In the Hispanic tradition, a spiritual healer is a curandero: someone who works the body and the spirit together, with herbs, prayer, cleansings and hands, and who learned it inside a family rather than in a school. The word "healer" in English covers a lot of ground, from Reiki to faith healing. What I do is narrower and older, and I would rather tell you exactly what it is.
I am Don Jacinto Nahual, from Catemaco, Veracruz, four generations of this, and over thirty years seeing people in Los Angeles and Santa Ana.
What the work covers
- Susto, the fright that lodges in a person after an accident, a death, a deportation, a violent scene. Very common in children.
- Mal de ojo, harm carried by someone else's envy or intense attention.
- Heaviness with no medical cause: weeks of exhaustion, dread, sleeplessness, after the doctor found nothing.
- A house that has gone wrong: everyone tense, fights over nothing, nobody sleeping.
- What someone else placed on you, when the reading shows it is there.
What a session looks like
You sit or stand. I pass bunches of fresh herbs over the body while praying, then an egg, slowly, from head to feet, then copal smoke, sometimes a candle. The egg is broken into a glass of water and we both look at it; what the white does in the water is how this tradition reads what a person was carrying. About an hour. Nothing is cut, burned or drunk, and if a healer anywhere tells you a session requires that, leave.
The reading decides what comes next. Some people need one session and a candle at home. Some need the full course. You hear which before you pay for anything beyond the first.
A real price
$97 for the first session, about an hour, and that price does not move. Three sessions is the usual course; heavy cases can run to nine. I tell people that at the start rather than after they have paid, because the trick of quoting low and climbing session by session is how a lot of people in this trade make their living, and it is the main reason people distrust all of us.
When to see a doctor instead
This is where I lose customers and I would rather lose them. Chest pain, a lump, a fever that will not break, sudden weight loss: a physician, today. Months of hopelessness and sleeplessness: a therapist, and there are Spanish-speaking ones across Los Angeles County. Thoughts of hurting yourself: an emergency, and the number is 988.
A cleansing sits alongside those things. It never stands in for them. I send people to a physician most weeks, and any healer who tells a mother that a feverish baby needs a limpia instead of a pediatrician is dangerous.
Healer, curandero, brujo, santero
A curandero heals and removes. A brujo does that and also works with intention aimed at another person. A santero is initiated in Regla de Ocha, a religion, with a godparent and ceremonies; I am not one and will tell you if what you need is one. "Spiritual healer" in English usually maps to the first of these. That is what I am.
Where I see people
Los Angeles, 1208 Venice Blvd, walk-in. Santa Ana, 830 S Main St Ste 109, by appointment, because it is an interior suite with no front desk. (213) 598-1928, first call free. The service page is here: spiritual cleansing, and the longer explanation of the work is in what a curandero does.