You are Everything/Everything is in You: Re-connecting with our Ancestors.

By Karen Moe

with Nagual Huitzi

Nagual Huitzi

Are we, those of us who are the descendants of colonizers, the lost people?

Even though our self-proclaimed first world countries tout the status of ‘progressed’ and ‘developed,’ are we, paradoxically, at a spiritual and existential disadvantage to those our culture have, and continue, to exploit? As so many of us in the West are becoming increasingly aware of the atrocities committed by the very culture that has given us our privilege search for meaning beyond what we have been conditioned to believe is righteousness and “the way it’s always been,” many of us are now seeking guidance from Indigenous peoples, the very people our culture has oppressed.

This is not an essay of blame. This is not an essay of flipping the hierarchy of oppression onto its head positing those of us who have at least economically benefited from the oppression of others as the neo-oppressed. This is an essay of truth, uncomfortable truths that some are sick of hearing about because we have been encouraged to not act as there is “nothing we can do” and others, busy caught up in the extreme inflation-distraction paying mortgages, feeding kids, oblivious members of the cult of consumerism, don’t have time or interest to hear at all. This is an essay for, in Zapotec healer Naguel Huitzi’s words: “Those who dream and want a real world.”

Many of you will already know this; however, for those who don’t, it hasn’t always been this way: the first world created the third. Neither would be either without European Imperialism that began in the early 15^th Century when the Portuguese conquered Ceuta, a coastal town in North Africa and initiated what the colonizers proclaimed: “The Age of Discovery.” The Spaniards followed closely behind with their spurious ditty: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” when Christopher Columbus landed, mistakenly, on an island in the Bahamas thinking he had arrived in India and inadvertently “discovered” what became known as the Americas. No one was there according to the Spaniards, except the Indigenous peoples who were deemed “no one” and thus the land with its riches was wide open for discovery — and, most importantly for the burgeoning capitalist economy to plunder.

Morelos, Mexico

The Western European penchant for capitalist exploitation

didn’t begin with the colonization of Africa and the Americas, though. It began long before with the exploitation of the colonizer’s homelands. Capitalism originated with the enclosures of the Commons starting in 12^th Century England, the Commons being the land that all peasants and artisans could access to produce their own food and, thereby, maintain a level of self-reliance separate from the dictates of the land-owning lords.[1] Yes, during the Medieval period, the majority of the people still worked the land of the lords; however, they were able to farm and hunt on the Commons as well for their direct benefit and not be prey to the threat of starvation. Along with their ability to feed themselves, pre-Capitalism, the average person (re: the high majority) were also able to maintain their cultural and spiritual connections to the land that were, significantly, led by women as — like in the Indigenous cultures that survive today — midwives and healers. Women were central to pre-industrial European culture and, therefore, in order to detach people from the land and create a population of landless wage labourers and, thereby, prey to the reality of starvation, women had to be disempowered and persecuted.

In her book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici discusses the first wave of ‘primitive accumulation’ occurring in Europe which lay the foundation for capitalism internationally. Primitive accumulation is a Marxist term that describes when people are violently separated from their means of livelihood and land, transforming them into a propertyless working class (in Marxist terms, the proletariat) who become wholly dependent on the very system that exploits them.[2] Federici makes the historical linkages between the creation of patriarchy and the persecution of women (who were the main sector of the population who resisted the enclosures), capitalism (which was made possible by the former) and colonialism (which fed capitalism and resulted in its global rule ideologically, culturally and economically and the international extremities we live under today as ‘corporate capitalism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’). Along with patriarchy and the oppression of women facilitating the enclosures of the Commons, capitalism would not have thrived without the colonization of the Americas and Africa filling European coffers with the stolen riches from their ‘new’ world.[3] 

As Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones states: “We were all Indigenous once.”

