Hey folks,
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Berenice Dimas, a reiki practitioner, full-spectrum doula, medicine maker, body worker, workshop facilitator, and owner of Cantos De La Tierra.
She is based in Bay-Area and Los Angeles and has worked extensively to provide healing justice to communities of color. We had a beautiful conversation about the role that healing arts plays in social justice movements and community care.
This is just the first part of our interview, so stay tuned for the rest of our thought-provoking conversation.
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1. How did you become a healer?
I feel like there were very particular stages in my life. It all had to do with geography and movement. It all started when I was an undergrad at Cal State Fullerton. I was in M.E.Ch.A and there was a beautiful group of people doing spiritual work in the org. At one of our Friday meetings, people decided to go outside and start with a drum circle. My comadre Nayeli went around smudging us with sage. I remember staring at her as she smudged everyone. It was my first time smelling sage and something happened to me when she came and smudged me. It is so clear in my memory: the smells, the sunshine, the grass and the drum beat. I remember that when I closed my eyes, the smell activated something within me. I remember thinking, I don’t know what she is doing…. but I want to know what she is doing.
I think that is how it started. I joined the In Lak Ex committee and I participated in healing circles and womxn’s circles for full moons. I remember learning about the elements, about the meaning behind rituals, and learning about how to set up an altar.
I learned how to create a sacred space.
The next part of my journey was when I moved to Texas for my masters program. I packed all my stuff, put it in my car and drove to Texas with another friend. I had nowhere to live when I left. I just knew that I needed to be in that program. My first year there, I rented a room in this house and that is where I met my good friend Jessica. She lived across from me. It was my first time having my own room. As a kid, I shared my room with my two sisters. In college I had roommates and at some point a partner so having my own room and alone time allowed to start working on myself. I was going through a lot, feeling really alone, and processing so many things. One day, Jessica offered to give me Reiki. I had never experienced any type of energy healing but I laid on her massage table anyways. I remember her putting different things on my body like a dried honey-comb on my womb area and lots of stones. During our session, she activated something in me and she opened a lot!
We processed the session and weeks after I asked if I could meet her teacher. Jessica took me to her Reiki master, Pamela, a queer Chilena doing work in Fort Worth, Texas and I got attuned to Level 1 Reiki. I love the way that Pamela taught us Reiki. She taught us that we were the channels, the facilitators of healing journeys not necessarily the healers. I learned that doing any type of healing work was a huge responsibility. She told me that you could never do healing with other people if you are not doing it with yourself. So, Reki level 1 was about working with myself, activating, opening, listening, balancing, and doing the work. Pamela told me that I needed to give myself Reiki for 30 minutes everyday for at least 6 months before I did Reiki on anyone else. A year later, I became attuned to Level 2. I’ve been at Level 2 since then. It has been several years and I finally feel ready to go back to Texas to visit Pamela and do the Reiki Master level 3 attunement.
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My last stage (or the stage I'm in right now) started after I was rejected from 3 PhD programs (one of them being Berkeley by the way *laughs*). Up until that point, all I had known was school. I was going to get my PhD, teach at the university, and publish books but when I got rejected I freaked out and thought, what am I going to do? I made the difficult decision of coming back to California for the summer to figure things out. I found a free film-training program for queer women of color through QWOCMAP. I applied to it and got in. I said, “Fuck it, I am moving to the Bay!” and I did. I packed my stuff in my car again and drove to the bay. A month later I became a full-time substitute teacher and kept the job for 3 years. During that time, I found beautiful friends, spaces, my boo, and Atava who is now my herbal teacher and mentor.
2. I also wanted to talk about the Herbal Trauma/Crisis Kits that you created and envisioned with your Ancestral Apothecary Cohort. You all came together as healers to play a part in professing that black lives matter. I love how there is a narrative around healing justice and how social justice has this deep relevancy in communities of color. What was the process of creating and envisioning trauma kits and utilizing herbs and traditional medicine as a means of resistance.
