Luisa was born into a family lineage of healers. Her father was a physician and psychiatrist. Her maternal grandmother was Concepción Palacios, the first female physician in Central America; her great-grandmother Báltazara was a curandera in El Sauce, Nicaragua.
In early childhood, Luisa began experiencing inner visions, clairvoyant dreams and auditory guidance. The lack of spiritual mentors at that that time meant she lived with the emotional pain and confusion that comes from navigating blindly between consensual reality and a vivid non-ordinary inner reality.
At 14, Luisa had a breakdown of her rational and perceptual processes. She was told by an inner voice that she was “shedding a skin” and that the process would last for one year. The experience subsided one year later. This period of isolation and destabilization led to a deeper opening of Luisa’s psychic and intuitive abilities.
This period of inner deconstruction facilitated a disintegration and subsequent reorganization of ego structures, allowing Luisa natural access to non-ordinary states of consciousness. Such a core death-rebirth experience is a common feature of initiation into a shamanic life.
Education & Training
Luisa has a B.A. in humanities from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was an assistant producer for the Source Theater Company and editorial assistant to editor Richard Peabody of Gargoyle Magazine in Washington, DC. Through Peabody, she encountered the writings of Paul Bowles (“The Sheltering Sky”), and felt a kinship with Bowles’ exploration of chaos and magic in the unconscious territories of the psyche.
Feeling alienated from American culture and values, Luisa left the U.S. to find Paul Bowles in Morocco. She met and spent time with him; it was a pivotal experience for her.
From Morocco she went on to Ibiza, Spain where she met master-healer Ioanna Salajan*. Ioanna saw in Luisa the natural qualities of a healer and mystic. She recognized her as the student for whom she had been waiting to transmit the teachings of her lineage. She invited Luisa to engage in a one-on-one apprenticeship over the course of the next four-and-a-half years.
After her apprenticeship with Ioanna, Luisa returned to the United States in the early 1990s.
Her healing practice began to blossom by word-of-mouth and Luisa specialized in working shamanically with terminally ill clients. She learned to midwife the death & dying journey for clients and their families. Her work in this area was influenced by the conscious dying teachings of Ram Dass and Stephen Levine.
Luisa studied the trance posture work of Felicitas Goodman with psychologist Johanna Maybury (Cuyamungue Institute). With author and medical astrologer Marcia Starck she learned the foundations of earth-based spiritual ceremony. Her association with Joan Halifax Roshi (Upaya Foundation) deepened Luisa’s understanding of Zazen sitting meditation and Buddhism. She also became an apprentice in the Sweet Medicine Sundance lineage and was initiated in the teachings of meditation master and mystic Osho.
Luisa has a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a licensed psychotherapist in the state of New Mexico.
Luisa is a referring therapist for The Meadows treatment center in Wickenburg, AZ. She has been trained by (and participates in ongoing case-consultation) with Pia Mellody (author of “Facing Codependence” and “Facing Love Addiction”) in family-of-origin emotional trauma resolution therapy.
Luisa’s mission is to assist others in transforming their self-defeating patterns into joyful, passionate authenticity. The ultimate aim is to live a life of integrity, passion, spontaneity and joy. Luisa says: “My relationship with my inner world and the wilderness inside my own being generates an empathic and respectful relationship with the natural world outside of me. My responsibility as a human being is to be a vessel for beauty and balance and to give that back to the world and to this planet, which give me so much.”
For Luisa, the shamanic path is one that she lives and breathes. It is her life’s work.
Luisa provides shamanic and psychotherapeutic consultation for individuals of all ages, facilitates dynamic workshops, seasonal ceremonies, and ongoing shamanic journey circles. She works in person, by Skype and over the phone with clients in New Mexico, across the U.S. and all over the world. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