This statement of innate indigeneity is connected to the fact that in all cultures, even the European with its trenchant patriarchy that has only begun to be effectively resisted since the mid-Twentieth Century, women have always been central to spirituality in connection with the land, where we are all from and where we will all return. Because capitalism and colonialism are founded upon patriarchy, what we can lexically conflate as “colonial/capitalism”[4] is absolutely gendered and sexed. In Europe and then in the Americas, the unruly women who resisted the violent separation of the people from the land were persecuted and burned as witches. Significantly, in an engraving designed by Jan van der Strait in 1589, “America” is represented as a naked woman with Indigenous peoples in throes of rabid cannibalism in the background.[5] A century into the advent of colonialism feeding the inherent greed of capitalism, both woman and the Indigenous peoples of the colonized lands were demonized and, thereby, justifiably oppressed in order to feed what would become Western culture’s prioritization of monetary profit at all costs.

Lee Maracle comments in her book, I am Woman: Native Perspective of Sociology and Feminism: “Racism is recent; patriarchy is old.”[6] Europeans arrived in their ‘new world’ with their combination of patriarchy and capitalism, and they added racism into their colonial stew in order to justify the theft of the land that was, inconveniently for them, already inhabited. When Africans were abducted as the most economical form of wage labour (re: slavery, the wage-less one), they were the African women slaves with the double demonization of race and sex whose oppression was further justified by what Federici calls ‘the Africanization of the witch’[7] and she points out how “the last execution of a witch, in an English-speaking territory, was that of a black slave, Sarah Basset, killed in Bermuda in 1730.”[8] From the 12^th Century to the present, capitalism and patriarchy have separated Europeans from the land through the erasure of the power of women and creation of racism against those so many of us are seeking guidance — or even salvation — from now.

“Listen to your ancestors, your Abuelas!” Indigenous peoples now tell us when we finally ask. But who are they? Where are they, our ancestors of the colonizing culture? Do we have any ancestors, or Abuelas, to listen to? These are questions that heaved to the surface of my consciousness during my most recent temazcal ritual in Mexico. And my body, my entire being, wept.

Morelos, Mexico

A temazcal is an Indigenous sweat ritual in Mexico.

Simply put, this ancient ritual offers renewal, purification, and spiritual connection. The temazcals, the structures within which the ceremonies take place, are built with the earth of the immediate environment; the ritual is absolutely connected to the roots of the natural world where, in Temazcalero and healer Huitzi Nagual’s words:

Energía, tierra, los elementos, la obscuridad es clave.

Energy, earth, the elements and the darkness are key.

When we enter a temazcal ritual, we re-enter the womb as a re-birth. Critical to this ritual is absolute darkness and extreme heat. The temazcal is dark and hot like the womb from where we come. However, with the womb being on average 38 degrees Celsius, it is the objective of temazcal rituals to get as hot as people can resist, building resistence being a key objective. At the first level, the heat assists us in purging (or sweating out) the toxins that build both physically and psychologically throughout our lives. Once this foundation is set, we resist as much heat as our current tolerance and desire for healing and transformation will allow. Huitzi guides:

Digo volver al origen, al silencio, a respirar en el Obscuridad.

A conectarse con el vacío interno.

I speak of returning to the source, to silence, to breathing in the darkness.

To connecting with the inner void.

However, in the case of those of us descended from the colonizing culture that has been detached from the earth for centuries and some argue millennia,[9] we have to dig beneath the centuries of destruction that block and keep us from our Abuelas and our connection to our true ancestors — and the earth.

And I ask: Can ancestors be colonizers and capitalist pillagers of the land?

Can ancestors be settlers who left their homelands with the promise of a new life, often unwittingly participating in stealing the land of the ancestors of the Indigenous peoples who have lived there for millennia, those who we are now going to for spiritual fulfillment, or answers to the emptiness we feel, or healing? How far back do descendants of the colonizer have to go to find the ancestors that Indigenous peoples tell us to listen to?

Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones relates how, during the old-growth logging blockade at Fairy Creek between 2020 and 2021 when Indigenous and settler came together to fight for the ancient trees: “In their search for some sanity in this world, the privileged white people all looked at me with these blank faces, and I sensed that they needed something from me, and I didn’t know what I was going to say to these people who had shat on me all my life.”[10] 

The fire that heats the volcanic stones (the Abuelas) who will heat the temazcal.

Nagual Huitzi, his father Mayan and his mother Zapatec, was born in Oaxaca, Mexico

early in the morning in a temazcal in the Zapotec tradition. Deliveries by midwives in temazcals bring children into the world in unison with mother earth; however, such births are very rare in Mexico now as giving birth has been institutionalized to the extent that the high majority of Mexican women have cesarians. Not only was Huitzi born fully connected to the earth and his ancestors, for Zapotecos,[11] children who are born in the early morning are destined healers. His life committed to healing others, Huitzi founded the temezcal Aldea Tonantzin in Mexico City to share his Zapotec culture through temazcal ceremonies. He explains how for him, “preserving this tradition is crucial and his ceremonies are a project and a life’s work with the goal to share Zapotec tradition worldwide for human healing.”[12]

It is interesting that the majority of the people who come to Huitzi’s temazcal in Mexico City are tourists or ex-pats like myself, who either live in colonial countries and/or are descendants of the colonizer, those of us who have been conditioned to be separate from the earth and from our ancient ancestors for centuries and some argue millennia; those of us who come from the countries with the greatest number of drug addicted people: the US is first with 3,815 people per 100k; Canada second with 2,169 per 100K; Australia third with 2,057 per 100k, followed by New Zealand and Great Britain with 1,737 and 1,736.[13] Huitzi, with his Zapotec traditions passed down to him by his Abuelas, is committed to healing us, planting the seed from where we can begin to heal ourselves and, in so doing, build an embodied spiritual revolution of a sick culture from within.

Morelos, Mexico

I first met Huitzi at Aldea Tonantzin in Mexico City.

When I travelled there from the meeting place in the trendy Mexico City colonia of la Condessa, I was with about ten other people. We were all from North America carrying our metaphorical baggage of what causes drug addiction and mental illness in the first place: dysfunctional families with the shut-down empathy that can so readily lead to familial estrangement; self-righteous individualism where a competitive way of being is something to be aspired to, especially in the US with the normalization of conquest is represented by the idiom: “Dog eat dog” — that, unfortunately, all colonial cultures are infected by as well to varying degrees. As we drove and chatted, it became evident that some of us were looking for something, knew that something was amiss, not necessarily only within ourselves personally, but from the culture from which we come.

Huitzi’s face is strikingly kind; his eyes are clear, and one can feel the generosity of his spirit. At the beginning of the ceremony, he smudges each participant with smoldering sage and tells everyone something specific to them before they enter the temazcal. He said to me in early November 2025, “This is a very important time in your life, just live.” He didn’t mean, “Don’t kill yourself.” He meant that’s all you have to do. Just live. Shed the complications that we so often plague ourselves with, or allow ourselves to be plagued with by others, which is basically the same thing. That’s all you have to do. Live. And everything else will follow. Profound simplicity. Live in the sense of live everything. Enjoy and indulge in everything beautiful. At that time, as I was finishing writing a new book under a virtually impossible deadline, I was under a lot of pressure, beautiful pressure but pressure nonetheless as it was an activity that required profound discipline and unfaltering belief. Huitzi’s words were perfect for that moment in my life. Along with offering a spoken gift to each participant, Huitzi also told me that, during the ritual, even when there are twelve people in the temazcal, he is aware of each person’s breathing and emotional state so that he knows if there is a possibility of panic and if he needs to adjust the heat and the ritual. A healer since birth, Huitzi is absolutely in tune with the energy of the people.

Es las raíces, la tierra, el viento, los pajaros, la vida de vibrar con esta hermosa vida. A veces hay el camino tiene piedras, a veces flores, otra veces el viento sopla el rostro mientras uno va caminando.

