Getting an Egg Limpia in Los Angeles: What Happened When a Curandera Saw Everything I Had Been Carrying
"Is this man actually spitting on me?"
That was the thought running through my head as the healer doused me with Florida Water. He was spraying it through his mouth, misting my body as part of a ritual that, to the uninitiated, would have looked completely insane. Then he beat me with leaves as he rubbed healing lotion on my skin while saying prayers, whistling, and clicking. At some point he said a word I had never heard before, “Wooshtau." In this tradition, it is the equivalent of the primordial OM, the first breath, meant to clean the spirit and breathe new life into the body.
I had been there in Costa Rica, in this ceremony, on a media trade…meaning I was there for free. But the rest of the participants paid absurd amounts of money to be there. While also puking and shitting and tripping balls, mind you.
Strangely, after the limpia was complete, I felt a sense of wholeness. A baptism in the sense of rebirth, as if my soul had been treated with some sort of spiritual Lysol. Kind of like an exorcism, perhaps, but without any identifiable (at least) demonic presence.
What is a Limpia?
A limpia, which is the Spanish word for "cleansing," is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The basic premise is that the human body accumulates energetic “hitch-hikers” overtime. Not just stress or trauma in the way a therapist might describe it, but actual spiritual residue. Fear, grief, bad luck, other people's bad energy or jealousy, the general weight aliveness.
The goal of a limpia is to clear the person of that influence, and bring back balance and harmony. In some traditions, it helps invite a person's wandering spirit back into their body.
After the cleansing, whatever tools were used are usually disposed of or ritually cleansed themselves, because the belief is that the negative energies were transferred into them. It’s kind of like taking out the trash, spiritually speaking.
In the Colombian tradition, the curandero (Spanish for “healer”), works with a combination of sacred tools. Florida Water, a cologne with roots in both European perfumery and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice, is used to clear the energy field. Tobacco smoke, plant bundles (often called Wayra), prayers, and breath are all part of the process. The curandero uses tools like their pipe and mapacho smoke, agua de florida, their breath, and sometimes techniques involving touch, guided by plant spirits to harmonize the energies of whoever is in front of them. Every healer has their own style, their own lineage, their own specific prayers. But the logic, and intention, is synchronous.
The practice is not uniquely Colombian.
Limpias are used as a spiritual cleaning tool across traditions throughout Mexico, Central and South America, and the American Southwest, performed with plants, crystals, spirit waters, smudging, incense, candles, and eggs. The tools shift depending on where you are and who trained the healer.
The Aztec and Maya had their own versions. Modern curanderismo traces its roots directly to ancient Yukatek Maya and Mexica practices, using herbs, flowers, eggs, feathers, fire, and water as the principal instruments of cleansing.
In plant medicine ceremonies specifically, the limpia takes on a particular role. Before the ceremony even begins, the curandero performs ritual blessings to cleanse the ceremonial space, often using palo santo or mapacho, setting the energetic container for what is about to happen. During the ceremony itself, as participants move through their experience, the curandero works individually with each person, reading their energy and responding to what they find.
The idea is that when someone is in an altered state, their defenses are down, and whatever has been lodged inside them is closer to the surface, and, as such, it easier to move. The limpia, in that context, becomes a sort of active spiritual surgery, performed on someone who is cracked wide open.
Which raises an interesting question. Does any of it actually work? And if it does, what exactly is doing the working? Is it the ritual, or is it the belief? Is it both, and all?
Pachita performing a healing. SOURCE: Medium.com
Alejandro Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker behind the psychedelic masterpiece The Holy Mountain, spent years studying with a Mexican healer named Pachita, a frail old woman who would reportedly become possessed by the spirit of an Aztec emperor and perform what she called psychic surgeries on her patients, mimicking the physical sensations of actual operations, removing things from the body that were not literally there. Out of those experiences, Jodorowsky developed what he called psychomagic, a therapeutic practice built on the idea that the unconscious mind responds more readily to the language of dreams than to rationality, and that certain physical, symbolic acts can reach places that words simply cannot. In psychomagic, the ritual itself is the medicine, because the body believes what it experiences, even when the mind knows better.
