Chiapas Healing Center

By donating to this campaign, you will be supporting an indigenous community and their local healer to build a center dedicated to the healing arts with native medicine. Our support of this center is one way to help show respect and gratitude for the cultures that have developed these practices over thousands of years.

Among the peoples native to Mexico, the healer or sorcerer is a character whose community function is essential. She communicates between this world and that of the gods. The figure of Maria Sabina, specifically, was a bridge of wisdom and mysticism within her community and between the world of divinity and that of humankind. Moreover, she was also one of the key figures of recent decades in the world’s approach to the sacred practices of these peoples, a journey which still has many lessons to show us.

This brings us to the project at hand. Amparo Sanchez is a young Mayan from Chiapas who has been deeply studying the art of healing with the native medicine of her region. She is at the beginning of her journey but has the potential to become a healer at the level of Maria Sabina. She comes from a village that is in need of, not just a community healer, but a reconnection to the history of her people. She came into our lives many years ago, and we have been honored to watch her grow from a young woman with only a sixth-grade education, who earned her money by selling empanadas on the street, mother of 3 children (the first born when she was only 15), to a powerful healer training in her indigenous wisdom.

As a family, we have been supporting her shamanic formation over these years. She has one more year left of training, at which point she will return to Mexico and open her healing center. Amparo and her family have been caught in a multi-generational cycle of poverty. Her training as a healer, and the building of this center for the community, we hope will help break that cycle. This center will serve as a place for her community to return to the spiritual practices that are a part of their legacy, to heal as a community, and to grow.

Your donation will go to purchase land and build the center. Amparo will be returning to her village in December 2023. She will travel with the healers who have been training her over these years, and they will help install and initiate her as the healer of her community and hold the first healings together to inaugurate the center.

You will receive regular updates accounting use of the funds, pictures of the building as it progresses, and a video account of the first healing in the center.