It’s the roots, the land, the wind, the birds, the experience of resonating with this beautiful life. Sometimes the journey has stones, sometimes flowers, other times the wind blows against your face as you walk.

Morelos, Mexico

February 2026. It was my fifth temazcal.

It’s as though the first four were an initiation to what was to come, and what is destined to continue. The first was an attempt. It was led by a French yoga instructor. She meant well, of course, with her candles, far from enough darkness and definitely not hot to an extent that would do anything to purge toxins and allow for at least the awareness of the possibility of re-birth. Like many people from the West, she couldn’t help but impose rigidity and demands onto what is in the end a personal journey. There was too much talking. She read from a script. There was too much about her — unwitting narcissism by a young woman with good intentions dipping her European toes into the ancient world of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.

Shortly into the ritual, I felt the imposition of a question approaching me. I tensed up and any portal I was working towards was shut down. The question arrived:

            “Karen, what do you want to share?”

            Silence as I worked to quash my annoyance:

            “Nothing … I don’t want to share anything at this moment.” I almost didn’t say. In the too much light, I saw her mouth tighten. A flicker of a glare of annoyance that I had not obeyed her dictates. I knew I had to continue my search.

The second was in Amecameca in the State of Mexico, a small city at the foot of the active volcano Popocatépetl with his ash-emitting rumblings everyday when the sun begins its morning birthing. This temazcal ritual was held in a mini-pyramid with who became my first curandero and healer, Oscar. There are two temazcals in the mini-pyramid, one on either side of a room with vaulted ceilings and walls covered with pre-Hispanic paintings. Oscar told me how the murals represent heaven, the underworld, and the earthly realm of the Mayas. Everything is connected in this merging; multiplicity is one.

I was there with a friend from Canada. Oscar led us into what may as well have been an oven. We had to almost crawl to enter and then a sliding metal guillotine-style door was slammed shut behind us and we were immediately saturated by darkness. There was nothing. No possibility of light filtering through a chink in a wall or a crack in the ceiling. I felt myself begin to float, but not only up; in this absolute darkness, I felt like I was floating from all directions. The only sound was Oscar pouring a bucket of water onto the heat-filled volcanic stones, the Abuelas, the Grandmothers. “Bienvenido Abuelalitas.” The heat began to fill the black. Sweat began to rise. That was all. That was the beginning.

“Estamos en infierno.” (We are in hell) was the only thing Oscar said.

“Bring it on,” I thought as my friend panicked and bolted. I had a lot of hell to commune with, to purge, to fully embrace. The latter necessary for the former.

“Tu dolar es tu medicina,” (Your pain is your medicine), Oscar told me later. I started to realize that this ritual of endurance is about building resistance, becoming a warrior, living through my pain in order to heal. It was here where I began to cleanse and purify and, in Huitzi’s words: become acquainted with my “inner fire.”

The third was with Maria, Huitzi’s apprentice at Aldea Tonantzin. There were flowers, music, a lighter touch preparing me for what I had no idea was to come. It was beautiful. Calming. Soothing. In retrospect, like I was hovering on the edge of a life-altering journey. Like I was about to leap off a cliff into a valley filled with flowers, or fire, or both.

And then there was my first temazcal ritual with Huitzi when I was a part of a circle of soul-searching foreigners like me and told to “just live.”

And then came the fifth. I was invited to Huitzi’s private home in Morelos where he built his bedroom facing the wide-open sunrise so he can live the rebirth of All every morning.

The landscape in this part of the state of Morelos exudes a holiness.

Here, the land is simultaneously scorched and gentle. Mountains erupt from the earth as irrepressible innards; fields are drawn upon by trees casting shadows as veins; grasses have gathered on ledges striating rock faces with velvet; Nopal gathers as a community of nourishment from which one must first remove the spines before eating; and oranges, yellows and purples of flowers I have not yet learned to name dance as miracles upon golden grassland. When one looks up, carved caves on cliffs gaze down upon you: mysteries wide open to the inevitable darkness at the center of all — what you will enter when you return to the womb of the temazcal.

