Curanderas sin Fronteras

Lovely opportunity...

Join me for "Introduction to Curanderismo"
Sunday, August 23 - 10 am to noon Pacific

Together we’ll explore and discuss the history, roots, and practices of Curanderismo and learn about the role of the curandero/a as healer and guide and how one is called to this path; cultural practices such as spiritual cleansings, limpias, the aspects of the human body from the Mexika world view, how colonialism affected and continues to affect its understanding and practice; and how empirical observation and sacrifices of thousands of traditional healers over hundreds of years have preserved its ceremonies and knowledge, and the blend of spirit, plant medicine, limpias, and energy work that has carried this tradition through time to us today.

Curanderismo is a specific, culturally rooted expression of traditional medicine ways that, in Maestra Grace’s cultural healing practice, comes from Mexico and blends Indigenous and Mesoamerican cosmology, customs, and practices. For other practitioners, it may be blended with Spanish Catholicism and/or Sephardic or African diasporic influence.

A curandera/curandero/curandere uses cultural tools to help determine the cause of and to treat conditions that straddle the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, among them:
* susto (soul loss from trauma and fright),
* mal de ojo (powerful gaze that may affect others on a spiritual or energetic aspect),
* empacho (energetic-digestive blockage)

Learn more about this powerful ancestral healing tradition on:

Sunday, August 23 - 10 am to noon Pacific on Zoom. Event will not be recorded,
Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-curanderismo-with-maestra-grace-sesma-tickets-1996761106220

Our Fall class registration is still open. All classes are virtual and live. The time of each class is from 5-7:30pm PST. Weekly recordings are available for people who can’t make it to every class. For more info or to register, please click the link in our bio. You can also visit hoodherbalism.com or email [email protected] if you have any questions. Please check your spam inboxes for newsletter and class updates.

Intro to Herbalism - BIPOC only.
August 17, 31, September 14, 28, October 12, 19

Grounded Roots - Advanced Herbalism class open to folks who have taken our Intro Class or another intro to herbalism class. BIPOC only.
August 18, 25, Sept 1, 8, 15, 29, Oct 13, 20, Nov  3, 10, 17, Dec 1

Community Centered Herbalism
Open to Everyone
Sept 2, 9, 16, 30, Oct 14, 21 

Herbal Medicine for Birth Support - open to BIPOC Midwives, Doulas, Birthworkers, Birthkeepers, and practitioners holding space for gestating folks.
August 20, 27, September 3, 10, 17, Oct 1

From one of our amazing healers, Berenice Dimas!

Hi Everyone! Our Fall class registration is open. All classes are virtual and live. The time of each class is from 5-7:30pm PST. Weekly recordings are available for people who can’t make it to every class. For more info or to register, please click the link in our bio. You can also visit hoodherbalism.com or email [email protected] if you have any questions. Please check your spam inboxes for newsletter and class updates.

Intro to Herbalism - BIPOC only.
August 17, 31, September 14, 28, October 12, 19

Grounded Roots - Advanced Herbalism class open to folks who have taken our Intro Class or another intro to herbalism class. BIPOC only.
August 18, 25, Sept 1, 8, 15, 29, Oct 13, 20, Nov  3, 10, 17, Dec 1

Community Centered Herbalism
Open to Everyone
Sept 2, 9, 16, 30, Oct 14, 21 

Herbal Medicine for Birth Support - open to BIPOC Midwives, Doulas, Birthworkers, Birthkeepers, and practitioners holding space for gestating folks.
August 20, 27, September 3, 10, 17, Oct 1

From our querida maestra, Atava Garcia Swiecicki!

Happy 4th birthday to the Curanderx Toolkit book!

On July 12, 2022, Heyday (an incredible, independent publisher) released The Curanderx Toolkit book to the world. Over the past four years, my book has taken me on an incredible journey, connecting me to amazing communities in cities such as Detroit, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Austin, Ojai, Oakland, Sacramento, Stanford & San Francisco. I am grateful for all the bookstores, community organizations and colleges that hosted my book events and look forward for the opportunities and connections that continue to unfold.

