(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photos by Etienne Laurent and Sarahi Apaez /For De Los)
8 Latinx healers raising vibrations in L.A.
To show up fully for others, we have to tend to our mental, emotional and physical health. Prayer, meditation, journaling and yoga help us stay centered and grounded. We try to eat a well-balanced diet and exercise as much as possible. If you’ve taken the therapy plunge, you know the benefits of having a professional hear you out and help you work through trauma and life challenges. Healing ourselves is a revolutionary act that often requires going deeper and tapping into ancestral wisdom and medicine. From body to birth workers, and life coaches to spiritual guides, the Latinx community abounds with healing arts practitioners offering relief from stress, anger and anxiety that affect our nervous system and can cause health problems. Here are some of the healers raising vibes in L.A. and helping us connect to our highest self.
Showing Places
(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Healing Queen
Spiritual
Reina Prado, a.k.a. Healing Queen, is a spiritual guide, love coach and holistic energy practitioner and facilitator based in Mid-City. Best known for her love limpias — energetic clearings of the heart space — Prado helps folks transform or clear what no longer serves them in order to connect vibrationally to whom or what we want to bring into our lives. Rooted in curanderismo, Prado, who identifies at Xicanx, receives “grandmother’s teachings” orally from elders or via channeling and claircognizance. A certified reiki, craniosacral unwinding, tarot and astrologer (among many other certifications), Prado co-creates with clients in person or virtually through guided visualization and therapeutic touch to help heal their inner child and guide heart seekers and mystics to trust love again.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Sacred Space House of Healing
El Sereno Spiritual
After her husband died in 2017, Maria Wallace considered selling the home they lived in until a vision of an elephant came to her. She realized the animal symbolized Elephant Hill, the sacred El Sereno hillside her home faces, and decided to stay. She quit her physically draining job as a court reporter and became a certified massage therapist, a service she offered to fighters and their families as a former Muay Thai boxer. Born and raised in South Central L.A., Wallace turned her home into a sanctuary in 2019 before COVID hit. She was one of the only massage therapists available during the time. From the moment you step inside her cozy casa azul, your worries melt away as you’re guided into a relaxing room where a massage table and meditative music await. Wallace offers Swedish, deep tissue and Thai massage that incorporates myofascial release, energy work, crystal therapy, chakra balancing, hot stones, cupping and sound therapy to leave clients feeling lighter and looser. Afterward, clients are met by Wallace for a cup of tea and chat.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Rocio Navarro
Spiritual
Born and raised in Lincoln Heights, Rocio Navarro, 41, uses water and sound for somatic healing from cultural, familial and ancestral traumas and dynamics that transcend time and space. The daughter of immigrants from Michoacan, Navarro uses Indigenous-based healing practices and epigenetics to hold clients like a child in water as ancestral, intergenerational, conception, womb, birth and early childhood imprinting is unveiled. This rebirth process uncovers limiting truths and helps folks gain deeper insight and self-awareness on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level. She offers private and group water healing sessions that take clients to natural hot springs, lakes and oceans in places like Death Valley, Ojai and Mexico or locally in private pools.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
LA Healer
Spiritual
Growing up in the San Gabriel and Napa valleys before settling in La Loma or what is more commonly known as Chavez Ravine at 18, Olivia Biera started facilitating talking circles at 16 and is deeply connected to her Mayan and Comanche roots. Today, the 44-year-old healer uses herbs like ruda, white sage, arnica, aloe, elderberry and mallow that she grows in her garden, which overlooks Solano Canyon, for limpias and remedies to heal from trauma and energy blockages. Her services include ancestral trauma release, Mayan cosmology and abdominal massage, energy and chakra clearing, soul retrieval and emotional cleansing rituals. She teaches other healers about essential oils and clinical energetics and is constantly learning new ways to heal through her own self-reflection.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Andrea Valencia L.A
Highland Park Spiritual
A self-described guest practitioner of East Asian medicine, Andrea Valencia, 33, offers acupuncture, fire cupping massage and herbal medicine rooted in Daoist practices at Golden Folk Wellness in Highland Park. A background in dance and yoga inspired the San Fernando Valley native to look for a practice that combined somatic communication and Eastern philosophy. She found it in this ancient Chinese medicine that is believed to directly stimulate the sensory nervous system, which can improve emotional, digestive, pelvic and musculoskeletal health. Valencia provides reflective prompts and mindfulness practices that engage the relationship between one’s body, behavior and nervous system for psychosomatic healing.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Raquel Lemus Coaxitlalli
Spiritual
A birth worker since 2012, Raquel Lemus Coaxitlalli centers pleasure, joy and purpose during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. The fully licensed Afro-Indigenous Latinx full-spectrum midwife, peristeam hydrotherapist and placenta specialist facilitates home births with local holistic Black and Indigenous maternity service providers Sugar Heal Gang and offers uterine health and holistic gynecology independently as Community Partera. As a childbirth educator, Coaxitlalli promotes positive birthing experience for families by checking mother and baby’s vital signs and offering self-care guidance throughout prenatal visits. During the birthing window (37-42 weeks), she remains on call and recommends vaginal steaming and other holistic modalities to prepare mother and baby for birth. During postpartum visits, she assesses vital signs and provides lactation counseling, uterine massage, belly binding and postpartum vaginal steaming.
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Sarahi Apaez)
Indigemama
Spiritual
On a mission to end postpartum suffering for Black and brown families, L.A. native Pānquetzani Ticitl teaches folks how to heal themselves using the power of la matriz (the womb). Tapping into 4,000 years of ancestral wisdom, the postpartum healer considers her abuelas, ancestors and intuition as her biggest teachers. Born and raised in L.A. to Mexican parents, Ticitl has been organizing in the community since she was 12 years old and was surrounded by revolutionary leaders. She realized womb wellness was an obscurity after seeing strong women give up their bodily autonomy and radical liberation ideology during pregnancy and birth. Guided by ancestral memory, Ticitl founded Indigemama in 2012 and is a traditional herbalist, healer and birthkeeper showing what it looks like to thrive in one’s calling and reclaim one’s body and destiny. She has a book coming out in September .
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(Pedro Nekoi / For De Los; Photo by Etienne Laurent)
Goddess Fix Your Crown
Spiritual
Espie Munoz Quintero is a spiritual life coach, artist and floral designer who practices human design, a new age belief system rooted in astrology, I Ching, Kabbalah, Vedic philosophy and physics that determines our personality and purpose based on the date, time and location of our birth. Coined by late Canadian publisher-turned-teacher Alan Robert Krakower, who in 1992 wrote a book called “The Human Design System” under the pseudonym Ra Uru Hu based on a voice that visited him for eight days, the belief is that everyone falls into one of four energy types: manifestor, generator, projector, or reflector. Quintero invites clients into her chic Alhambra home, next door to the house she grew up in where her parents have been providing marriage counseling for 50 years, to unlock their unique human design and discover their life purpose. A firm believer in tapping into the goddess within, Quintero offers her services in person and on Zoom.
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