Morelos, Mexico

We climb the mountain next to his house,

undoubtedly a part of the serendipitous location Huitzi chose to build his paradise. Huitzi explains:

Todas las montañas son poderosas, no era hay algunas más poderosas que otras, depende de ola presencia, de minerales. La montaña junto a la casa se llama tonantzin (madre tierra) poderosa, mágica. 

All mountains are powerful; some are more powerful than others, depending on their presence and mineral content. The mountain next to the house is called Tonantzin (Mother Earth in the indigenous language Nahuatl) — and it is powerful and magical.

The energy of Tonantzin is visceral. We follow well-worn paths that wind upwards from her base. When we reach the summit, Huitzi points to the other side and tells me to go there and find a place to sit and meditate. 

Reflexiona, medita, piensa, donder perteneces? Quien eras en realidad? Que te trajo aqui? Reflect, meditate, think, where do you belong? Who are you really? What brought you here?

Morelos, Mexico

First though, I must cross a crevasse that cuts the mountain in two.

I feel a tinge of trepidation as I lunge across a wide crack in the stone that descends into darkness. I choose a spot next to a delicate tree encased in its own silhouette, topped with pale green leaves adorning a tangle of branches that feel like an ancient script waiting to be deciphered. I survey the landscape spreading out below me, the protuberance of mountains surrounded by an impasto of rolling farmland and simple houses. My gaze arrives at a mountain standing as a goddess in the midst of the lives of the people. She is Mujer Mariposa (Butterfly Woman). I can see a path snaking up her ascent attesting to centuries of people communing with the power one can access there. Later, I write in my journal: Asumbiada is my Spanish word for the day as I’m blessed to be in Huitzi’s paradise. Overwhelmed. I close my eyes.

Huitzi calls me back to the other side of the crevasse and tells me to lie down on the earth boca arriba (mouth up) and face to the sky. He starts to dance around me, his footsteps as stones building a necklace of protection and guidance. Later, he told me how we were:

Abrir energía, invocar fuerza y Sanacion. Era como hablar a los energía de ti y pedir tu visión y conexión para poder trabajar contigo energéticamente. Las montañas guardan energías muy sagradas y desde la antigüedad los sabios abuelos iban ahí a buscar, visión, agradecer, a aprender. Por eso estaba agradeciendo para ti.

Opening up to energy, invoking strength and healing. It was like speaking to your energy, asking for your vision and connection so I could work with you energetically.

The mountains hold very sacred energies; since ancient times, wise elders have gone there to seek vision, offer thanks, and learn. That is why I was giving thanks on your behalf.

I open my eyes and stand. Huitzi walks over to the crevasse and places one foot on either side. One can tell that he has made this movement in this exact place many times before. He opens his arms wide, looks up at the sky and closes his eyes. And breathes. I can see his diaphragm expanding and contracting with each absolute breath. The rest of his body is still, in unison with the mountain and the magic that lives there.

It is my turn.

Huitzi takes my hand and leads me to the crevasse. He tells me to place one foot on either side like he did. Such a simple gesture, it’s only about three feet across, but I look at him in horror. The vertigo that has followed me all my life kicks in. I feel as though I am about to lose control and unintentionally jump into the crevasse, an ultimate self-deception. My legs are jelly. Huitzi feels my fear and holds my arm tightly. I feel wind from the depths of the crevasse blowing up between my legs, attempting to fill me, but I am shut down and trembling. Huitzi makes me stay. Pushes me through living in the fear a little longer. I know I need to practice this. It’s my goal to stand tall and wide and trusting in myself as our Great Mother gives me the gift of filling me with her breath. But apparently, I still have a lot of work to do. I am blocked.

