Thank you for visiting my website. May you find what is most needed in your journey of healing and growth. My healing arts offerings combine the principles and practices of Curanderismo and Nahualismo with devotion to the Divine Feminine and Her ancient traditions. Sessions, groups and workshops are conducted in ceremony space. I have studied and practiced Indigenous healing techniques for 20 years, and have applied these traditional methods to 1:1 healing sessions, workshops, public ritual, the arts, and healing groups within mental health facilities for survivors of trauma, abuse, neglect, mental illness and human trafficking. Below is a little more information about the elements of my practice and experience. You will find more details throughout the pages of this website as well.

Curanderismo

Curanderismo is a traditional healing art from Mexico, which blend indigenous wisdom with influences from European healing traditions.  Developed by the first Meztizas, born with both lineages, but without acceptance from either, its emphasis is the loving and deep healing of the emotional conditions that exhaust us and keep us from our true path of flourishing.  Through massage, plant medicines, shamanic healing, ritual, counsel, the wisdom of generations of development, and gentle caring support, the Curandera guides you through a process of releasing heavy emotion and destructive patterns, while discovering the lessons therein and calling home the lost parts of the soul.

Led by my dreams and by the plants who helped me to find the Curanderx community, I have had the good fortune to be traditionally trained in the art of Curanderismo by internationally respected Curanderas Estela Roman and Dona Enriqueta Contreras, as well as Master Herbalist and Healer Atava Garcia Swiecicki of Ancestral Apothecary starting in 2012.  I began as a massage therapist, Reiki practitioner/energy healer and tarot reader, and as a Reclaiming tradition witch. I then began training in shamanic healing and Native Way spiritual disciplines from the age of 26. At the same time that I was engaged in my journey with Vision Questing, The Sundance, and Native Way ceremony and indigenous healing forms for extraction, journeying, and soul retrieval, I remained in love with the deeply personal and ecstatic relationship I felt with the Goddess and the Earth, and wanted to bring that loving, nurturing connection into the healing forms that I was learning. When I discovered the Curanderismo tradition, that was in my own lineage but which had not been taught because of assimilation to U.S. culture, I realized that I was just trying to recreate what already existed in this form and in my soul memory. I now have over 20 years of experience in massage, intuitive seership, and animistic, earth based healing arts.  Having worked for 6 years at the popular Kabuki Spa in SF, I spent the following 10 years developing and facilitating an Expressive Arts, ritual and herbalism program in SF for youth healing from trauma, neglect and mental health crisis at Edgewood Center for Children and Families and engaged with other therapeutic centers to bring ritual and the arts to survivors of trauma and sexual trafficking. After the birth of my son in 2017, I began to do this healing work directly, outside of the frame of mental health agencies or other formats that I had used as a kind of screen or umbrella for the work I felt called to do. I wanted my son to know who we are and to heal the Ancestral wound that encourages us to hide our magic and healing light. So much wounding, persecution, and fear came from generations past, but also so much resilience, survival, knowledge and love. Now is the time to reclaim the gifts and beauty, as we heal the wounds. Ometeotl.

Everything That We See Is A Shadow Cast By That Which We Do not See.

/  Martin Luther King jr.  /

My Experience

I am first generation Mexican-American. My father came to California at about 9 years old, one of the youngest of a large family of migrant workers.  He and his 7 siblings worked in the orchards and fields alongside their parents to support the family, in addition to attending public schools in new towns each season and learning English.  I can’t say that I know what that experience is like.  When my father or my aunts and uncles speak of this time, it is clear that they still feel the loss of the communal warmth and slower pace of the life they left behind, the shyness of being outsiders, and the stresses the family faced.  Each of them found a place in this country, citizenship, job, family, though they had to take the opportunities that came to them and never had the needed support to design an education and career path based on their dreams and ideals.  Instead, they worked hard to develop some security, and to place a little more ease and freedom to choose in the hands of their children.  Like many of my generation, I have been gifted more opportunity than my parents were because they did the hard work of assimilation.  I have had the luxury of education and hold three Master's degrees in the arts for theatre, interdisciplinary arts, and creative writing.  However, like many in my generation who inherited an emphasis on Americanized identity, I was left with a longing to understand my roots, and the fragments of more indigenous ways of understanding that I felt intuitively, but had not been taught.  When I was little, I loved to spend time with my paternal grandmother, who was also my godmother.  She spoke no English, and I was the only child in the family who was of mixed ethnicity and wasn’t able to speak much Spanish, as it wasn’t encouraged in my household.  So, instead of words, she communicated with me by showing how to do things with love and silence.  We cooked together, making everything by hand, while the modern appliances sat on the counters, polished and unused.  I watched her interact lovingly with the birds that lived in her house, one of them a wild sparrow, all of them able to fly in and out of their cages at will.  She would give me special objects, or holy water, laugh with me, place her hand on my heart.  She had a magic for me.  I learned from watching her, and I longed for something that I couldn’t name.  I found out later that she had prophetic dreams as well, that in fact many of the people in my family do, but the influence of Catholicism made it into something we don’t much talk about.  I learned that she was a teacher and poet in Mexico, before coming here.  And I learned that she always had a magical relationship with birds.  Even a wild crow befriended her in Mexico and would watch over her babies if she stepped away, cawing and threatening anyone who approached.  I would love to have talked to her more about these things later in life, to understand her beliefs, practices, and even who her mother was, but she died of breast cancer when I was 11 years old.  Still, I have always felt her presence in my life.  As a young adult I sought out indigenous wisdom and practices.  I learned about dreaming and healing.  I became a theatre artist, a writer, an arts teacher for emotionally disturbed youth, and for adults looking for self exploration and healing through original performance development.  I cultivated relationship with the animal and plant worlds.  I found my way back to the traditions of my lineage by putting the pieces together from instinct and seeking teachers wherever I could find them, in order to understand my own feelings and gifts.  This is something that my child won’t have to do, should he have the same internal calling.  And in this quest for myself, in my attempt to understand who I am, to be a better artist and teacher, a good mother, a more fulfilled person and a healer to those who would ask for that, by relearning these practices, I learned that in this country of people who mostly left behind their cultures of origin to become part of a fast paced, demanding, and secular whirlwind of individualism, the elements that make up indigenous based healing and ritual are like water for our souls.