Thank you to all my readers! The writing process was long and solitary and I definitely felt vulnerable when I birthed my book baby into the public. As my editor wisely told me, “When your book is published, it takes on a life of its own.” She was correct and I love hearing from folks about the ways my book has impacted them.

Celebrating Four Years with Curanderx Conversations!

One of my favorite parts of writing the Curanderx Toolkit was the chance to interview the thirteen people who were spotlighted in the book. These people were my teachers, students, friends and colleagues, and although I had known many of them for years, I hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to their life story until the interviews.

I learned so much from listening to their stories and words of wisdom and wanted to create a platform for more people to learn from them. This wish gave birth to a new series of videos called Curanderx Conversations. In Curanderx Conversations I will interview these people, along with many others in our greater healing community. Some of the conversations will be live streamed and all will be archived on my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/) .

The first two conversations in the series are now available on YouTube. The first was with beloved elder and mentor Eleanor Barron Druckrey, a curandera of dreaming. The second was a panel of three amazing community practitioners, Brenda Salgado, Patricia Chicueyi Coatl and Sandra Pacheco where they talked about how curanderismo can support our resistance & resilience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV3w_8xtMm4&list=PLU8x3NhvrpoU

Copal!

Long before the first Catholic incense ever burned in a Mexican church, copal smoke was already rising toward the sky in Mesoamerican temples, carrying prayers to the gods in a tradition thousands of years older than the conquest that tried to replace it. 🌿✨ Copal — the resin harvested from the Bursera tree family native to Mexico and Central America — has been used as a sacred ceremonial substance in Mesoamerican religious practice for at least three thousand years, its white fragrant smoke understood not as decoration or atmosphere but as a literal vehicle for communication between the human world and the divine. In Aztec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, and dozens of other Mesoamerican cosmologies, the smoke of burning copal was the medium through which prayers traveled upward to the gods — a direct line of communication made visible, given form and direction, capable of carrying human intention across the boundary between the earthly world and the sacred one.
The Nahuatl word for copal is copalli, and the specific variety most associated with Aztec ceremony — Bursera bipinnata — grows in the dry tropical forests of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla, its resin harvested by hand in the same way it has been collected for centuries. Different varieties of copal produce different qualities of smoke and different scents — some clean and sharp, some sweet and heavy, some with a specific quality that indigenous healers and curanderas still associate with different ceremonial purposes. The choice of copal for a specific ceremony was never arbitrary. It was a deliberate selection made with the same care that a Western pharmacist applies to choosing the right compound for a specific condition. The smoke was medicine as much as prayer. 🌺🕯️
What makes copal's survival across five centuries of Christian missionary pressure so remarkable is that it never fully disappeared from Mexican religious practice — it simply moved into the spaces where indigenous and Catholic traditions overlapped and refused to separate. Today copal smoke rises in Catholic churches in Oaxaca and Chiapas alongside the Catholic incense, in curandera healing ceremonies alongside prayers to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and on Día de los Mu***os altars beside candles and marigolds. The smoke has been rising in the same landscape for three thousand years. The prayers it carries have changed form but never stopped traveling upward. 💛 Have you ever experienced copal smoke in a ceremony, a healing, or a sacred space — and what did the specific quality of that smoke and that moment feel like in your body?

Sharing from Chicueyi Coatl's post...
Free zoom event: July 23, 6-7:15 PDT

Querida comunidad! I'd like to invite you all to a free event (registration required) about our curanderx community with Maestras Sandra Pacheco, Brenda Salgado y Patricia Chicueyi Coatl hosted by Maestra Atava Garcia Swiecicki

This will be a discussion about our curanderx community, its past, present and future as we explore how ancestral healing traditions can support our collective resistance & resilience

I hope to see you all there!!
Please register through the QR code below and please plan to attend! 🥰💝