Free Life is a Trip by Judith Fein Page A

aptitudes, as though their life mission is to be a brujo. But for those without the initial witchy spark, the techniques can also be taught.
    Because energy work is so potent, it can be used for good or nefarious purpo s es: it can heal or it can harm. But it is only the healing that interests me, and I never bothered to find out much about the latter.
    To be honest, saying that healing interests me is a gross unde r statement. It is a great, driving passion in my life.
    My great-grandmother was a healer in a Russian shtetl , or village, and she did diagnosis by melting wax over a fire, molding it into a ball, and gazing into it. When she got a vision, she knew what to do to help the ailing person. Maybe it’s in my genes. Perhaps one day I’ll melt a candle and see a vision in wax. But, in the meantime, when I travel the world as a journalist, I track down indigenous healers and healing modalities that are rapidly disappearing. I don’t interview them to find out what they do and how they do it; that would be like asking Lance Armstrong to describe his cycling or Aretha to explain her singing. I request a private session so I can experience firsthand what each healer does. In most cases, they allow their work to be photographed and videotaped. I never take this for granted and am a l ways grateful.
    Eight years ago, when I was in Guanajuato state on assignment, I heard about the town of Juventino Rosas. It took several hours on a chicken bus to get there, and when I arrived, I asked a taxi driver who the best local healer was. I was d i rected to the home of Ana Maria de Vilar.
    Arriving at the home of a healer is often an experience with ritualized frustr a tion. This time was no different. I stood outside an iron gate for about fifteen minutes, alternately knocking and cowering from the ferocious barking of an u n seen dog. Finally, a woman who seemed to be in her thirties walked slowly up to the gate.
    “What do you want?” she asked, looking me up and down.
    “I would like a limpia ,” I said. I knew a bit about the Mexican tradition and understood that a limpia was supposed to clear or cleanse the energy field and get rid of negative influences.
    Without another word, the woman disappeared. I waited another five minutes until she came back, opened the gate, and accompanied me into the healer’s house. A few minutes later, her mother, Ana, a p peared. A plump, middle-aged Mexican curandera (healer), she wore a floral housedress and oversized glasses and had a warm, gentle, earth-mother kind of face. “What do you want?” she asked me.
    “I would like a limpia,” I repeated.
    “You will have to come back in three days,” Ana informed me.
    Three days?! I thought. I just spent hours getting here on a chic k en bus. I have to go back to my hotel and chicken-bus it back here in three days? Is she kidding? This is what I thought, but what I said was, “Yes, I will come back in three days.”
    This has happened almost every time I’ve schlepped into the mountains, climbed down into valleys, or trekked through the jungle to find a healer. When I’ve found him or her, I’ve been told to come back several days later. I suppose it is some kind of initiation rite to separate the merely-curious from the seriously-intentioned.
    That night, back at my hotel, after dusting myself off from the chicken bus which I had shared with fifteen cement bags, I had a strange dream. In it was the word “ serpiente .” I was surprised to have a Spanish word pop into my nocturnal ramblings.
    Three days later, as instructed, I arrived back at Juventino Rosas and went directly to Ana’s house. This time there was almost no waiting. Ana led me into her private chapel, or capilla , which was adjacent to her house. It was a rectangular-shaped room lined with beautiful, old, woo d en Mexican string instruments, images and statues of Jesus, and many candles. Ana beckoned me to stand on a large, inlaid stone cross. She burned copal (an