Heritage of Healing
This podcast episode delves into the traditional practice of curanderismo, focusing on the relationship between an apprentice and her master healer, La Maestra Michelle. Michelle explains the various types of curanderos and their specialties, which include massage, midwifery, herbalism, and spiritual healing. The episode also discusses the interchangeable use of terms like curandera, shaman, and medicine person, as well as the cultural roots and misconceptions surrounding these practices.
Listeners are cautioned that the podcast is for entertainment and not medical advice. The episode highlights the importance of lineage and the apprenticeship process in becoming a curandera, emphasizing the long-term dedication required to master the healing arts.
Heritage of Healing
Guided by Dreams and Spirits
Ever wondered what secrets your dreams are trying to tell you? Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the dream world with Michelle, a master healer with a unique blend of expertise in curanderismo and psychology. Michelle guides us through the healing potential of dreams, offering insights on how connecting with loved ones who've passed on can bring comfort and closure.
Our exploration doesn't stop there; we venture into the enigmatic realm of spirits and energies. Hear thrilling stories, like that of a family in New Mexico grappling with a hostile ghost, and understand the importance of respecting the spirits of the land. We discuss practical methods to shield yourself from negative energies and preserve the magic of positive dream experiences. As Liz shares her transformative journey as Michelle's apprentice, we invite you to join our community on Instagram at Curandera Podcast for further updates and insights. Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes and share this episode with friends who might find our discussions both intriguing and enlightening.
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What are dreams? Just a way of processing our daily lives and experiences? Or is there more? Do we travel to past lives, interact with spirits or even become haunted while dreaming? La Maestra knows, and today she is telling us about the dream world and how to quickly remove any negative energies that attach to us after a distressing dream. This is a good one. Here we go. There are some fascinating studies about the biology and psychology of dreams, for example. Many of us are dreamers but don't really know it. It is said that most people forget about 95% of their dreams, and that's disappointing because in a lifetime, we will spend an average of six years of our lives dreaming. Knowing this, it's important to get a better handle on our dreams and how powerful they can be. So I asked Michelle can she start out by just talking about what dreams are?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, dreams, aren't they so amazing. Now, saying that I am a dreamer and I dream and remember my dreams every night, pretty much, and I have also an educational background in the understanding of dreams, so I do consider myself a specialist in dreams, both from curanderismo and, let's say, psychology. There are many different levels of dreams, so sometimes our dreams are just processing our day-to-day and they have to do with our stresses or things that are happening in our current life. Sometimes they have to do with, maybe, something that has happened in the past that needs to be processed through or awareness needs to come to you in reference to that which affords the opportunity for healing.
Speaker 2:And there are what I call dream happenings, and to me, dream happenings are when we are on other levels, in the dream time, and we're having actually experiences on those levels in which we enter into interactions with other entities. I think all of us have the capacity to have those dreams and have those experiences on those levels. It takes a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of discernment to know sometimes when it's a psychological dream versus a dream happening and those. It depends on who you go to and how they're analyzed. But I always like to say, like, people are the specialists of their lives and they know what the dream is about.
Speaker 1:The notion of dream happenings is fascinating, so I asked Michelle if we could talk more about what that is exactly.
Speaker 2:Those are things where you're having an experience on another dimension and your soul is journeying and interacting with other people, other beings, and you're doing things. And also a dream happening can be when somebody who has passed on comes to communicate with you. And those dreams are very common and they're very beautiful and very healing to a person when they've lost somebody.
Speaker 1:Michelle's answer sounded so lovely, but I had a strange and powerful experience years ago when I first visited New Orleans. I was a high school student and was very interested in the history and the culture of the town. My mother and I went on a tour and encountered a space where there were still very obvious remnants of the ways that people were brutalized. One woman on my tour walked past the area and fainted. It was shocking because an ambulance actually came to tend to her and she could not complete the tour While everyone else encircled the woman. I wanted to take a better look at what caused that impact.
Speaker 1:Energetically, I felt something pull me towards the gate that blocked the area. That gate looked probably for good reason like a jail sales gate. Now, this pool wasn't like a pool of interest or curiosity. It was an aggressive yank that made me lose my balance a little bit. I shook it off and forgot about it Back at the hotel. I quickly fell asleep after a long and hot day of touring. I seemed to be waking up, so I opened my eyes and looked down and saw myself sleeping. Suddenly, I felt that same yanking pulling on me and I commanded aloud no, I fell back asleep and rested well as if nothing had happened. This seemed like a happening versus a dream. I wanted Michelle to weigh in and I wondered specifically are happenings often bad? They can be bad.
