With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, you may have turned your focus on to finding something to impress your S.O. But this Valentine’s Day, we propose centering yourself. After all, 2018 is gearing up to be another difficult year, making self care extremely crucial. While this practice looks different for everyone, we think natural and traditional healing – which has seen a surge in popularity in recent years – can help bring you the peace of mind.
Since we don’t always see our own healing traditions in authentic ways – that is, made and sold by us – we’ve rounded up a collection of Latina-owned stores and services that focus on physical and spiritual healing. The businesses below are all dedicated to using remedies and methods from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean to restore balance.
1
BreadxButta
Bronx-born artist Lynsey Ayala launched BreadxButta, a Brooklyn-based brand focusing on wearable fine art pieces and healing through plant medicine. She makes each of her wearable pieces by hand. And every herbal wellness product goes from farm to customer. She’s launching a new line, Botanica, on February 9th at Urban Asanas in Brooklyn. Botanica will feature CBD wellness products and herbal healing infusions, and the event will discuss CBD as a tool for deepening meditation, connecting mind, body and spirit.
But if you can’t catch her in Brooklyn, Ayala is currently working on restocking her store with CBD bath soaks, CBD moon oil, and CBD healing salve.
Shop here.
2
Curandera Remedies
Curandera Remedies is a wellness brand that Josie Castaneda, a Mexican-Cuban certified health coach and yoga therapist, created. Her shop offers artisanal apothecary remedies that will help revitalize your relationship to the sacred and natural world – helping to bring peace to your life.
With her work, Castaneda draws on her background. As outlined on her About page, her family is “rooted in the healing arts of curandería, shape shifting, and clairvoyance.” On top of offering wellness sessions and private consultations to focus on specific ailments, Castaneda also sells herbal oils, body potions, and therapeutic eau de parfums.
Shop here.
3
Tatianna Tarot
Tatianna Morales, aka Tatianna Tarot, is an intuitive tarot therapist and ritual practitioner, medium, spiritual consultant, teacher, and energetic healer based in New Orleans. With more than 20 years of experience, she provides her services as a means of alternative therapy to aid others in gaining higher personal power, intuitive/psychic awareness abilities, and to facilitate healing through a deeper connection with spirit.
Tatianna credits both sides of her family for her gifts. Her mother’s family is Black, Haitian, Indonesian, Native American, and Polynesian. Her dad’s side is Puerto Rican. “On my father’s side, there are some traces of members who have connected with the Lucumi/Santería practice, but no one close to me,” she tells Broadly. “… For whatever reason right now, brujas are really trendy. And I think that there’s pros and cons to that. Like, hell yeah – ideally we are really all brujas and brujos. My definition is honing in on your personal power and working with the energies around you to create the life that you want. So ultimately, we all are capable of that. But it’s important to know that people have been doing it way before we have been doing it And it’s important to know and respect that knowledge, those people, and where it came from.”
Tatianna is currently working on an online store, but if you want to book her (she offers sessions in person, over the phone, and through Google Hangout), learn how to do that here.
4
Chiquita Brujita
Chiquita Brujita is a third-generation Nuyorican bruja who also dabbles in event production. You can catch her co-producing Latinx events around New York and making altars in the club. But she also offers readings of her own divination system using loteria cards (one of her services includes being a “digital dancing fortune teller for your homegirls’ bachelorette”) and sells sleekly designed prayer candles. Her Tres Mujeres collection features a set of three candles that represent Yemaya, Ochun, and Oya. “Let the multiple energies of the divine feminine light your path,” the product’s description reads.
Shop here.
5
Emilia Ortiz
Emilia Ortiz is a New York-based Boricua and bruja. She’s kind of like Walter Mercado meets Oprah, with the realness of Trina. She aims to provide healing and spiritual understanding to those who often find themselves excluded from this world. Feeling she couldn’t relate to others in the spiritual community, she decided to become the voice her community needed. Spiritual healing can be costly and inaccessible, so she focuses on offering healing to all – especially people of color.
“I gotta do it in a way that makes it acceptable and relatable to other people that I felt were being left out of the conversations,” she tells Paper. “Because this is cultural for so many of those people, and in one way or another, and yet more often than not, we’re left out of the conversation because we often feel like yeah, I just don’t like that I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I can’t relate to this shit. Like, you know, you’re a little too yogi for me.”
Though based in New York, Ortiz – who recently teamed up with Paper to offer 30-second therapy videos – offers sessions to people all across the world through phone calls and FaceTime. (She’s working on setting up Google Hangouts in the future.)
Head to her Instagram to learn how to book her.