Andy Kaufman, the late comedian who built an entire career on making audiences question what was real, believed something similar, or at least was willing to bet his life on it. In March 1984, dying of lung cancer and having exhausted conventional options, Kaufman flew to Baguio in the Philippines, where he underwent twice-daily sessions with psychic surgeon Jun Labo, who claimed to reach into the body with bare hands and remove tumors. Labo declared he had removed Kaufman's cancer, and for a while Kaufman said he felt better, but unfortunately he died two months later. The surgery was almost certainly sleight of hand, chicken organs palmed and presented as extracted tumors. Kaufman had spent his entire career as a performance artist studying how audiences are fooled. In the film Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey's version of Kaufman notices the magic trick during the surgery and lies back laughing at the irony of it.
Jodorowsky himself said the question of whether Pachita's healings were real did not make sense to ask, because in the shamanic worldview, there is no detached observer standing outside the experience. There is only the world as a field of symbols and signals, and how you give meaning to things that are inherently “meaningless.” The placebo effect is a potent mechanism in magic and in healing. Belief is the most powerful drug on earth.
And, beyond that, trauma has a potent way of making a believer out of anyone. Whether what follows is supernatural or simply the body finally giving itself permission to heal, I am not sure it matters.
I should say something about belief here, because mine has been tested more than I would like to admit over the last few years.
I started Evolve and Ascend in 2013, and it has changed shape more times than I can count. But the thread running through all of it has always been the same, the intersection of ancient wisdom and the modern world, of art and the occult, of gonzo spirituality and liminal spaces. Despite our name, we have never wanted to be anything more than a portal for exploring the esoteric with an eagle-eyed perspective.
And that is because, I have been a seeker for as long as I can remember, and always hoped to find a community that spoke to that particular unnamable feeling, and one day FINALLY heal from all of my traumas.
Prophetic dreams, unexplainable synchronicities, magic in the margins of mundanity. I was reading oracle cards at eight. I have channeled, seen things I cannot explain, and spent most of my life operating with one foot somewhere most people do not acknowledge exists, with the other stuck in “society.” It is a lot, and sometimes I try to turn it off, it does not turn off, but gets louder and louder until I break.
Lately I have been in an extreme crisis of faith. The world is continuously on fire, chaotic news cycles colonize every screen, and it is hard to feel anything beyond a deep “Weltschmerz,” a German word that describes the sadness that comes from carrying the weight of the world. This past year has been one of the hardest of my personal life, and I have been carrying so much grief. I am ready to set it down.
The City of Angels
Los Angeles holds a strange, and gorgeous, Lynchian magic within its spirit. Of the many places I’ve traveled, I found that even when you feel as though you are lost, the city guides you home and takes you exactly where you need to go.
So, this piece is the first in a series I am starting about exactly that. The hidden, the holy, the wonderfully weird. The local magic of the City of Angels.
Image courtesy of Botanica Luz Del Dia
Botanica Luz Del Dia, located on West Pico Boulevard, is the longest running botanica in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1984 by Maria Elena Ceron, an immigrant from El Salvador who brought her knowledge of spirituality and tarot from her homeland and built an establishment that has outlasted trends, gentrification, and the relentless churn of the city.
Her daughter, Señora Elena, now ninety years old and still reading tarot cards, has been featured on Univision, the LA Times, and beyond. At ninety, she is not slowing down.
The store carries rare and imported spiritual products, ritual candles, herbs, oils, spiritual waters, and everything in between, and has been serving people of every background, belief, and religion since Reagan was president.
Señora Gladys works out of their second location on Central Avenue, and has been performing limpias for over forty years. Her signature is a triple cleansing, an egg cleanse, an herb cleanse, and a smoke cleanse, layered together into one session. It is rooted in the same curanderismo tradition stretching back through generations of healers across Latin America. The experience is available at an affordable price of fifty dollars, and is offered every Friday and Saturday by appointment only.
