Celebrating 100 Years of the Texas Folklore Society, 1909-2009 Page: 299

                                
MEXICAN AND MEXICAN-AMERICAN FOLK HEALERS 299

Avila has taken a "vow to be of service" to help people in their
own healing process through self-empowerment. At the center of
curanderismo we find not the healer, but God, the Creator, or uni-
versal spiritual energies. Therefore, self-empowerment means that
Avila's main responsibility is "to educate and empower people" by
teaching them "to call upon divine guidance, saints that are mean-
ingful to them, and to the protective spirits of their ancestors."26
To accomplish this, Avila's sessions begin with a pldtica, a counsel-
ing session, which allows her to learn about a person's spiritual and
cultural beliefs. Pldticas allow a person to desahogarse, which means
a person "speaks until everything has been released from the body,
soul, and heart."27 A pldtica, in many ways is a limpi (a spiritual
cleansing). As a professor, I do not have clients but I have students.
By sharing our stories through pldticas that take the form of dis-
cussions, journals, and research papers, my students and I create
venues of desahogos (of opening up and letting go), and in the
process convert the classroom into a space of limpias.
Avila offers a useful distinction between the soul and the spirit.
It demonstrates how important the well being of both is for us to
maintain a healthy and balanced sense of self. The soul, she says,
"is the part of us that includes all that we are: our talents, our
hopes and dreams, our true voice, our nature, our identity, .
[and our] seat of creativity."28 Our soul is sacred. The spirit, on the
other hand, is "the envelope that protects [the] soul from harm."
What makes this envelope effective or ineffective as a seal of pro-
tection is that the spirit contains "the sum total of our nutritional
habits," whether they are "good or bad." The spirit also keeps "the
energy generated from our feelings" as well as our thoughts,
whether they are positive or negative.29 The nature of our spirit
affects our social relationships, making them healthy or destructive.
If this protective envelope rips easily, then our soul, the core of our
being, gets violated. A wounded soul, or soul loss, never fully
leaves our body, otherwise we would be dead. However, depend-
ing on the severity of a physical, emotional, or psychological abuse,
we can become like the walking dead. As a result of sustos, an
injured and violated soul can live within us.