experience.
Our healer provides us with assurances before, and as she will in the course of the temazcal that she is in careful control of our bodies and minds, allaying any preconceived concerns or stressors one might encounter as levels of temperature and steam increase.
Then it begins…Draped in a cotton sheet, seated with only my partner and the curandera, eyes closed to the blackness of the small, low-roofed thatched hut, quiet words in Spanish and in an indigenous tongue, deliberate chants, as well as sweet song, while my body is being patted and rubbed with leafy twigs. Surges of different herbal scents sweep in front of me, reminiscent of waves of heat I’ve encountered while slowly paddling down a tropical lagoon. “Qué salga el mal; qué entre el bien.”
I’m being cleansed, that welcomed relaxation taking over my soul. As I float into a native past I’m now coming to better understand and appreciate, I hear “En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo” — “In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit.” It’s one of several incongruities in Oaxaca, as between the pride in, and ongoing cultural traditions of indigenous populations, and then the knowledge of the destruction heaped upon the populace by the conquest, and The Church.
The Spanish tried to destroy the temazcal tradition because of its association with worship of deities. It survives, with most aspects of the purity of its tradition intact.
Doña Mariana leads us out of the lodge, on our knees, a new awakening, with fresh dry sheets enveloped around us as we drop the soaked ones, without