Teresa's Journey of Indigenous Learning
My "Borderlands" Spiritual-Healing Journey:
I just celebrated another birthday. In this COVID and Uprising world we are living into together it was a birthday of rest and reflection. One where I took time to reflect deeply on what I am centering, living into and releasing into this new year of life. In this moment of crisis it feels for myself, and many others I talk to, the urgency of the world has manifested a kind of refinement to vision and calling where what isn't needed falls away as unessential and what is necessary becomes even more deeply rooted.
As an international adoptee, born in Colombia and raised the United States by white parents the story of who I am, what has meaning and what I am being called into always becomes immensely prominent in and around my own birth day. The day of being born in one way and the beginning of losing so much - as international adoption is also a process of removing us from the people, the culture, the language and the lineages which are our birth right.
My whole life feels like it constantly circles back to my birth day. The day of beginnings and the early stages of grieving a loss that I couldn't yet understand but has taken a lifetime towards reclamation.
In this COVID moment, in which the poignancy and clarity of calling and deepening seems so pin sharp I have been leaning deeply into the lineages of healing and spirituality from my ancestors at a new level of commitment. A commitment to learning and growing in the ancestral wisdoms that resonate with me - as an adoptee (often as with other displaced peoples) that often is finding what resonates which is often less specific to the place of our birth but a wider continuum of cultural landscape .
For me that is specifically Latinx oriented healing and spirituality across a continuum.
In this moment of virtual access, in this weird expansion of our increasing virtualized 2020, I have found greater access to teachers and wisdoms which would have been inaccessible in previous times - and more time at home to commit to the search for the things that fit the greatest towards my mission towards a return to lineage - as an individual and as a practitioner for community through Mystic Soul, TRACC4Movements and beyond...with a focus on BIPOC/QTPOC care and social movement healing work.
This brings me into this "Borderlands" Spiritual-Healing Journey and calling - to find what feels most like home and, in prayer and meditation, what is that asking of me as a person and as someone serving community. There is some part of this is work I have to do for myself, but, also to me what serves me also is in service of community.
Deepening Call into Indigenous Medicine & Wisdom:
This searching has brought me to three specific continuums of learning and growth. Each one serves an aspect of the work I feel called into in this new year of life, and beyond that, into this new season of work as a spiritual and healing care provider.
The first calling into deeper study in herbalism and herbal medicine, an area of practice that I have been especially called into in COVID times - both due to a new hyper-attunement to the way in which we offer our body its own healing and resiliency and also an awareness of the absence of nature in my city-based life and a thirst for connection to the earth and the elements of nature that nurture us. I also knew I wanted the orientation of learning I accessed to not be white-led and to be very intentionally Latinx-oriented. As a result I found Atabey Medicine Apprenticeship with Lara Pacheco, a Taino-informed approach to herbalism, which will be a year course of study, now virtually accessible even though traditionally west-coast and in-person. I found out this past week that, after the interview process a few weeks ago, I have officially been offered a space in the program! I am so grateful and hopeful to begin this journey to help nurture my own wholistic wellness (as a chronically ill person) and also that of others in community.
The second calling was into the study of the spiritual and healing traditions of the Andes mountains - having had a lifelong connection to these mountains of my birth. In my search I found my way to Don Alejandro Apaza - one of the remaining lineages of the Incan Q'ero Paqo (healer) tradition. In these COVID times and with an increased sense of accountability to their ancestors and passing along the wisdom of the Andes to a new generation outside of Cusco alone, where the tradition is dying out, Don Alejandro and the Apaza family decided to offer their oral tradition of sharing the healer and spiritual lineage of Q'ero Paqo formation and initiation in a virtual way. This program I begin this fall and am working towards my first initiation (of three, I am still hoping when I have come to the third and final initiation in my process of learning I will be able to go to Cusco to do it in person). This journey has already been such a powerful reclamation and embodied remembrance not just of the spiritual lineage of my own Andes ancestral path but also one in which I am learning the healing and ritual practices of this lineage which I can offer into community.
The third space of learning is that of the Traditional Healer program with Marika Alvarado who integrates her lineages of both a Curanderimx and Apache are of Healer learning and practice - one which integrates much of the two dimensions of learning of the previous two programs I named - bringing together ritual and healing - and offering an orientation to indigenous earth-based wisdom and Curanderx ritual (including depth study in Limpias and other Curanderismx healing practices) bringing forward the North American borderlands of Latinx Indigenous wisdom. As this program begins layered after the other two I am hoping it brings together a final grounding and foundation of the two previous areas of learning and deepening my own orientation towards the ancestral wisdoms of Curanderismx - which I began this summer with the University of New Mexico's two week intensive in Curanderism and continued with a series of virtual workshops with practitioners across the country. Like the other programs, this program is a virtual training program, beginning in March 2020.
