Curanderismo

 At twenty, I lost my way. I didn’t know what to do with my life, where to turn, or how to quiet the uncertainty that followed me everywhere. In my confusion, I sat down with my mother and asked her for guidance. She listened carefully, then spoke gently about making a manda. A manda is a sacred promise for direction and clarity. With her patron saints, La Virgen de Guadalupe and San Francisco, my mother helped me shape a path of devotion and reflection.

My manda was simple but powerful: I would not cut my hair for two years. In that time, I would step away from the material distractions that clouded my focus and instead dedicate myself to self-discipline, reflection, and meditation.
My mother asked a Yaqui curandero friend of hers, Don Francisco, who ran a small yerbería in Chandler, to mentor me. Under his guidance, I began to undergo limpias and assist with them, learn about plant medicine, and understand how to support our community when they came seeking healing or counsel.
I took to walking for hours through the desert's deep wilderness. Those walks became my true classroom. The land taught me to listen to the wind through the ocotillo, the rhythms of the seasons, the quiet lives of the small creatures moving beneath mesquite shade. I began to sense my own place within it all, a thread woven into something vast and living. The beauty I discovered there was beyond words, beyond comprehension.
On April 1, the day my manda began, I could not have imagined how much I would change. Two years later, I found myself sitting in front of a mirror, scissors in hand, staring at my reflection. My hair had grown long and black, carrying within it the weight of those two sacred years. I sat for hours, remembering the meditations, the solitude, the lessons learned from the land and from Don Francisco.
For the first time in my life, I felt truly alone, and I realized that being alone was not something to fear; in fact, I welcomed it, I honored it. In this moment of reflection in the mirror, I also lost the fear of death and the unknown. It was a space of peace, clarity, humility, and gratitude.
I put the scissors down, wiped my tears, and offered silent thanks to my mother and to Don Francisco for guiding me with such love and patience. I stepped forward that day with a deeper understanding of who I am, who I am becoming, and my sacred connection to all my relations, seen and unseen, animate and inanimate.
almost 40 years later, my hair is still long, it still captures the moments and experiences of my life, it also remembers and helps me remember the 'manda" that I live, breathe and walk.
We are never finished with the “work”, just in a better place to understand the “work” before us.
In “beauty’…..jeffrey

Read more on Curenderisimo here-
https://www.curanderismo.org/


https://www.curanderismo.org/

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