Luzclara Camus Living in Times of Plenitude

tatiana de la tierra

In Chile, Luzclara lives in a round wooden temple that overlooks the Maipo River and faces the Andes mountains. Buddhist flags, statues of goddesses, and an organic garden planted in the shape of a spiral lead the way to Luz del Maipo, the temple that she calls home. This is where she meditates, does yoga, prepares for ceremony, and rides on horseback into the mountains to a special retreat. But shamanic leader Luzclara Camus is a globetrotter who hasn’t been home much lately. She’s been in Poland, Spain, Portugal, and France recently, facilitating ceremonies of the sacred feminine. Her next stop is California, with weekend workshops planned in the Los Angeles area (June 17-19) and in Mount Shasta (June 24-26).

A Priestess of the Goddess, Luzclara is on a mission to bring women together in old-fashioned ways. Imagine a circle of women chanting and drumming around a fire under the full moon. “It’s time for women to come together again,” she says. “This is a moment of a great awakening to the feminine, and we are responding en masse. We’ve been living in a patriarchal system for thousands of years, where we had to develop our masculine side in order to survive. We had to learn to compete, for instance, and we had to forget our feminine essence.”

I met Luzclara in a medicine journey in Chile a few years ago. That same night, after I’d met her, she came to me in a dream as a condor. Over the next few days, I participated in fire circles, sweat lodge, sound healing, and a labyrinth ceremony that she led. I learned of her ways of viewing sexuality, menstruation, manifestation, healing, Pachamama, plant medicine, menopause, and magic. I also found out that the grand Condor is her totem, and that, before going to sleep, she gives her light body permission to travel. Luzclara has unforgettable presence and I’m looking forward to her landing at Los Angeles International Airport in a few days.

Responding to an email interview while taking a break in Saint-Tropez in the French Riviera, Luzclara explains that ancient ones said that the way energy enters the planet changes every two thousand years. Masculine energy entered Earth from the Himalayas, and now feminine energy is entering from the Andes mountain range. “Feminine energy is not just for women,” she says. “It’s for everyone, and it’s time for the feminine qualities to develop once again.”

A native of Chile, Luzclara was mentored by an indigenous Mapuche Machi (shaman), Antonia Lincolaf, after the Machi came to her in a dream in 1981. Machi Antonia taught her how to hold ceremonies and how to heal with herbs, flutes, and sound. She initiated Luzclara with the kultrún, a feminine ceremonial drum in the shape of a bowl with symbols that represent the universe that holds medicine in its womb. Luzclara has initiated hundreds of women kultrún carriers since. “Sound heals by harmonizing our bodies, as the musical vibration penetrates deeply into each organ, into each cell,” she says. She does an adaptation of the Machitún, a healing ceremony done by the Machis, where people receive healing within a circle of drums, rattles, dancing, and intentional chanting.

She is also schooled in Chinese and Tibetan spiritual practices and has learned and shared ceremonies with indigenous groups from North America, Peru, and the Amazon. “My relations and contacts with native tribes in North and South America gave me the memory of how to be one with the Earth, how to feel the spirit in the elements, and how to see Her as a living being and respect Her as my Mother,” she says.

“Right now, European and American multinational corporations are pillaging our lands in Chile,” says Luzclara. Monsanto has claimed ownership of the country’s native seeds, and AES Gener has bought the rights to waters of the Maipo River, with a hydroelectric project that is sure to damage the environment, diminish water supply in Santiago, and enrich the company. Additionally, corporations are vying to build reservoirs in Patagonia. As a Guardian of the Earth, Luzclara has participated in her community’s protests against these assaults on the land.


“I am committed to caring for Pachamama and to teaching others how to connect with Her,” she says. Luzclara is a co-founder of the Guardians of the Earth Women’s Shamanic School in Chile, which began this year. (The school has two sessions every year; one in English, and another in Spanish.) She also takes on apprentices for one-on-one training in Luz del Maipo. “My most important work is empowering women, assisting them in the discovery of their sacred feminine and their roots with the Earth.” Her teaching methods include working in sacred circles and doing ceremony with the moon, solstices, and equinoxes.

“My relationship with Mother Earth has been a love affair. I have so much love and gratitude for her,” she writes. A central part of her message of embracing the feminine is in embracing Mother Earth herself. “To align with the Earth, we need to align with ourselves first and see Her as the living being that she is. We need to walk upon Her with love and respect, and to care for Her waters and Her nature. We need to quit exploiting Her for profit. We need to curb our consumption. And we need to be grateful and conscious of Her generosity.”

