Journal Date: June 8, 2021

Last week I went to a temazcal ceremony in the north of Mexico City. 

The word temazcal comes from Nahuatl and it means “house of heat,” or what we might call a sweat lodge.

The ancient Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs used this type of ceremony for purification, often used to heal the sick and for women in childbirth.

The structure itself is in the shape of a circular dome and is built using stone or adobe bricks. During the ceremony, it is filled with heated volcanic rocks which are then soaked with a mixture of water and medicinal herbs.

This creates a dark, warm and moist environment, and for this reason, “The temazcal is seen as a metaphorical womb, where participants undergo a rebirth and emerge purified and renewed.”

That day we were guided by a shaman named Huitzi. He explained the history of the ritual and what we would experience when we entered the dark space underground.

One by one, we lined up in front of him. He said a prayer before us and cleansed us with branches of sacred herbs before we stepped into the temazcal.

As the heat underneath the earth grew, the shaman told me, “Guerrera, I know what happened to you when you were fourteen.”

He said impossible things, true things, but how could he have known? 

He gazed directly into my eyes in the darkness. He looked directly at my pain without aversion.

I was seen, but not judged for this pain. Somehow, he saw and he knew. 

And in his eyes, there was nothing to judge, nothing to forgive. 

It gave me the idea that maybe I could look at myself the same way.

Once he had addressed this difficult moment in my life, this crisis point, he took me back to the very beginning: my birth.

As the heat in the temazcal rose, he guided me back through my own birth, only this time through my mother’s eyes.

He described the circumstances under which I was born with perfect accuracy (according to what I have been told by my family).

When I was born, I came out of the birth canal but I would not cry, I refused to breathe.

The doctors spanked me, trying to scare me or otherwise provoke some kind of reaction in me.

Nothing worked.

Finally, the nurse held me out to my mother to see if she would have better luck.

This is how to the shaman described the rest:

My mother hit my bottom, and the nurse turned me over to place me in her arms as I took my first breath.

Finally, I cried.

It was in that moment that my mother saw I was a girl, and not a boy, as she had so desperately hoped (she had called me “Andrew”, my brother’s name now, during the entire pregnancy).

When she saw that I was a girl, she let out her own cry of horror and despair.

This was my entrance into the world. I hadn’t wanted to be here, and once I was, I only knew the rejection of “NO.”

It was true that my mother did not want a girl, the shaman told me. Even as an infant, I had registered her despair correctly.

What I did not understand then were the reasons why.

The despair was not disappointment, but fear: she feared that I would live to experience the same pain of being a woman that she had so long had to bear. 

According to Huitzi, she recoiled at the thought that I would suffer due to what he called machismo (all of this took place in Spanish), or what I might call the patriarchy.

It was not because she didn’t love me that she screamed “NO!”

It was actually because she did, and felt compassion and fear for what I might experience as a girl in this world she knew too well.

I had shared this first cry of “No!”  with my mother.

It was a cry that would ring out for a lifetime.

It has endured in many ways until now.

But on that day, I felt the beginning of something new. 

A melody rose in my heart, my secret song. 

I hummed it quietly at first, until the courage grew within me to sing it openly. 

It was a song without words, a song of laughter and tears, capturing the rhythm and rapture of my soul.

For the first time, I could leave behind the reflection of my mother’s voice, and claim my own.