Elena Avila, Identity, Modern Medicine and an Interview with her Daughter

'Chacmool' Reproduction, Parque Hundido, Mexico City

It was really only the moaning from next door that snapped me out of my trance. I had come all of the way to Cuernavaca from Mexico City (and all of the way to Mexico City from New Mexico...and all of the way to the US from Turkey) to experience something. Cedehc ( Centro de Desarollo Humano Hacia la Comunidad (Center for Human Development Towards the Community) is an acronym that rolls off of the tongue, much like the beautiful Nahuatl names for the places and people around many Mexican cities, names that seem so easy for the local people to say: Huitzilopochtli, Tenochtitlan, Nezahualcóyotl.  

The moaning was painful, feminine and low, strangely almost beautiful. I saw some starting to hover around the doorway and windows of the classroom in which Rita Navarrete was teaching. She was using a bouquet of herbs and pressing on parts of the physical frame known in Mesoamerican traditional medicine to help release and metabolize undigested emotional experience that imbalances the nervous system and beyond. Joining the class later, sitting in the circle around Rita and her patients, one couldn't help but have the sense that everything there pointed towards both wellness and learning, with highly trained traditional healers, medical specialists and academics all converging in a place that was not simply a romantic homage to an imagined past nor an isolated or superstitious space for making wild supernatural claims, disconnected from grounded common sense or the simple biology of the body that modern biomedicine has studied in such detail.

Even the classrooms at Cedehc used for teaching Mesomaerican traditional medicine, among other similar subjects, evoked a sense a pedagogy in space, designed with traditional and sustainable architectural blueprints in mind. As evocative as the space and the experience is, it also mirrors a number of traditional learning environments I have experienced outside of the corridors of formal academia, that have impressed me. I have stepped into these alternative yet traditional schools a number of times, with some having unbroken historical chains, some being mostly well-meaning reinventions, and almost all being a combination of both some continuous tradition and inevitable innovation and genealogy.

Moans and screams are certainly not what draws me most to these schools of traditional medicine, what draws me is the essential nature of these institutions and the people in them, something that I recognize as particularly distinct from the experience of much modern education. I don’t say that to totally disparage the system we have now. It has brought us all sorts of engineering, NASA and higher levels of literacy, and a certain level of meritocracy. And yet there is something very special about classical institutions of wisdom and learning, something that I am always impressed with. What one finds in these schools is something very hard to describe, a sort of rarified atmosphere of knowledge exchange and acquisition, a send of learning that somehow doesn’t seem present in a modern university setting, with rare exception. And yet something of this atmosphere does permeate schools of martial arts, traditional medicine, yeshivas, madrasas and the classical gurukula system of India.

There are a lot of things that I learned from the day I spent in the Temazcal (sweat lodge) class with Rita.  When I had finally made it to the school, I drank  agua de fresa y sandia and I sat down to just relax and experience the space without jumping from task to task. I had to choose one topic to work on for the weekend long intensive. After signing up for the meridians and emotions class I walked over past the temazcal and saw that Rita’s class was next door. Perhaps it would be better to say that I heard the class because theis was the moment when I followed the anguished sounds and surprised onlookers, going in to find the classroom strewn with herbs where Maestra Rita was teaching. I joined the class. Rita smiled so widely that I had finally made it there (home?). She asked if I had enrolled in her class. Saying yes, I had told a half-truth and spontaneously changed my mind. Why did I need to join the meridian class to get more intellectual information when people were screaming through the painful alchemy of transformation next door!

Rita treated me a bit like a guest of honor, sweetly. She spun me around a few times in front of the group so that everyone could have a thoroughly good look at me, telling them that I was a person who traveled in search of the knowledge of different communities and cultures. When I sat down with the group after the introductions she said ‘And you also study the methodology of Rumi, right?’. What an interesting expression.

During the lecture she encouraged us to touch and hold the plants to sense their properties. For example, I held the jasmine flower in my left hand with my eyes closed as she requested and as I held and connected with the plant I felt something move from the flower to my heart and eyes. My eyes began to water and I had some feelings of sadness. Someone in the class responded regarding her sense from holding the flower that it might be good for someone dealing with transition (and we were all being asked to keep our eyes closed so as to not identify the plant intellectually, but rather through a felt-sense). Interestingly, when we opened our eyes we saw that we were holding Jasmine and Rita pointed out that we were connecting with a plant often used at Mexican funerals and that indeed it was intimately linked to the issue of grief. A positivist might suggest that this was a simple unconscious association, which certainly makes sense. And indeed Rita did not seem to be trying to make a dramatic or supernatural point. It was consistently my impression that the traditional healers I met in Mexico and the US southwest wanted to use whatever worked to be of help, without concern about whether the methods appeared to be empirically sound to a western audience or not, and also not necessarily focusing on anything intended to be particularly extra-worldly either. 

At some basic level, I can see that what distinguishes these institutions and projects from most mainstream schools and universities, is the degree to which they are voluntarily joined. This forms an entirely different environment from what one finds when twelve year olds are being forced to learn English grammar, or twenty year olds are studying engineering to please their parents, hoping to eventually become actors.

One of the differences can be found in the Sanskrit term for traditional education mentioned above: gurukula, which literally means 'teacher-family'. Unlike the physically sanitized, cold and distant style that I often work with (or against?) in the mainstream university system, what one finds here is a family-like environment in which (madrasa, gurukula etc...) students sit on the floor, exchange ideas, spend long amounts of time together bonded around a topic of interest or at least relevance, applying the knowledge quickly and sharing a great deal. At a very simple level there is the process of memorization and sharing knowledge as something fairly immediate. One doesn't go home and sit alone reading, one ponders over texts in the classroom. A learner repeats them, tells mythical stories about the origin of the temazcal or repeats a surah or sutra to another student. Perhaps a teacher chants it for her pupil or acts it out, all in the same environment in which the learning process is happening, in the 'teacher-family' rather than alone in front of one's laptop or with a laptop on the desk separating teacher and student.

In sharing this I don't mean to suggest that modern education is not a step forward. In many ways it likely is, and allows for a flexibility of thought previously unknown. But when it comes to the study of what goes on in the world of traditional medicine, I have observed that it is not just the outcome of techniques ideas and the lived cosmologies that matters, it is the entire field and arena in which these medicines are passed along. Pedagogy is primal and primary.

In the end, some moaned, some screamed, others cried  and I certainly got very wet. After an hour of singing and being doused with all sorts of herbs, hot and cold water, steamed like a vegetable in the sweat lodge, I knew what it was like to fully include intellect, body and community, all in the temple of knowledge, furthering the 'limits of what can be known' as Michel Foucault might have put it, had he come along to experience a little sweet torture.