In Luzclara’s world, all women are goddesses and all people can become one with Pachamama. She views the female experience as a visionary by turning “menopause” on its head by naming it “plenitude.” The idea of useless shriveled up hags gets replaced with plenitude, “a grand initiation for women, a time for a woman to birth herself and claim her power. It is a time of plenitude and the beginning of a marvelous phase of life.” She explains that during plenitude, blood rises to the upper chakras. The third eye chakra, which corresponds to vision, and the crown chakra, which is the connection to the divine, are engaged. This, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a “wise woman”--a woman who actively “sees” and who is consciously connected to her internal goddess. From everything I know about her, I’d say Luzclara, who’s going to be celebrating her 70th birthday in August, is a wise woman embodied.

Following is information about upcoming events by Luzclara Camus. Individual appointments are also available.

LOS ANGELES AREA EVENTS, June 17-19, to be held at 3732 Sapphire Drive, Encino, CA. See http://innerflowerchild.com/. RSVP 818-905-7789 or susan.bernardo@gmail.com
Friday, June 17, 5:00-11:00 PM. Sound healing ceremony and potluck. All are welcome. $25; kids attend for free.
Saturday June 18, 2:00-8:00 PM, Opening to the True Power of Your Feminine Nature: Learn to deepen your connection to your own healing power and the healing of Earth. Includes rites of initiation, Machitún transformational healing, cleansing with feathers and smoke. $115
Sunday June 19, 11:00-6:00 PM, Woman’s Wisdom, Power and Mysteries, Riding the Serpent Through the Years of Plenitude: Learn to harness the transformational fire energy of menopause to seed your wisdom years with wonder and power. Includes lunch with foods that support all phases of this potentially powerful and transformative time in our lives. $145


MOUNT SHASTA RETREAT: June 24-26. In Spanish. Songs, dances, healing rites, sound healing, fire ceremony, and sweat lodge. Participants should bring sleeping bags and camping equipment. Facilitated by Leticia Elicea at Portal de Luz.$175 for weekend, including meals. Contact Leticia Elicea 408.261.3272, instituto@isehn.org

Peregrinación a Machu Picchu. Un peregrinaje de mujeres por el Valle Sagrado visitando Machu-Picchu y otros lugares de poder. Inscripción: soco@cascada.net o luzclara777@yahoo.com

Contact Luzclara directly for information about the Guardians of the Earth Shamanic School for Women or private apprenticeships. luzclara777@yahoo.com

Visioning Beneath the Almond Trees

by tatiana de la tierra

The shamans shuttled us to a grove of almond trees for a 4-day, 4-night silent vision quest. They placed us each beneath an almond tree, far apart from each other. Here, we would commune with nature, sleep upon the earth, pray and meditate. We were instructed to put an altar at the eastern entrance of our space and to hang our tobacco prayer ties around the four corners. A tiny ceramic replica of Venus del Valdivia accompanied us, along with a cornhusk-rolled tobacco, which we had swept four times through the fire at the base camp. The fire, which would be tended to at all hours, would reflect our states of being and would alert the fire keepers if anything came up.

We were to live off of two apples, one pear, one avocado, one corn on the cob, a miniature chocolate bar, a handful of almonds and a gallon of water. We would pee on the ground and, with the little plastic shovel provided, we would dig a hole in the earth for bowel movements. Two in the group of ten women were menstruating; they were to bequeath their bloods upon Mother Earth. We were told to wear skirts for ceremony and not to read any books.

I wondered how many rules I’d break, and if I could make it through even one night.

As the sun set behind the mountain, I scrambled to get my space in order. A bright pink piece of plastic was the “floor” of my “house”, which consisted of a twin air mattress, a sleeping bag and travel pillow, a duffle bag for nightclothes and another for day clothes. I also had two mochilas, one for health and beauty aids/writing tools and the other for my altar. Though we had only minutes to prepare, I skillfully crammed quite a lot of stuff to bring with me, leaving nothing to chance.

It was around 8 pm after I’d finished setting up and changing into flannel pajamas. With just a bit of daylight left, I set out to make the hole for going to the bathroom. It was to be deep enough to last all four days. I walked all over, crunching dry leaves and twigs in my path, searching for just the right place to squat. A place with a view, yet out of sight, and without spiky bushes and vines in the vicinity. There were many options, but all my attempts were futile. Dry, hard and rocky, the earth was impenetrable with a little plastic shovel. If only I had a pick and a sledgehammer, maybe I could swing it. Instead of one deep hole, I made several shallow ones. Yet I wondered if the other women were able to dig deep into the earth, and if I was just a lazy, inefficient, shit-hole digger.

