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Culture
Finding the Cure in Indigenous Oaxaca
by Daphne Carpenter
I had been standing alongside the road in the blistering sun for nearly two hours, hitchhiking on a mission in search of Samadhi, or the settled mind. Finally, a man picked me up. We were driving south along Oaxaca’s coastline at Puerto Escondido, Mexico when he reached across my seat and pointed towards the lonely beach cove. “And over there is where the whale was. It was enormous!”
He said the whale had somehow beached herself and died on the shore, and it took the locals a week to push her back out into the ocean.
Initially the story provoked no emotion in me. My response was null and apathetic.
“Dead whale? Uh, okay.”
Up until that point, my mind had been anchored to the same repetitive pattern of thoughts concerning the events that led to the breakup with my boyfriend four months and 15 days prior. All I wanted to do was find the cure for my broken heart and to stop feeling sad thoughts.
But then, remembering how much I loved whales and imagining the poor creature lying lifeless under the hot sun being devoured by flies, I started to cry. These days I was hyper-emotional and anything, at any time, could set me off.
“Will you be alright, señorita?” When the man saw the spectrum of effects the whale story had had over me, he lightened up the conversation.
His name was Uriel, like the angel. He had been nice enough to stop and give me a lift towards Zipolite, a small yoga-minded town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. My intention was to get over my depression by wandering around the densely indigenous state of Oaxaca, where spiritual energy is abundant. I really had no idea what was in store for me.
The breakup with my boyfriend had brought my world to a crystalline halt. I was depressed and crying just wasn’t helping. I had suffered enough and now it was time to bid farewell to my self-deprecating despair and clear the heavy, stagnant energy block that had lodged itself within my heart chakra.
Uriel dropped me off on the road less than a kilometer away from the beach. I arrived to the cabañas dazed, confused and mysteriously sunburned on only one side of my face.
That’s just great. I felt awful and weak, and now I had a two-toned face. Feeling beaten up by life, I plopped myself into a hammock and immediately disappeared into the tranquil ebb and flow of the playa tranquila.
I started waking up at 4:30 a.m. to drink Tibetan tea, meditate and to do yoga. I began to surrender to the pains of love and find inner harmony. By the end of my retreat, I felt as though I had achieved a renewed sense of peace. Then one night, a group of people invited me to go on an astral adventure.
“Come with us,” suggested Lua, who was from Brazil. “You won’t regret it.”
As a group, we walked out to the back road. When we arrived to the top of the hill, we could see the surrounding beauty of Puerto Escondido, Mazunte, and Zipolite under the golden sunrays that were slowly fading into night.
A woman dressed in white appeared unexpectedly from behind a palm tree. It was as if she had just stepped out from a dream. She introduced herself as Irma Luz. A beautiful Mazatec Indian shamaness in her late 30s, her eyes were warm and her hair was long and shiny black. She spoke Spanish with the indigenous accent characteristic to the region. We followed her to an area further up the cliff where she lived with her extended family and where she performed pre-Hispanic traditional healing ceremonies. This night we would experience the temazcal, an Indian sweat lodge.
The temazcal was a circular clay hut approximately 10 feet in diameter with a small opening that faced west. These sweat lodges have been used in purification ceremonies for thousands of years as a way to connect the human body to cosmic energies—to improve the quality of life. The principle elements of a temazcal ceremony are fire, earth, air and water. Irma Luz explained that once inside the temazcal, we would go through a process of cleansing and rebirth. This was just the medicine I needed.
We disrobed down to our bathing suits at the small door, and then 12 of us piled into the cramped quarters that would become our home for the next hour and a half. Once we were all carefully inside, a young woman covered the outside entrance with a thick blanket and the clay igloo suddenly became pitch-black. Now there was no turning back.
Irma Luz began the ceremony by chanting in her native Mazatec language and then in Spanish. Sitting next to a burner, she began to throw water and eucalyptus leaves onto the hot rocks. She asked each of us individually our earth names, and upon responding, the rest of the group would scream out the name with an enthusiastic roar in different rhythms and pitches for about 20 seconds. The reverberation sounded animalistic and primal, like squawking jungle birds or monkeys. It was bizarre and beautiful. The commotion made each of us feel elated and primordially connected.
As the shamaness called out to Mother Earth and the Creator, hot steam began to rise up and fill the temazcal. She thanked the stars for their light and then invoked the spirits of the four cardinal directions, asking that they provide guidance for our journey. After only a few minutes, the intense heat had caused such discomfort that it began to take hold of me. Beads of sweat raced from my pores like fountains. I did everything I could do to adjust to my anxiety—ujjai breathing, counting backwards from 100, even chanting to myself quietly. I would shift from sitting in a cross-legged position to a hugging-my-knees-to-my-chest position every 20 seconds. I attempted to drop my head below the steam to catch a cool breath, but there was no cool breath anywhere.
The vapor was so dense that I felt like I was going to die. The steam had encapsulated every inch of the temazcal and I felt like I was having an anxiety attack. The blackness was eerie and if it hadn’t been for Irma Luz’s hypnotic chanting and an irresistible willpower from within me that demanded I stick with it, I would have run out like another woman did after only a few minutes.
Then finally, after this first phase, our minds and bodies began to soften and become purified. It was at this point that I began to gather my composure, as if a magical barrier between worlds had been broken. We came to the first of four doors—inter-dimensional portals—through which we would enter and leave behind the poisons of the mind.
I was slowly shifting into a different state of consciousness which was now beckoning me, rather than torturing me. The heat had somehow become tolerable. My body became almost oblivious to its own existence. Irma Luz began to dip eucalyptus branches into the water and spray us as part of the cleansing.
After much chanting, singing, and detoxification, Irma Luz put an end to the steam and said that we had completed our journey. She closed the ceremony by saying a personal prayer for each of us. The whole process was to make us feel as if we were dying because in order to be reborn, we must die first.
Serving as midwives, Irma Luz’s sisters were waiting at the small door to assist us by pulling our slimy sweaty bodies out face first from the clay womb. As I stepped out of the steamy sweat lodge and into the cool air, I felt like a nubile earth child, no longer in-utero, but reborn, stepping out into the world for the first time—again. Disoriented and trembling, with my five senses under a spell, I could barely walk and I could not yet perceive what had just occurred. I walked out like a zombie.
The girls wrapped us in blankets and guided us to a small area of the yard that was enclosed by three walls of thatched palm leaves. They had us lie down on soft rattan floor mats to decompress and to begin to process the experience. They served us warm sage tea.
Wrapped in my blanket like a newborn baby, I stared up into a black velvet sky sprinkled with stars. Then, ever so slowly, I began to return to my body—only this was not the body I had arrived to the temazcal with.
I became overly sensitive to each of the two pulses (from the lower and upper chambers of my heart) that make up one heartbeat. The first beat would pulse from my heart and the one that immediately followed would pulse through my third eye.
For several minutes, my heart was open and actually beating from my third eye. All external sound vanished and I felt like I was floating through the eternal now. Overcome with a great sense of relief, I began to cry. Simultaneously, the pain in my heart slowly began to dissolve. Suspended in this state of oneness, I had found Samadhi.
Daphne Carpenter is a time traveler who stays healthy by surrounding herself with people with positive attitudes, by contorting her body into strange positions while trying to remember to breathe, and by eating a lot of açaí by the beach. Contact her at daphnestree@hotmail.com.