Siente la energía en tu vientre, en tu ombligo en tu centro, y de ahí siente tu paz.

Feel the energy in your belly, in your naval, in your center, and from there feel your peace.

Huitzi's Temazcal

When we return,

Huitzi’s assistant, Iván, has lit the fire to heat up the volcanic rocks. Like the rocks being of the region, Huitzi’s temazcal is composed of local materials: earth, quicklime, ash, and pigments containing insects. There is a jaguar sculpted above the entrance. In Mezo-American cultures, Jaguars are symbols of transformation and represent the courage to face your deepest fears and step into your authentic power or what Huitzi calls the "fire that burns within." More than an emblem above the entrance of Huitzi’s temazcal, the jaguar guards as it invites into the sacred space that is filled with darkness even during daylight. It is in the temazcal where one can build the resistance to become a warrior[14] and walk with the jaguar.

            Huitzi explains:

El guerrero no busca enemigos afuera, porque conoce dónde vive la batalla real: en su propia sombra. Se mira sin máscara, conquista sus miedos antes que territorios, y cada amanecer decide no traicionar su fuego interior. Su triunfo no hace ruido; se sostiene en la paz de quien ya ha hecho las paces con su propio abismo, domesticando al jaguar que habita dentro sin encadenarlo, sino caminando junto a él.

The warrior seeks no enemies outside, for they know where the true battle lies: within their own shadow. They look at themselves without a mask, conquering their fears before territories, and with every dawn, they resolve not to betray their inner fire. Their triumph makes no noise; it rests in the peace of one who has made peace with their own abyss, taming the jaguar within — not by chaining it, but by walking alongside it.

Huitzi prepares the plants that he has chosen for my personal temazcal ritual.

“Siempre elige las plantas que tu energia necesita para ese momento”

I always choose the plants that you need in that moment.

Huitzi uses the plants that compose Vaporub (plectranthus tomentosa or menthosa), rue, lemon balm, cedar, myrtle, rosemary, citronella, Mexican tarragon, white sapote leaves. However, for my fifth temazcal, after the ritual with the mountain Tonantzin, Huitzi tells me that he didn’t use many plants.

Hablamos con el espíritu, buscamos que el cielo, el universo, tu alma te recordara, fuimos al origen  (en tu silencio interior ) gritamos, reímos, si. Que tú te dieras cuenta yo iban desbloqueando, conectado. No usamos muchas plantas medicinales, usamos muchos plantas que despiertan, (solo el vaporub para que no olvides respirar tu cuerpo físico, lo demás fueron sueños, fueron desbloqueas y vision.

We communed with the spirit; we sought to have the heavens, the universe, and your own soul remember you. We journeyed to the source — into your inner silence — where we shouted and laughed. It was about you realizing the process as we cleared blockages and forged connections. We didn't use many medicinal plants; instead, save for a bit of VapoRub to ensure you didn't forget to breathe into your physical body. Everything else was a matter of dreams, the release of blockages, and visions.

The latter definitely comes to pass.

Vaporub and ocotillo

At first, I don’t think I have much to heal from.

Except for the horrors of the crevasse (that I seem to be denying in that moment), after the ritual on the Tonantzin Mountain, I am feeling calm, at peace, happy even. I sit and wonder what will, if anything, come. If I even have any transitions to navigate, any need for transformation.

The Abuela’s are carried in one by one:

Bienvenido Abuelita.

(Welcome grandmother).

Bienvenido Abuelita.

Until there are thirteen. Iván covers the entrance with a heavy blanket. There is no light. Only the red rims of the Abuelitas ready, piled as a miniature mountain in a shallow pit at the center of the Temazcal. I brace myself; my adrenalin begins to rise. Huitzi pours water onto the first Abuelita. Then the second. Then the third. I breathe. I focus. Heat fills the temazcal, begins to fill me.