I know who I am now.  I am placed somewhere in the lineage of the Mestizas, the children who were born to be neither part of the Indigenous culture that makes up half of their psyche, nor part of the European lineage that blended with these Ancestors after colonization and gave us our exotic appearance, so easily passing for a variety of cultural identities.  The Spanish side of my family came to Mexico well past that early post-colonial time period but in time to fight in the Mexican Revolution. Already a blend of Basque, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Dutch origins, they came to the Haciendas as teachers and merchants. Here we are Mexican Americans, or just Americans, something that perhaps adds to the cultural confusion, but just like the first of our kind, we carry the medicine of both parts of our heritage, and the ability to make a bridge to the older forms of healing that still serve to address the fears, sorrows, and lostness of people in a rapidly changing world.  It was the Mestizas who developed the art of Curanderismo, and learning this gave a lot of clarity to my life and my impulse, which is why I regard that term with respect. I can relate to the tension and sorrow of not being able to claim an identity, of feeling like perhaps I belong to nowhere and nothing, and yet my dreams and inner feeling led me just the same to origin places of my lineages. Returning to Mexico to study with elders in the tradition and to visit the sacred sites, I was not treated as an outsider by the land or the people, but rather like a lost child of the lineage who had found her way home.  This filled me with more healing than I can accurately describe, and with a sense of responsibility towards my lineage. Years later, and much to my surprise, I was treated with open arms and a deep embrace of land magic when I visited Mallorca, Spain, an island with Neolithic roots and a system of 200 caves beneath. I began to get a sense of just now much memory and magic we can carry in our our veins and in our Akashic records when I visited one of those caves and experienced a deep and ancient earth temple.  All of my goals as a healer, as a writer, and as an artist stem from my desire to understand the potent gifts of my heritage and its particular blend of working with the unconscious, the deep imagination, the body in relationship with the soul, and the powerful and deeply nurturing elements of nature in the process of healing trauma, recovering original purpose, and cultivating joy, connection, freedom, magic, sanctity, and depth in our modern lives.  

I have been fortunate, because in finding my lineage within Curanderismo and traveling to Mexico I not only came to understand myself a lot better, as well as the principals of healing, but was also led towards the opportunity to learn the  more ancient and potent spiritual teachings of the Mexica (Aztec) and Toltec cultures, just as they were first being taught by the elders who have preserved them through an oral tradition existing only within family lines.  Because of Mexica prophecy, the teachings and practices for healing and spiritual development relating to intentionally working with the unconscious are now beginning to be taught openly, though few people know of them.  My purpose is to honor the ancestors who preserved this tradition with the foresight that people like me, living in this era, would be adrift in a time of confusion and displacement, disconnected from the wisdom of the more hidden layers of the world and of our own internal landscapes, essentially dreaming our lives by accident instead of intention and artfulness.  I grew up with a quiet feeling of fear of my intuition and dreams, and the sense of not fitting in with the world around me.  I now see this as a form of generational trauma, coming from the displacement of immigration, the tension of racism, and even the earlier wounds of colonization and the following centuries when it was dangerous to acknowledge gifts and interests related to magic or healing in Mexican culture.  In my community of Curanderas, and in my work as a healer and with disenfranchised and traumatized youth at Egewood Center for Children and Families, I have seen firsthand how real that sense of disconnection, disempowerment and longing is.  In my traditional healing practice, it is my intention to focus on generational trauma, as well as my culture’s traditional practices for healing unconscious and ancestral patterns, and addressing trauma in a soul centered, sensory oriented and nurturing manner, as is the emphasis of Curanderismo.  All of this is in service to the Ancestors, with eternal gratitude for their resilience, and in gratitude for the teachers who helped me to know myself and shared with me the tools I now use to support others.  Ometeotl.

-Melusina Gomez

Through love, all pain will turn to medicine.

/  Rumi  /