A wise woman of the earth, Flordemayo has been a Curandera Espiritu, a healer of divine spirit, her entire life. And through her keen vision she is able to sense other realms of light, sound and color. As a seer, she is able to see the effects of existing imbalances on the physical, emotional and spiritual levels within a person’s energy system.
Flordemayo is a founding member and President of the Institute of Natural and Traditional Knowledge, based in Estancia, New Mexico. She has been widely recognized for her healing ability and wisdom, including being the recipient of the Martin de la Cruz Award for Alternative Healing. This prestigious honor is given by the International Congress of Traditional Medicine. Working with respected spiritual leader, Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, who is head of the Quiche Maya Council of Elders, Flordemayo has been recognized as a ‘Priestess’ by the Maya.
Flordemayo was born and grew up in the big highlands of Central America in a family of traditional healers. She now travels around the globe to share her healing abilities and to foster more spiritual understanding among people. Since 2004, Flordemayo has been a founding member of the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of traditional female elders drawn from around the world, whose work it is to travel and unite people through a circle of prayer.
A frequent contributor at international conferences such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Bioneers, we are most honored to highlight the visionary work of Flordemayo, in our July/August Indigeous Peoples Issue.
Awareness: In the West we often define health as the absence of symptoms, but as a Curandera Espiritu, you may have a different perspective on the process of healing and what health is.
Flordemayo: To my observation, when we look for healing and are doing everything we can to heal, we come to a place of surrender. When we surrender, we open ourselves to receive. Not only do we receive the wisdom we are to receive, but then we also open our hearts and our minds and it is at this point that someone like myself who does healings becomes a conduit, an intermediary who will bring the person looking for healing into a magical dance between themselves and their Beloved. So in actuality what I see is a magical dance. I don’t see it any other way. Healings don’t happen unless we surrender.
Awareness: From what I have read, you basically see light in and around a person.
Flordemayo: I see light with everything. Everything is alive. When it is alive, it is full of light. I see light like the Aurora Borealis, you know how it moves, kind of like that. I also hear my Beloved speaking to me. So then I will let the person know what it is that I am seeing and what I am being told. I ask for permission to look into their sacred space. When I ask for permission, I close my eyes and listen to their name. In listening to their voice, I listen to the vibration and it is the vibration that opens the picture for me. I close my eyes and with my spirit eye, I see a combination of a dance of color and light in and around the body, and this is how I do the healings.
Awareness: You have said there is quality of trust that needs to emerge...
Flordemayo: Well, you see the trust also comes when we surrender. We can’t be in fear or doubt. When I meet people for the first time, I don’t know anything about them and they don’t know much about me, so when I start talking to them and I say, ‘I see this and this and that going on in your body, and you’ve been doing this and it hasn’t helped you out. As I’m starting the dialogue with the person, I also see the energies.
When I pray I ask for help from the Beloved with this healing, because I am not the healer. It is between the person and his or her Beloved. So as soon as the person starts receiving through this dialogue, I start witnessing the change. I talk to them, “Look, now this is beginning to move, I see this other light and other color coming in, and I see the healing starting.” Some healings are instantaneous and some are not.
Awareness: You were acknowledged at a very young age as a healer. Can you tell us a bit about how that happened?
Flordemayo: The recognition came from my family, my mother, brothers and sisters, while I was a baby. I was born seeing, and I was not the only child born like this in our family. In my particular case I saw a lot of things. My mother was a midwife.
When I was four, my mother decided that it would be good for me to come with her while delivering babies. I never saw the baby being delivered. She would give me the baby after the umbilical was cut and the baby was cleaned and wrapped in a little blanket.
I would kind of innocently just look at the baby and I would see how the light looked, things in the past and in future, in the presence of the child. I would see little bits of information, but it was enough to delight the mother and father, and my mother thought it was a good way for me to continue my growth. It was beautiful!
Awareness: How few babies born are seen and recognized such as this! So you worked with your mother probably for quite a long time...
