Curanderismo Workshop 8: Healing with the Heart & Spirit (Center)

The 8th and final installment of the CAHAM curanderismo workshop series!

Led by curandero Jesús Cuauhtémoc Villa, this class will focus on the basics of healing the Heart and Spirit - as well as how to heal with Heart and Spirit - and working with the Medicine Wheel direction of Center (Xictlampa) in Chicano & Mexican curanderismo.

Students will participate in a traditional closing ceremony and cover topics including:

• herbs associated with heart health and circulation
• herbs associated with lifting the spirit (including traditional remedies for anxiety, depression, and stress)
• sacred duality, nonbinarism, and nonbinary & Two-Spirit people in Nahua medicine tradition
• working with the teyolia, one of the body's animating forces and sacred powers in Nahua medicine tradition
• a traditional egg and broom barrida (sweeping energy cleansing) for healing from susto (fright sickness) and aiding in soul retrieval
• the healing elements associated with the Center, yollotl (Heart) and animatzin (Spirit)
• and more!

Jesús Cuauhtémoc Villa, M.A., is a curandero, a co-founder of the Patiloni Collective, a co-founder of and Director of Programming for the Sonoran Desert Cultural Preservation Society (SDCPS), the head instructor for the SDCPS's Center for Ancestral Healing Arts and Medicines (CAHAM), and a Ph.D. candidate in the Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology (with a focus on Forensic Anthropology) and a Master's degree in Religious Studies (with a focus on Anthropology of Religion) from Arizona State University. His Master's thesis examines the African, European, Indigenous Mesoamerican, and other multicultural influences on Mexican curanderismo, the traditional medicine and ancestral healing art of Mexico and the Mexican diaspora. His doctoral research is in thanatology: the scientific and humanistic study of death and dying in a cross-cultural perspective and in the context of the México-U.S. borderlands. Villa is a community-recognized curandero (meaning "healer," a practitioner of curanderismo) who learned his healing arts from a family lineage dating back to pre-colonial Mexico; from a 13-year apprenticeship with local curandera Doña Patricia Federico; and from master curanderas, curanderes, curanderos, Conjure Doctors, Indigenous medicine people, and other traditional healing experts from all over Mexico, the U.S., Central America, and the Caribbean. When not in school or working on CAHAM and SDCPS matters, Villa enjoys gardening, hiking, making traditional Mexican and Chicano folk art, playing music, falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and talking to plants, rocks, bones in the desert.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Arizona Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, this and all other installments of the CAHAM curanderismo workshop series is free and open to the public! The Sonoran Desert Cultural Preservation Society, its Center for Ancestral Healing Arts and Medicines, and the curanderismo workshop series instructors sincerely thank AZ Humanities and the NEH for making this project possible. ¡Muchísimas gracias, patrones!

Host or Publisher The Sonoran Desert Cultural Preservation Society