Speaker 2:They can be really beautiful and very pleasant as well. Just like a human experience on the earth plane, it can vary from anything positive to negative all the way across, anywhere in between. And so, yeah, anywhere in between. And so, yeah, interestingly, you know how you said. You say you can't, you're not granting them permission, you were not granting them permission, and so you came right back into your bed, into the at the hotel room, and so that is a curandera technique, where we are taught if an entity or an energy is trying to attack you, you command that they don't have permission and they can't touch you. But most people don't know that, so they go along with it or they're in it and they don't know how to get out of it. That's an interesting story when you're crossing over and talking about something being haunted, the energy remaining there of atrocities that happen perhaps at that area.
Speaker 1:Bringing up ghosts is a perfect transition, because, for people that often feel like they have experienced a ghost or a haunting, a common response that others may give them is it's all in your head or you're just dreaming it or something to that effect. So, michelle, are ghosts?
Speaker 2:actually real, absolutely. I have a lot of people that come to me because they have some sort of energy ghost entity, something stuck in their house or on their property. I'll tell you this story. It's related to both things being haunted and the dream. So I bought this property that I have about 15 years ago or so, and the first week that I slept here I had a dream.
Speaker 2:I'm going to shorten the dream, going to shorten the dream, but basically in the dream I was an indigenous woman, and right close to my house is a, an Arroyo with a little bit of a Canyon, not a big one, but and in that Arroyo were dwellings like houses, and in the dream I was this native American woman and I was. It was nighttime and I had a dream in my dream, and in the dream that I had on the second level, I saw men coming with torches and horses and they were coming fire, and so the long story short is, I was trying to. I woke up in the level of the dream. I woke up and I was getting people out of these dwellings and I was frantic to get them out. There were men, women and children. Anyway, I got them out, but there was death and pillaging and all kinds of heinous things that happened in this dream. And so I told my at the time my husband, who's an indigenous man. I called him up, I said I had this dream and I said do you know if the Native Americans were here where I bought this property? Oh, my gosh, he said I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:For some reason he goes over to the grocery store in Pahuaque to go pick something up and he runs into this man who's selling earrings, and this man is from Santo Domingo Pueblo and he starts telling this man my dream. Long story short, the man says that was our original Pueblo and that is exactly what our stories tell. And that is what happened. Would you mind if we go meet your wife and we say some prayers and pray on the land? So this area is haunted with a lot of indigenous beings and I have a cousin who lives around the corner from me and she sees them in her home all the time, the indigenous people which is in this area. This was Santo Domingo Pueblo and there's shards here and there's all kinds of stuff. And my dream was one a happening. I believe it was a past life happening. It was prophetic, as it showed what was coming and what was going to happen, and it also let me know about the energies and the entities and the ghosts that are around here.
Speaker 1:You may be in a situation where you live in a home that very well is haunted and you might know it, but perhaps it doesn't really interfere with your daily life.
Speaker 2:So I asked Michelle, is it ever okay to just cohabitate with a ghost in your house? And like the ones here that are here in this house, I know that a woman died in this home before I bought this house and she's around and I'll catch her out at the corner of my eye. And then there's the indigenous people that this land was their home, and I catch them all the time, a lot of the times, and what I do is I make an out loud offering, in the sense of I say to them I'm here on this level, living in this space, and you're on your level, in your space, and I come here with respect to you. I don't want to interfere with you and I'm asking you not to interfere with me. And sometimes I have little altar grids in my home, different ones, and I'll make an offering on that little altar grid and I'll tell them I'm placing an offering here for you, so that you know that and I'm coming with good. Now there's some energies and goes that are not with good intention and I've had people come like I had a couple.
Speaker 2:The father was a psychiatrist in Las Vegas, new Mexico, and the mother was a doctor, and they had two young girls. They were teenage girls who had all of these interactions with this poltergeist thing, and they were very Catholic. They went to the priest and the priest tried to do an exorcism and couldn't get rid of it, whatever it was that was going on in the house. And so the parents didn't believe in the ghost. They were like this is BS, we don't believe in any of this. So the priest referred them to me and so I started working with this teenage girl who was 16, who was really having a lot of problems with the ghost. It would come at night when she would turn on her music, the ghost would grab her neck. It was an attacking energy, and so I did a lot of work with them, with a lot of different things over a period of time, and finally we got the this ghost to be out of there. The young girl did some research and she found out that there was a murder there that happened to a woman and a man who lived in that home. I don't know, I think it was like in the late 1800s. It was an older home, and so, anyway, she found out about that. But her mother became a believer because I told the mom okay, you don't believe any of this. I said I'm going to ask you to sleep with your teenage daughter one night and I'm going to ask her to go into the routine of turning on the music and going through the routine of what happened. And that thing grabbed the girl and grabbed the mom. So the mom became a believer and you hear of areas that are very haunted and you go back and things have happened.