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| [Find the complete kit here] |
Atava sets up the class to be very interactive. She believes that if there are pressing things happening in the world and we need to talk about them, then we talk about them. We had class a day after the verdict was announced. A lot of us walked in feeling very heavy. Atava allowed for us to have a space to express what we were feeling. During my check-in, I spoke about a well-known healer on the East Coast who created an herbal crisis trauma kit and sent them to Ferguson. After we all talked, Atava asked us what we wanted class to be like and we all agreed that we wanted to leave with some kind of tool kit to support our friends and communities during these times. The Herbal Crisis/Trauma kit that I put out on my website blog was a summary of what we talked about. I wanted to share the resources with people so, I went home, typed up my notes and posted it. Through doing this work, I have learned about the important role that herbs play when you are experiencing anything traumatic. Sometimes in these intense experiences, our body responds in a fight or flight mode. Some people even experience susto, shock, or “soul loss.” A part of us leaves our body as a survival mechanism. I learned that the quicker you deal with traumatic experiences (whatever they may be or whatever you are ready to deal with) the easier the body comes back to itself to process the experiences and heal itself (in whatever way it wants to or needs to heal.) So for me immediate care is as important as long term care.
We need to take care of our bodies if we are going to be able to go back out into the streets and demand justice. We cannot do that if we are getting sick! We cant! (obviously, it’s a different experience if we incorporate chronic conditions and disability). We can go into another conversation about abelism in healing rhetoric right…. But for me healing and being well is directly connected to how and what people define for themselves. What I do know is that I see so many people that are not doing good because of how much they push their bodies and I just want us to be mindful, to give ourselves the permissions to take care of ourselves, our bodies, and our spirit in the way that we choose to. I want us to know that we deserve to make time for ourselves (even if it is just 5 minutes), that it is not selfish. I like Audre Lorde’s quote “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” So part of connecting traditional medicine to resistance movements is recognizing that many many of our ancestral traditions also incorporated self care as a practice as a daily routine. Part of their resistance and survival was directly connected to plant medicine and self care.
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| Image taken from Berenice's website: for more info click here |
There are people who put their bodies on the frontlines and people have died for justice to happen but for me that is not the only way it has to be. There are many ways, many journeys and one of them is for us, the ones living, to strategize in solidarity with those being killed daily. To bring justice to their deaths we must have the capacity to do it and that also takes energy. It takes time. So we need to prepare our bodies to do that type of work. We have to think about sustainability and how we do this for a long time so that our next 7 generations feel the impact. How do we provide care for our world and future generations for a long time?
In my work, I try to support people with what they want/need. Whether they are the ones on the frontlines and are willing to risk their lives or the ones organizing in other ways - if that is their journey I am no one to tell them different. It is about supporting people so that they can continue doing the important work they choose to do in the community. It’s about providing care, resources, healing spaces for the bodies to rest, to feel good. It is about us taking care of each other.
The crisis kit was about having herbs be part of the social justice dialogue! Taking care of ourselves has to be apart of the dialogue. For me, the plants are there on the frontlines with me.
3. What role does community play in your work as a healer? What comes to mind in regards to the concept of community care.
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I think that another component of my journey was when I started doing workshops in communities. As an undergrad, I facilitated workshops for conferences that were more community oriented. As a grad student, I started of doing so many paper presentations at conferences. I got tired of sitting through conferences and listening to people read their papers all the time so I decided to do a healing circle at the conference! I just wanted a different space to share and have a dialogue with people that was not in a paper panel. The workshop brought a big group of people and some of the people in it were undocumented students who had just finished fasting 30 days in their community. They came up to me after the workshop and said that they felt that they need a healing circle for themselves.They told me that they had a lot of attention from media and their community as they were fasting but they never thought about actually preparing their bodies for a fast.
After the fast, many of them were going through a lot of digestive issues and some had gotten extremely ill. Some were told that they had incurable conditions and had created sever damage to their intestines because of how they fasted. They felt like their community had not supported them afterwards and they were trying to find ways to recuperate and re-nourish their bodies. In preparation for the workshop, I did a lot of research on digestion, fasting and how to support people after fasts. I thought, how do you help people feel healed, or feel better, or feel like they got something useful from a healing circle?
I learned the importance of translating information to the community. How do you make it accessible? How do you use language? I had to translate a bunch of really complicated articles on digestion and things to support internal organs. They really allowed for me to think about these things early on which helped me facilitate more intentional workshops.
Making resources accessible is at the core of how I do my work. It’s about listening to what people need, making it more accessible, and affordable. I always think about how much a charge for my herbal products or for a workshop. It’s a balance between honoring my time and my medicine but also making services affordable. I really like to offer sliding scale and make it as affordable as possible.
Part II on Self-care, Grounding and Protective Herbs and Elixirs Coming Soon!
Be sure to follow Berenice:
IG : @cantosdelatierra
Twitter:@ _LaBere
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