The Tri-Fold Process of Learning, Immersion & Deepening:
1. Atabey Medicine Apprenticeship with Lara Pacheco of Seed & Thistle Apothecary in Portland, Oregon: ($1500+500 for herbs) - Beginning December 2020
2. Paqo Education & Initiations with the Apaza family lineage of Q'ero Paqos of Cusco, Peru at the Inca Medicine School: $2900 (Module 1: $1300, Module 2: $800, Module 3: $800) - Began Fall 2020
3. Traditional Healer Certificate Program with Marika Alvarado at The Earth Institute of Indigenous Cultures & Teachings: ($2000) - Beginning March 2021
Total Cost (excluding supplies): $6900. I want in the requested amount to be clear that I want to also be offering my own fiscal support towards the training continuum beyond the ask into community. This includes $900 minimum plus additional supplies in costs that I want to and plan to find means to internally finance.
This is why I wanted my ask to be less than the total for the training - I think, even when it is a tight financial fit, it is important for us to work towards what we most want and I want my investment to sit alongside what I am inviting community into investment alongside me.
My Commitment Towards Reciprocity In Community:
I want to commit, as I commit to myself to the sincerity of this learning and growth journey in my own process of autoethnography (historical and present storytelling and experiential connection to my ancestral and personal story - intertwined), to also be deeply connected in a collective and communal way as I move through tthis journey. Part of this is the intentionality I want to have towards mentorship and teachers in this process and co-learning community, but I also want to be able to share the wisdoms I have been given in a way that are in service of healing and growth in community.
Towards this intention, I am hopeful, that if you choose to donate towards this journey of learning it feels like both an investment in my process, but also in a way that I can offer that learning back into community - to yourself, your friends, your community members. I want to make very specific commitments to how I am willing and wanting to share in that way through and after my process of education.
Beginning in Spring/Summer of 2021 I will be able to offer: (all virtual)
1. Introductory community education and ritual space on the Q'ero Paqo lineage of wisdom and practice (no cost), especially for BIPOC persons but open to all.
2. (*Into 2021 when I have the training enough to offer this in full*): Community-based introductory Herbalism & Curanderismx education and support especially for under-resourced, specifically BIPOC persons (basic herbal remedies, limpias, feather and smoke clearings/rituals, etc) but open to all.
3. An intention towards "Mutual Aid Medicine Making" - being able to offer herbal remedies towards mutual aid efforts in BIPOC and movement communities.
I hope to continue to be able to give back what I have received in at least equal measure and hopefully much greater measure - most especially and specifically for BIPOC and QTBIPOC community members.
Anything I might get beyond the basic requested amount in support of this journey will be split three ways between the following:
- Donation towards Inca Medicine School for their work with Indigenous communities in and around Cusco, Peru retaining and preserving the Indigenous wisdom with youth programming for Indigenous Peruvian young people in ancestral wisdom and practices.
- Donation towards Brown Girl Rise a program of Seed & Thistle Apothecary towards supporting young girls of color building community, empowerment and learning experiences & towards funding for BIPOC scholarship to the Atabey Medicine Apprenticeship.
- Funding towards full tuition costs for the three programs as well as course materials and supplies.
A DEEP BOW OF THANKS TO YOU ALL - MY BELOVED COMMUNITY:
Thank you so much for listening to my own story of becoming and my deepening in my own spiritual and healer lineage origins - a kind of homecoming - building out of this year and into my new year of life out of my October 15th birthday....both the feast day in the Catholic tradition of my raising of my namesake Teresa of Avila and the birthday of one my newly found (this year) birth sister, the radical mystic and one of the original Borderlands Curanderx - Teresa Urrea (whose life was fictionalized in the book "The Hummingbird").
I feel I hold the healer-mystic space between those places - one of learning in my adopted life and one I learned of in my indigenous roots seeking. Both powerful mystic women and both holding narratives of learning, mysticism and healing which continue to inform my life and my relationship with them.
I come from this lineage of mystic-healers and I am hopeful for the ways I continue to step into this path in a deeper way. I am grateful for any way you might want to support this journey - and deeply humbled by any giving towards this journey - for myself but also to give back into community. En conjunto.