Speaker 2:I think when they're friendly ghosts, you just cohabit with them. They're here and they're not hurting you, and then, when they're not friendly ghosts, you have to talk to them and you have to create protection and remove them. You have to move them on. They're stuck there because something bad happened and a piece of their soul, if you will, is stuck there. You want to pray for them and you want to ask their angels to surround them. There's also different methods, which are a little bit complicated, in reference to what you need to do with certain herbs and certain washes, where you would wash the entire home let's say it's in a home. You would wash the entire home, the walls, rid of any items that could be related and or close portals in the area of the home, of the inside of the home.
Speaker 1:Currently living in a large metropolitan area, I see new buildings popping up along the skyline and into the suburbs constantly. But even in these brand new buildings I've personally experienced poltergeist activity. But the building is new, so what's going on?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. They might not be yours directly, but you're stepping on the dead, because every corner of the world has been inhabited at different times by different ones. And so in our world it's just we're going to mow everything down, we're going to cut all the trees, we're going to lay the foundation, and there's no blessing, there's no prayer put there, there's no acknowledgement, there's no asking and asking for permission to the spirits. May I place this here? Is this okay to place here? Because you get signs from the spirit. So that's something that in the Western world is not done, but in our ways for sure, we do that when we're going to make a building and move things around, we ask before we do it. Those are very big differences, because if you have permission to place a building, then you're going to have a different energy there. If you don't, and you place a big old sky rise there don't be surprised if it is haunted and things are happening.
Speaker 1:No doubt that's true. And coming full circle to the conversation about dreams, you sometimes hear of people having terrorizing dreams when they're in certain areas. So what do we do if darker energies are infiltrating our dream time?
Speaker 2:When people have really heavy dream experiences with darker entities or energies. I think that those are things that we, in our ways, we teach to cleanse out and burn out, to remove those energies and those residues from within you. If we wanted to burn an energy out when you have, let's say you have a very heavy dream or a dream, paralysis dream or a nightmarish dream, you would take that dream and you can take an herb. We take cedar, we grind the cedar. You can take an herb that's local to your area and you grind that you have blessed and you have it closed in a glass jar, place a little bit of it in your hand.
Speaker 2:You can do salt as well and you blow the dream. You blow the energy of the dream, the emotion, the energy, whatever it is that haunted you into that item, into the cedar or into the salt, and then you place that in a fire and you burn it out. You burn it out, you get rid of it because you don't want to carry inside of you certain energies. You don't need to carry it. Maybe there's some wisdom or a teaching within that happening even though it might've been negative that you needed to know, that you needed to understand, but you want to get rid of the emotion and the energy that you interacted and that was placed inside of you.
Speaker 1:We should also explore the opposite. Explore the opposite. So what if we are feeling so much love and connection from a good dream? Is there a way to honor that or anything that we should know about those circumstances?
Speaker 2:Yes, I was always taught. When you have one of those kinds of dreams that's a magical, amazing, powerful dream and you're just feeling that energy and you're like, whoa, this is awesome. What our first instinct to do is to go and tell our friends or our mom or our dad, or let everybody our coworker know of this amazing dream. Do not do that. Do not do that. What we are taught is that leaks the energy out. That energy is a gift for you and you hold it and you keep it with you and you don't leak it out and you tap into the feeling of it and magnify that feeling inside of your energy field and inside of your heart or your mind or wherever you're needing it inside of you. But that belongs to you and it's special. It's something special for you and only you.
Speaker 2:Dreams are a very special capacity that each of us has, and to understand what they bring to you and how often they can bring that to you is a very beautiful way to develop your own spirituality.
Speaker 1:Thank you, michelle, for sharing your wisdom on this topic. It has been so interesting. I'm Liz, the apprentice to the master healer, michelle. If you'd like to follow along a little more closely on my learning journey and her healing journey, find us at curandera podcast on Instagram, and if you want to help support our work, please consider writing us a review and giving us a rating on iTunes, and please do share this show with anyone that you think might find it interesting. We'll see you here next week. Bye-bye.