Vision Quest Realization #1: I don’t know how to dig holes and am pretty clueless about appropriate tools for this or other means.

When I got back “home” it was too dark to set up the altar, which was next on my to-do list. That’s when it hit me that there was Nothing to Do. Except lie down and look up at the sky, through the lattice of treetops. Which is what I did. A lot. For hours and hours, wide awake. And there I discovered an entirely fascinating, seductive, magical, unending world. The world of night, of mysterious creaking sounds, fireflies, twinkling stars, planets, and that thing called the moon, which was plumping up dramatically and journeying across the sky. I believe it’s called enchantment. I was under the spell of the Night.

Vision Quest Realization #2: Nothing to Do leads to Everything Else.

Disoriented at daybreak, I had no idea where I was, or what I was doing with all those leaves in the landscape of the sky, until I remembered that I was in an almond grove somewhere in Chile on a silent vision quest. I had to get up to go to the bathroom.

Getting up—exactly how was I going to do that? This was the deep and recurring philosophical question of every day and night. Would I roll off the air mattress to one side and spring up from my knees? Not a chance. Pull myself up entirely using my core stomach muscles? Yeah, right. Hold on to the tree for support while I inched up? Impossible. Roll flat on my face and hustle on upward? Good luck with that. Getting up off the ground—that was an event, every time. I thought about it a lot, attempted it a few times, and after a while, just did it Somehow.

Vision Quest Realization #3: You better do some serious Pilates, girl.

I went looking for my bathroom holes but never found them, and had to dig new ones.

It’s a good thing I had all the time in the world to set up my altar, because it took a ton of time. Compass in hand, I was committed to putting the altar exactly at the eastern corner. Yet it also had to go with the setup of the tree, the rocks, and the “house”. It took three tries until I finally settled on the right spot. Not being able to “feed” the altar with candles and sage (we were asked not to light any fires since the area was so dry), I offered rocks, flowers, water, and a played a little harmonica, rang bells, and rattled. But were my sacred musical sounds violating the code of Silence?

Vision Quest Realization #4: Silence is a state of being, not an act.

Throughout the day, I sought shelter from the sun and the heat. Hoping to make my supply of food last, I sought fruit from the trees. Restless and unable to sit on the floor for long periods of time, I wanted to stretch my back and move around. And so it was that I would be the only one to walk freely up and down and around, eating blackberries, plums and grapes, resting on the tops of huge boulders, and chilling out in a tiny patch of jungle that I found on a path off to the side.

Vision Quest Realization #5: In nature, all things are possible.

My surroundings came to life the more I walked around. At first, I saw blobs of brown earth, mustard yellow leaves, dry and blackened tree branches. Everything seemed about the same. Later on, I could distinguish between one tree and the next. I found berries where, before, there were none. I noted the red plums that I had passed by every day without realizing it. I could see almonds, rocks, plants, spiders, lizards, ants, and, at times, little bits of trash on the floor. Rocks began to speak to me. Then, walking around went from being an act of fleeing from something (the heat, etc.) to an exercise in observation and discovery.

Vision Quest Realization #6: The more I consciously open my eyes, the more I see.

The heat, my lifelong nemesis, invited me to be in my natural skin, practically in the nude. Which was perfect except for one thing: carnivorous yellowjacket wasps.

Vision Quest Realization #7: When in nature, nature rules.

In the heat, and in silence, I was delighted to discover the Wind, which speaks lightly with rustling leaves or loudly like the roaring ocean. The wind that blows through my hair and shakes everything up, that scatters pollen and seeds and knocks yellowjackets about. The wind that refreshes and enlivens.

Vision Quest Realization #8: The Wind!

Nights with my altar, smoking a cigar for my ancestors, I connect with my personal path. This is where I keep things to myself, where my past comes to me as my visions for the future unfold. It gets so cold late at night that I put on the pure wool and cashmere layers to safeguard me while I dream.

Vision Quest Realization #9: Sacred tobacco clears the path and lures the images of my dreams.


Out in the almond grove, I wrote little songs to the earth, moon, sun, birds, to silence and to ayahuasca. The cycle of each day and night, natural as eternity, became magical as hell. I became a sky gazer, a moon worshipper, a sun watcher. A child of the stars.