Flordemayo: My mother was my teacher throughout my life until she passed away when I was seventeen. I was with her when she took her last breath, and was able to help guide and prepare her in surrendering her physical body. By the age of seventeen, when you come from Central America, you are raised in such a reality of life, so I felt like I was all grown up having seen so much — birth and death. You know, you are never ready for your mom to die. Absolutely never. I didn’t have a dad, and was the youngest in the family, so I got married right after my mother died.
I wanted to have a teacher because I was always seeing and experiencing with dreams, and you have a need to communicate with a physical person who understands you, who would be able to sit there and dialogue. I really missed that as I was getting older. I prayed and prayed and prayed to my Beloved. It wasn’t until my late forties when my teacher came. So there was a long period of loneliness waiting for a teacher. When he came, my interest at the time was my people and their way of life. I wanted to hear the language and prayer in the Mayan language. That is how I came to meet him.
Awareness: How courageous that you kept going for what must have felt like such a long time — almost two decades.
Flordemayo: I was not ready to embark on this journey until then. Earlier I had to take care of little children, the house and the husband. But I met my teacher in a period of time in my life when my children were all grown up and I could give my teacher one hundred percent of my time.
Awareness: I had also wanted to ask, what is it that you would offer women about being more in alignment with rhythms of nature?
Flordemayo: I am honored to say that my mother taught me so much — this is what her life was, working with women. My mother used a few herbs in her practice that are really really good for the woman’s body.
One of the things my mother always talked about was how we as modern women had forgotten how to honor and feed the earth. In doing so, she would always, when she could, squat on the earth and allow her menstrual to flow on the earth. Because this was food for the earth and we had the capacity to do that.
When I was a child, all of the placenta was buried in the earth. But we don’t do that any more. I had the privilege of doing this with my grandchildren, but not my children, because I was in a big city when I had my children. As women, we have to be aware of the need to feed the earth and how we are going to do this. We have to feed the earth the nourishment she needs.
Awareness: Is there anything you would suggest to women living in urban areas to stay more attuned to the cycles and rhythms of Mother Earth?
Flordemayo: When you go outside you bless the ground. Even women in urban areas can collect their blood and give it to the Earth. Let that be a silent dialogue with the Earth. If there is a will, we just have to find a way of doing it. In the old days women would use a sponge or a rag; they would wash it, take that water and put it in a very sacred place, so it is not anything we cannot do.
Awareness: What you are really touching on is that this menstrual blood is not considered sacred in the modern world. We’ve really lost that.
Flordemayo: Yes, we have really lost that. We just look at it like something that is not anything pleasant to be dealing with.
Awareness: We seem to have gotten really disconnected about what that blood was really intended for. If it cannot be utilized in the body to nourish new life, then what you are saying is that through the offering to the Earth, it was still honoring the sacredness of the woman’s blood that was produced for nourishing life in giving it to nourish the Earth.
Flordemayo: Yes!
Awareness: The other thing I wanted to ask about is how the world has become so toxic. As an example, in the last couple of years, there have been a couple of studies using the umbilical cords of newborn babies. They tested as having up to 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in them!
Flordemayo: This is why I teach young women to make their own product. The skin is one of the largest surfaces we have and it absorbs anything and everything, so if we can keep our skin fed with clean and organic things we can apply, we are a lot healthier. When women start nursing, the biggest thing that comes out through the breast is all of these chemicals, and this is what women are feeding the babies. Where are they getting it from? Body creams, deodorants shampoos — it is out of control.
We just do not have that awareness. The plastic bottles are toxic, but on top of it, we warm them up in the microwave!
My gosh it is like a double whammy! It’s so difficult and what does it take, just to warm it up in a little pot? What does it take to use something very organic?
Awareness: I agree! I also wanted to ask you about the school you are involved in, The Institute of Natural and Traditional Knowledge, and your work with preserving seeds...
Flordemayo: One of the things I feel is really really important is to focus on teaching women about women’s medicine, because we are losing it. I have learned it from some of the grandmothers in my travels, I learned it from my mother and it is all the same. We have to embrace it. For me, I feel the doors have to be opened to everybody to have this information and knowledge, regardless of who we are and where we come from, because we all need to take care of ourselves as a human race.