I shout. Deep. Guttural. Huitzi shouts back. We shout again. We laugh. The sweating, the purging, the melting begins. Until it is approximately 60 degrees Celsius, the hottest temazcal I have experienced so far.

We lie down. Here begins the endurance. The heat pushes down upon me. My body is pouring sweat. I breathe through it. Determined to continue. Knowing I need to find something. Feeling now that something is there. I am here to find something. And, this time, maybe even something that goes beyond me. The epiphany, the vision, the beginning of the beginning of the transformation, begins:

I have no ancestors. Or, if I do, they are lost, long buried, mute.

I am a lost person, a lost soul. My entire body starts to weep. My entire culture has no ancestors. Or, if we do, they are lost, long buried, silent. We are the lost people. We have no connection to our souls. To our Abuelas. This is what allows our culture to destroy. My entire body weeps deeper. I have never felt sadness as profound as this.

“Huitzi … Tengo bastante triste. Demsiado. Demsiado. Demsiado/ I have so much sadness. Too much. Too much. Too much…”

My eyes are torrents, every part of my body is composed of sweat as though my flesh has melted and ‘me’ as an individual entity is ceasing to exist, as though I am being consumed by the fathoms of loss.

Huitzi grabs a branch of ocotillo, one of the three plants he brought into the temazcal. Ocotillo is revered for resilience, protection, and heart-healing. Huitzi begins hitting my body with the branch. Every part of my body. He is virtually whipping me. I can hear his breath of exertion. I trust him and let him continue.

Huitzi stops. I breathe. I am able to sit up into the layer of more extreme heat.

Then, I see, I feel, a crevasse deep within me that extends from my throat, through my torso, and into the earth. The crevasse is filled with sedimentary rock composed of the layers of centuries of the disconnect with our ancient ancestors. I am inundated by the loss of my culture’s connection to the land, the wind, the plants, the birds, the animals, the spirits. Through this vision of the history of senseless greed and rabid destruction, I am able to feel the grief of emptiness within. I breathe.

And then, deep down, buried in my center, I feel a slight prick and perceive a glint, a possibility of light. I focus.

I hear a woman’s voice. Barely discernible. High and sweet cutting through the layers of a culture built of centuries of disconnect. She is singing. I listen with every fibre of my being. Straining. The sound is so faint, so buried; yet, slowly, slowly, I can uncover a melody. Wavering in and out. I begin to trace it with my voice. Louder and louder.

Huitzi starts to play the melody on his Bsjre gunna flute,[15] its minor key weaving with what from deep inside of me is in the purity of a major, maybe even the absolute sweetness of C. [16]

I sing louder and louder, determined not to forget, to inscribe it on my soul.

Huitzi pours water onto the thirteenth Abuelita. We have been in the temazcal for over three hours. It feels like barely one. Time has flattened. I have heard and touched my buried ancestors. My lost Abuelitas.

The sun is enormous as it reappears.

More so than when it sinks back into the other side at the beginning of the night. The sun of dawn announces its return more slowly than expected when compared to how the edge of night so suddenly swallows the descending sun of day. The rising red lingers instead of race. And slowly, oh so slowly, the horizon brightens as the light trembles on the cusp of the new day. The curve of the beginning broadens as a birthing from an omnipresent canal announcing the promise of rebirth. Branches are re-sculpted by light. Sun that will always caress. Warmth reaching into the bones. The breeze tussles and strokes and is felt with a heightened awareness I can access, now, as I write.

Tu sanación ocurre mientras haces todo.

Your healing happens while you do everything.

Todo pasa. Eres todo, todo es en ti.

Everything happens. You are everything. Everything is in you.

Notes:

[1] It is interesting that the two most extensive colonizers, England and Spain, led the way in the Enclosures of the Commons, forcibly removing people from access to the land.