So, I booked one.
On the car ride over, I spoke to my friend about his upcoming oracle card workshop, and we fell into a conversation about Jodorowsky, the Magician card, and the power of belief. Talking over bluetooth while watching the landscape shift from Los Feliz to Downtown LA, city streets of broken dreams and lives fighting to survive at the margins. People discarded by the world like urban detritus, but each one a living, breathing heartbeat. The hierarchy of spirits, angels, and demons, in this city can be as brutal as they are beautiful.
When I arrived at Botanica Luz Del Dia, I was greeted by a younger gentleman, and then by Señora Gladys herself. Her energy was warm and immediately disarming. I felt calm the moment I was in her presence.
We then walked to the second building, which had purple painted walls, and a random circle of books, then a stark back room.
I sat in a little chair and she began her work.
Image courtesy of Botanica Luz Del Dia
The eggs came first. In curanderismo, the egg acts as a kind of spiritual sponge, absorbing negative energy, illness, and curses (including mal de ojo, the evil eye) drawing out whatever has attached itself to the aura and leaving the person lighter. The egg is then cracked into water, and read, the patterns revealing what was held inside through fog, strings, bubbles—each one a different energetic signature.
Then came the plants. In the barrida tradition, the curandera sweeps the body from head to toe with a bundle of herbs selected for their cleansing and protective properties, plants like rosemary, basil, rue, and mint, each chosen for what it draws out and what it invites in. The herbs are believed to absorb negative energies in the body and in return offer their own positive energy back, restoring peace and harmony to the person being cleansed.
Finally, the copal smoke. The Mayans and Aztecs considered copal sacred, burning it in ceremony to purify spaces and communicate with the divine. Its smoke is thought to carry prayers and intentions upward, acting as a conduit between the physical and spiritual realms.
As the cleansing went on, I felt waves of chills move through my body, sensations I had almost forgotten, the kind that used to come when I practiced channeling and went deep into trance states.
By the end, I was wrought with tears. My Spanish is not great but I understand it completely, and even though Señora Gladys speaks English, I asked her to speak to me in Spanish, and to tell me what she saw.
She told me I had spent too long being eaten, and that it was time to learn how to be fed.
I was speechless. I have spent the last few years in way too many Zoom meetings with corporate clients where I have to fight to prove my worth and be taken seriously, where the price of admission is shrinking yourself down until you are palatable, where being heard requires repeating yourself ad nauseam. Way too many times my original ideas have been sold back to me for pennies on the dollar in a constant cycle of gaslighting by wealthy men with AI psychosis and power hungry narcissistic women who are borderline sociopathic.
And yet here was this woman who heard me without me having to explain anything, who saw everything I had been carrying without any context other than my presence. The sheer profundity, and validation, of being seen on that level without having to explain (or over-explain) and without having to perform your pain to make it legible affected me on a fundamental level.
When it was complete, she placed a red string bracelet on my wrist with Archangel Michael for protection.
It felt fitting.
My first piece on the magic of the City of Angels, and it ends with an angel watching over me, one of the most important angels we also chose to highlight in my Be Not Araid Deck.
Belief can be the most powerful drug on earth, and sometimes life knows exactly how to dose you.
I began this story in Costa Rica, with a word I had never heard before—Wooshtau, the first breath. The one that cleans the spirit and breathes new life into the body. Years later, standing on Central Avenue with a red string bracelet and copal still in my hair, I remembered what it was like to exhale and feel life’s potential to create, yet again.
That is what a limpia does, at its core. I removes what has accumulated, and makes space for hope to come back in. Whether you call that spiritual, psychological, or just the profound relief of being validated by a stranger, the result is what counts.
If you walk in carrying everything, and you walk out carrying a little less, that’s a huge win no matter what.