Vision Quest Realization #10: Me loves being alive on earth.


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SHE: BIKE/SPOKE/LOVE. SHE: BIKE/SPOKE/LOVE.
Texas writer, performance artist and urban bicyclist Tammy Gomez is fundraising for the production of her bicycle theater play, SHE: BIKE/SPOKE/LOVE in Austin, Texas in 2012. A story about young people in an ethnic community who care about the future of the planet and the greening of the barrios, the play features spoken word with choreographed bicycling, a turntablist, and video projections. For more information about her project, or to make a donation, see http://xxcommunicator.blogspot.com/.

The Blessing Next to the Wound

JOURNEYING INTO THE JUNGLE

by tatiana de la tierra

Inside the psyche of a young man being tortured in that cell at the top of a hill there is a book that will one day tell his story: The Blessing Next to the Wound. A political memoir rife with intimate and harrowing details of fractured life, this book takes deeply personal wounds on a journey to global healing. This is the story of Hector Aristizábal, a Colombian theater artist, activist and psychologist. It is about some difficult issues—abortion, homophobia, drug addiction, racism, exile, prison, immigration, murder, torture, and the U.S. juvenile justice system. It is about the intersection of creativity, ruptured reality, ritual, and therapy. And it is about Colombia, where the story begins and returns to at critical junctures.

Co-written with Diane Lefer, The Blessing takes place in Medellín, Colombia and Los Angeles, California, with many stops throughout the world. Aristizábal hails from the low-income barrios on the outskirts of Medellín. Rounded up at four in the morning in 1982 by the army in search of guerrilleros, the twenty-two year old university student was taken to a compound where he underwent questioning along with beatings, waterboarding, electric shocks, mock executions, and psychological terror. Ten days later, thanks to pressure from human rights activists, he was released (and went into hiding). His brother Juan Fernando, who had also been arrested, was imprisoned for several months for carrying a machete. In 1999, when his brother was murdered by paramilitaries for his past ties to the Ejército de Liberación Nacional guerrilla group, the enraged Aristizábal demanded an autopsy of his brother’s corpse and photographed the event.

Out of this experience came “Nightwind,” a solo play that re-enacts Aristizábal’s torture and his brother’s autopsy. Co-created with author Diane Lefer and musician Enzo Fina, Aristizábal performs “Nightwind” in the U.S. and around the world.

“The play opened doors for me,” he says. Diane Lefer, Hector and I meet for coffee and conversation one morning in Pasadena. He’s recently returned from an ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon jungle, where he experienced the plant’s healing, illuminating, and maddening psychedelic “pintas” for the first time. Later tonight, he’s heading to Nepal to perform “Nightwind” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” at the Kathmandu International Theatre Festival. “‘Nightwind’ opened the chamber of torture for people to see inside, opening the chamber for me to come out of it and not continue to live in it.”

The play also led to further collaboration between Lefer and Aristizábal, including writing and publishing magazine articles. The two joined political and artistic forces after people responded with suggestions that they write a book. Armed with Hector’s journal and his Masters thesis, Diane immersed herself in his voice and interviewed him, his family and others for further details. “Writing the book was harder on me than on him,” she says. “Telling your own story can be cathartic. Putting yourself in someone else’s head, that’s something else. Also I kind of lost track of myself for the years we worked on this, being so identified with his experience.”

Disgusted with U.S. politics and this country’s role in the world, Diane dropped out of college and ran away to Mexico years ago. She refers to herself as a “young idiot” for the time she took a bus through Guatemala and “got a guy with a motorcycle to take me into the United Fruit Company plantation,” where she marched to the manager’s house and demanded to see “the books.” Today, she is hooded and wears an orange Guantanamo outfit on her profile picture on Facebook. This was taken by Robin Lynne Gibson, a photographer who witnessed Lefer in street protest attire the day she was mistaken for a terrorist by the Los Angeles Police Department. The Facebook caption reads, “I thought I’d be able to change the photo by now.”

Lefer writes fiction, advocacy journalism, drama, and nonfiction. She avidly supports Duc Ta, a young man who’s been unjustly locked up in California prisons since 1999. Her activist affiliations include Witness for Peace, the Program for Torture Victims, and the Colombia Peace Project. As her “young idiot” spirit lives on, Diane Lefer is just about the perfect person to bring The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism and Transformation to light.


