BRENDA SALGADO LETS LOVE IN
SUBJECT
Brenda Salgado
OCCUPATION
Healer
INTERVIEWER
Berry Liberman
PHOTOGRAPHER
Ramin Rahimian
LOCATION
San Leandro, USA
DATE
August 2018
ANTIDOTE TO
Close-mindedness
UNEXPECTED
Ancestral connections
This conversation is out there. It’s different to anything I’ve ever done before. I met Brenda Salgado at a gathering of wisdom keepers, artists and spiritual creatives at Spirit Rock, a retreat centre in California. I had been invited for a business conference and found myself sitting in circle with some extraordinary and wholly unexpected people. It was one of the most profound encounters of my life. Although we were there to talk about the economy and the power of financial capital to be a force for good in the world, we were asked to suspend our usual paradigms and allow other perspectives—other stories and voices usually drowned out of conversations around money and power—to be present.
Brenda performed a welcome ceremony, similar to ones I had witnessed by Indigenous Australians. It was an invocation of the spirit of the place we were on, the sacredness of the land, and the story of its people and her ancestors—welcoming all of our ancestors to help us convene thoughtfully around the topics we were gathered to discuss. Something magical happens when you sit in circle with a diverse group of people who view and experience the world from completely different places. You grow.
Brenda is a Nicaraguan-American healer passionate about the role of culture, ceremony, relationship-building and community wisdom in creating a society filled with wholeness and beauty. She lives immersed in and honouring the spirit world. This phrase might be hard to read if you’re a rationalist. I have come to admire it and to understand that the indigenous knowing—its deep connection to nature and to ancestors—as hard as it is for the rational, compartmentalising mind to accept, doesn’t need that acceptance to be a healing force in our narrative. Brenda also reminded me that I too have ancestors. That the world doesn’t start with our birth and end with our death. That we are connected all the way back and all the way forward in the arc of humanity. It’s something we have collectively forgotten and need to remember.
On my return from the trip to Spirit Rock, I felt that the ability to hold the human paradox of feminine and masculine, of measurable and immeasurable experience, of belief in magic and belief in rigorous evidence, could all happen at the same time. And that the messier it is, the truer it is to our lived experience across the ages.
“Spend time in nature and on Earth as much as you can. Ask the earth to take what you’re ready to release. And spend time in water because water is really good at holding us, transmuting some of these energies.”
BERRY LIBERMAN: I was meant to be in the States with you but my family and I have just moved to a small town on the east coast of Australia to take a slower pace for a while and regenerate. It’s been a big 10 years of activism and raising the family. I’m feeling it in my body so much. And the thought of getting on a plane and coming to you, I don’t think I have the spiritual bandwidth. I don’t know what I’d give. So I’m really trying to honour that. Because I’m a yes person.
BRENDA SALGADO: I’m proud of you.
Oh…
[Laughs]. Because self-love is so important. And listening to our bodies. There was something I really wanted to go to with some colleagues and friends last night and I told them, “My body, my spirit