Awareness: What kinds of herbs might a woman have access to that would nourish and support her own needs and those of her family?
Flordemayo: Well one of the plants that is very common is the rosemary plant. For instance, if you have vaginal burning or itching, you can boil the rosemary and make a tea, pour it in a basin and squat in it. This is very, very healing. It helps with cramping, and it is just a miraculous plant for women. That would be one of your first-aid plants. The scent is really beautiful and it also clears dense energy — if you are overworked and tired — it will clear it right out.
Awareness: That’s great! Can I ask also about the seed preservation project?
Flordemayo: Well the seed actually belonged to my colleague Emigdio and he has had it for quite some time. He inherited it from his father and grandfather. He is the agronomist, the master farmer. Because the three of us work together and I am the only female and have given life, of course, I have become the caretaker of the food for the future, it is my role. I take care of the seeds through prayer.
Awareness: You have made comments about the life in seeds, so tell us about how they are alive...
Flordemayo: When you experience an organic seed, it has its essence, it is alive, it has its light. When you put it next to a genetically-modified seed, it is just dead, it doesn’t have life. So people have to be conscious, do you put life or dead stuff into your mouth?
Awareness: Since you see light on other planes, do you see a difference in what is happening in the light on the planet?
Flordemayo: That is a very huge, huge question. There is so much changing and happening. We are moving so quickly that we just can’t keep up from week to week. The elements are out of our prediction at the moment. Scientists like to think they can predict, but in reality it is difficult, they will go on and do something greater and unexpected. It is almost like we can’t keep up with the motion of the earth and the heavens.
Awareness: It sounds like you’re saying that we ought to consider how we can surrender to these conditions?
Flordemayo: To me, it’s more being, more just being one with the moment. Just totally understanding that. When we are one with the moment, then we are in the place of total acceptance and of humbleness and a place of love and freedom and just being.
When we anticipate, what we’re doing is dealing with the chatter of the mind and we can’t prepare ourselves to accept, to receive and to move with the movement of the light. We become stagnant at that point. So we have to allow ourselves to just be free from the chatter and do it a moment at a time.
Awareness: That’s very clearly stated. Can you suggest what people can do to be in the moment?
Flordemayo: It only comes through a practice, a practice of stillness. It’s the only way you can quiet the chatter, quiet the mind.
Awareness: So you would say for someone, whatever works to find the place of stillness...
Flordemayo: Right.
Awareness: Is there anything you would like to mention about the Council of Grandmothers? What are you all tending and nurturing together?
Flordemayo: We came together because we were called by the person organizing this, Joti, through a letter from the Center of Sacred Studies, but we were also guided from spirit. Many many grandmothers had visions. For myself, I was called by the Grandmothers of the Four Directions and I was also called by the Grandmother of the East.
Awareness: So on all levels the calling was undeniable!
Flordemayo: Our life is to pray and do healing. Not only for humanity, but for the Elements and the Cosmos. We do ceremony and pray.
Awareness: So you are maintaining the circle of life, a symbol of wholeness — true?
Flordemayo: Yes. One of the things that may be good for the readers to know is that we are looking for support, if it is within someone’s capacity to help and to make sure the grandmothers are taken care of. We are going to Gabon, then to Spain, and we’re going to the Vatican. From there we are going to be in private council and that is a whole month. We’re talking to the world.
Awareness: The grandmothers are caring for the Earth and its appropriate that you’re asking for others to care for the grandmothers.
You have said that we are all ‘children of the light.’
Flordemayo: We are exactly that. When I close my eyes I see the light within and without, and when I pray I connect to the cosmic light and this is who we all are. No one is better than the other, we are all the same. There is no difference. This is the root of peace.
For more information on Flordemayo, visit: www.intk.org or www.grandmotherscouncil.com.
Donna Strong’s book, “Coming Home to Calm,” demonstrates the healing potency of the innate intelligence in life. For information: visit: www.donnastrong.com.
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