[2] Published in 2004 and revised in 2014, Sylvia Federici points out how there “has been a worldwide return, with the new global expansion of capitalist relations, of a set of phenomena usually associated with the genesis of capitalism.” Like in the 12^th Century with the violent onset of the enclosures of the Common lands which lay the foundation for a capitalist economy by creating a wholly disenfranchised wage labourer, in so-called ‘post’ colonial countries, “large-scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the [European] period of ‘transition,’ with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized.” Significantly, witch hunting has had a resurgence in these twentieth and twenty-first century contexts or ‘primitive accumulation.’ Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. (Autonomedia, first edition, 2004; second, revised edition, 2014), 11; 17.

[3] Race is a construct to justify oppression of a people and capitalist exploitation of their land.

[4] As Elder Bill Jones says in our forthcoming book: “Greed is colonialism. Colonialism is greed, and capitalism and colonialism are one and the same.” Elder Bill Jones and Karen Moe, Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones. (Forthcoming Dundurn Press September 1^st, 2026), 9.

[5] Federici: 218.

[6] Lee Maracle I am Woman: Native Perspective of Sociology and Feminism. (Press Gang Publishers 1996), 20.

[7] Federici: 238.

[8] Federici: 237.

[9] Cree writer Harold R. Johnson posits Western culture’s disconnect from the land millennia earlier when he writes: “Kiciwamanawak [‘my cousin’ — what the Cree called the colonizers] lost their connection [to the land] ten thousand years ago in the failed Agrarian Revolution. They, too, had been hunter-gathers, but some of them chose to live in settlements and grow crops. Their lives were significantly worse than before.” The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster and New Fictions for a New Era (Biblioasis, 2022), 141. However, with the Enclosures of the Commons in the Twelfth Century and the ensuing industrialization and the implentation of a capitalist economy, this process was completed.

[10] Elder Bill Jones and Karen Moe, Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones. (Forthcoming Dundurn Press September 1^st, 2026), 67.

[11] It is important to note that, because the Spanish conquistador did not inflict the Indigenous people with the generational abuses of the Indian residential schools, more Indigenous cultures and languages have survived in Mexico, even though many were still lost and are still threatened and dying today.

[12] https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g150800-d26731310-Reviews-CDMX_TEMAZCAL_Healing_cleansing_ceremony_ritual_zapoteca-Mexico_City_Central_Mex.html

[13] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-by-country

[14] Huitzi explains that what he means by ‘warrior’ or guerro in Spanish is really called "chsha" or "Benne szina" in Nagual. "It isn't strictly the word for 'warrior,' " Huitzi explains, "but there is no way to express it in Spanish. So, I’ve called it 'warrior' because it refers to someone fighting an internal battle."

[15] Huitzi explained to me how there is no information about this type of flute on-line because “no existe mi cultura en linea.”

[16] Much as I tried, I can’t remember the melody of this first encounter with my lost Abuelitas. But I do remember it was in a major key. I will return to hear them again.

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About the Artists:

NAGAUL HUITZI: A spiritual guide, guardian of ancestral knowledge, and traveler between worlds, Huitzi — meaning hummingbird — dedicates his life to the awakening of consciousness and the healing of the spirit, reminding every human being that they did not come into this world to survive ... but to awaken.

Huitzi is the founder of the temazcal in Mexico City, Aldea Tonantzin. Along with his apprentice and translator Maria José Moto Alcalá, Huitzi provides healing and cleansing ceremonies in the Zapotec tradition.

@huitzinagual

KAREN MOE is an author, art critic, visual and performance artist, and feminist activist. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish and she has exhibited and performed across Canada, the US and Mexico and has spoken on sexual violence internationally. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor . Her next book is a collaboration with Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones entitled, Listening Once Again to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones will be released on September 1st, 2026 with Dundurn Press. Books are now available for pre-order at your favourite bookstore. Karen lives in Mexico City and in Lantzville BC, Canada.

https://karenmoeauthor.com/

IG: @karenmoeart

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Karen Moe and Nagual Huitzi at Huitzi's home in Morelos, Mexico, February 2026