I was done I felt like he needed to play a more active role in releasing this rash. So I asked him to blow anything we missed into the egg. He blew about three times, hard, and then we were done.
I went to compost the egg and when I came back not even three minutes later he was fast asleep. But that's when things got really cool. His sweet little body was twitching. Little twitches in hands, face, feet, shoulders. Not huge jerks, just little twitches like when you first fall asleep and you get a little energy surge. It felt like a bunch of those were moving in his body. Then they settled and the rest of us went to bed.
In the morning, his rash was completely gone. Like all the itchiness and redness had drained out entirely. His skin still felt a little rough to the touch, but the rash itself was gone.
Real magic. Real medicine.