Alternative Treatments: Mayan Healing

KATE O’BRIEN takes you off the beaten track with a few alternative treatments to reboot body and mind. Today we take a look at Mayan Healing.

Today’s traditional Mayan healers (or H’men) continue to combine profoundly spiritual rituals with the best of Mother Nature’s medicine to empower all who visit just as their forefathers have done for centuries. Contrary to Western medical thinking, the first line of Mayan therapy is to promote a healthy spirit, one that is at peace with the natural world and its creator. To achieve this, H’men work with 20 different energies and 13 life forces (or Kan Ku) to harmonise the body physically, emotionally and spiritually.

At Yaan Wellness Energy Spa?in Tulum, on the southern edge?of Mexico’s Riviera Maya, Demi Moore, Sting and Trudie Styler have discovered the enduring benefits of native Mayan healing. According to founder Dr Bobby Klein, the energy of their land is magical. ?We recognise that we are guests on this land in the Yucat?n, the home of the Mayan people. If the traditional therapies?we offer such as Sobada Maya (ancient Mayan massage), Temazcals (sweat lodges), and energetic?Limpias (traditional cleansing) were performed away from this land, they would not have the dynamic effect they have here in Tulum.?

The Temazcal, for example, was long used by the Mayans and Aztecs to uncover a deeper connection?with the womb of mother earth, to help people discover answers from within themselves. At Yaan Wellness, Temazcals are performed in a Mayan traditional ceremony to nurture spiritual transformation and physical healing.

CLOSE TO HOME

In Dublin, Adrienne Egan uses ?the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy?, weaving a combination of bodywork, botanicals and energy work to address a range of conditions, including fertility support, menstrual health issues, and pelvic and digestive issues. Egan is one of few to have studied with Dr Rosita Arvigo in Belize, Central America, who is primarily responsible for keeping this ancient knowledge alive and relevant, mayatherapy.ie.

FURTHER AFIELD

Yaan Wellness Energy Spa, Tulum, Mexico, yaanwellness.com.