How did Hector like having his voice channeled by Diane? “It was fantastic. I didn’t have to sit,” he says. “The book exists thanks to Diane, her artistry. She forced me to go deeper… She provided the structure and made final decisions.” One decision she made was to cast the protagonist as truthfully as possible without glossing over his flaws. “When he does workshops, people come to him like he’s this great hero… I want people reading the book to feel like they can overcome anything that’s happened in their past. He’s not perfect. He has issues.”

A structural decision she made was to carry the story back and forth, from Colombia to the U.S. and beyond, out of chronological order, letting the themes drive the narrative. In twelve chapters, we are exposed to a man’s private life—a marriage that blooms and crumbles before our eyes, the lingering psychological effects of torture, a fetus pumping with life that falls into the palms of the hands, a group of men shedding tears for the grieving brother who is unable to cry for himself. Just as important are sociopolitical discussions about complex issues brought out from the personal, and abundant anecdotes and psychological perspectives about people healing through crisis.

With this approach, The Blessing transcends any one person’s experience. For example, “Life from Barren Rock” is a chapter about Hernán Dario, Hector’s thirty-one year old brother who is dying of AIDS after a lifetime of unacknowledged and unaccepted homosexuality. While the chapter centers on his dying brother’s life, it is also about homophobia, the sexilio of gay Latin Americans who leave their countries of birth to live freely as homosexuals, transgender mujeres in Los Angeles, and the power of ritual.

A lot happens in The Blessing, and it took me a bit to get accustomed to narrative jumping around—from personal voice to political discourse, from Medellín to Palestine to Passover dinner, from Hector being in one country, then another, on and on. The book is packed with so many references and information, I wish it had an index. And I appreciate how Colombia is represented here; I can see it vividly. This book is great for anyone who wants to understand the country’s complex history, with concise explanations of La Violencia, guerrilla groups, cocaine mafias, paramilitaries, and phenomena such as los gamines, los deshechables (the disposible ones), young hired killers known as sicarios, and much more.

With training in the performance arts in Colombia, Masters degrees in psychology and marriage and family counseling, twenty years of psychotherapy under his belt, serious personal drama and a penchant for mixing it all up, Aristizábal has developed, over time, a comprehensive and creative approach to healing. He travels the world now, teaching techniques inspired by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. “I also bring psychodrama and the use of ritual, using theatre as a laboratory to explore alternatives to conflict, and theatre with community groups to reconnect with roots of where we come from.” He has offered his workshops all over, including Palestine, Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Northern Ireland, Israel, Canada, Spain, Colombia, Cuba, and the U.S. In Southern California, he has worked with marginalized communities—immigrants, gang members, torture survivors, pregnant teenagers, AIDS patients, “at risk” students and youth in juvenile detention centers.

His subject matter is heavy, I say. How can you focus so much energy on everything that’s painful and wrong in the world? “I hear you, I hear that from my family,” he says. “My sister says ‘you’re morboso’.”

But I won’t tag him as morbid. It’s just that he “goes there” to places that are ugly and uncomfortable. And he stays there long enough to recount, explore, bear witness, find the blessing, and transform.

“My wounds have informed my work,” he says. His brother’s homosexuality and struggle against homophobia inspired him to become a therapist. The time spent with his dying brother led to his work in hospice. He framed his experience with torture as an initiation that marked the beginning of a new life. The death of his murdered brother brought shamanism into his personal healing. When confronted with teenage peace activists from Colombia’s Red Juvenil, his internal terrorist shifted out of retaliation.



“The wound is a tomb for the things that need to die and for the things that are born out of the wound… Most traditional societies believe that when something happens to a person it is important to pay attention to it and find meaning in it, not pretend it didn’t happen.” He uses medical analogy to make his case: a physical wound requires cleaning and disinfecting before it can be sewn up. “In psychic wounds, the idea is not to wound ourselves but to look inside to see what happened to us. What are the internal resources that are awakened in us? … The idea is sufrimiento. To suffer is to bear it, to be able to understand what is in pain… to learn from the pain.”

I get it. A part of me wishes I had not read this book because there are things I’ve tucked away that I don’t want to feel or remember. Yet I am grateful that a book exists to take me there. “We have to do the soul’s work, which is going to the darkness to find the light,” says Hector. “That’s ayahuasca. You go to a dark place and see things; that’s where the light is. You go to the jungle to go into your own jungle. It is a paradox, but it is a beautiful one.”

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The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation by Hector Aristizábal and Diane Lefer. Lantern Books, 2010. Available in paperback and e-book format for Amazon’s kindle.