Most common question - what is that?? Maya Spiritual Healing is done via spiritual baths. It isn’t a bath in the usual sense. You don’t sit in bath water. Basically, you sit while I splash carefully prepared water with plants all around you; small droplets and sometimes larger quantities. While it is quite lovely doing these spiritual baths in the warm sunshine, they can be modified in various ways for the Montana winter. I use water, plants, copal smoke, and prayers. Remember, we are treating not just your body, not just your mind, but your physical, emotional, and spiritual self. As an herbalist, I know this is the best way to rebalance, which is sometimes all that is needed. We do what we can and, as Don Elijio Panti would say, "the blessed plants will do the rest". Also remember that there are many illnesses that modern medicine cannot label or find or know what to do with. In this realm of spiritual illness, which can make us physically ill, Don Elijio would also say, “the machines don’t show it”.
Very simply put, you sit and I do the work. You don’t need to process information unless you choose to. You don’t have to talk about anything unless you choose to. The work will be done and the healing will occur without you having to chew on it or even fully comprehend that it’s happened. It is that simple, gentle, healing, and powerful. As of 2019, I’ve been practicing these traditional healing techniques for over a year. In that short time, I can already say without any reservation that these techniques are extraordinary. And believe me! I’m a critical nut to crack! Deep sadness, trauma, confusion, heavy burdens, broken hearts, and the general wounds of life; all lessened, lifted, and eased. It has been a joy to serve others this past year as well as healing old wounds of my own.
These techniques were passed via direct lineage from Don Elijio Panti to Rosita Arvigo. I spoke of them in my last post about the abdominal therapies. It is a real privilege to have learned these techniques and to have had the last year to see this beautiful work perform its magic on those in need of spiritual healing. Now we all have the benefit of those teachings.
It is a great honor to help keep this oral tradition alive. While the Spanish friars were destroying many thousands of Mayan books, the Maya people were continuing to pass knowledge down orally. Don Elijio, as do many modern healers in Latin America, blended his ancient beliefs with the new world. I will use any image or prayer someone chooses. I wrestled with concepts like faith for most of my life. This helps me to understand the spectrum from devout believer to atheist. With the plants as my teachers for many years, I have come to strongly believe what Rosita has said - “It is folly to ignore the sacred in life or medicine. Skirting the spiritual has had a shattering effect on every dimension of contemporary existence”.
