Relationship
We come to know ourselves through relationship.
Cihuateotcalli
A living sanctuary
A sanctuary of relationship, symbolism, expression, and transformation.
Enter the teocalli ↓
The origin
Where Cihuateotcalli began
About a decade ago, as I was first returning to my communal work after years of hiatus and moving through a period of personal healing and transformation, I realized that I wanted to transmit some of my experiences and share them with others.
I was still walking my path, reconnecting with my ancestors and el camino rojo, but there was a growing awareness that I had to continue expanding my community work after leaving it behind when I left graduate school. I knew it was time to synthesize my experiences and translate them into living medicine.
I was deep in spiritual practice and deepening my understanding of symbolism, goddess studies, archetypal psychology, art as ritual, and danza as ofrenda. My research had led me toward an alternate path between curanderismo and shamanic practices, Western psychology, and mysticism.
Through my goddess studies, I found language for the path of priestess and medicine woman which was a life lived in devotion to the divine through embodiment of the mystic arts, ritual, and connection to the natural world. For me, it was a path that encompassed a deeper knowing and connection with the cosmos and the natural world while maintaining grounded practices that help sustain harmonious order.
This path symbolized a role that could contain multitudinous identities while remaining connected to things that mattered. It meant that being a medicine woman, artist, mystic, and activist were not disconnected. The priestess path is one we can find in all corners of the world and one we can find in the Anahuac.
As I furthered my connection to my ancestors and spirituality, I began to embody this practice as a resurrection of a path not really spoken about. I visited the Palacio of Tepantitla and heard stories of priestess initiations there as we toured the place entirely to ourselves. Perhaps it was when I placed my hands on the sacrificial altar and saw blue lightning, or perhaps it was when I returned home. But as I prepared to share these practices with the world, I knew I needed a name that would reflect these principles, the energy of my ancestral lands, and values.
Through my Nahuatl language studies I went on a quest to create a word that would reflect this lineage or branch I wanted to reawaken. Because Nahuatl is a composite language, I combined words for “woman,” “divine,” and “house” to create Cihuateotcalli: “Temple of the Divine Woman,” or more closely, the house of the divine essence of woman.
Using that name, I began creating circles of women who would ascend a local mountain, quietly observing and allowing the mountain to speak to them as it had spoken to me. We would climb to the top, share medicine, make art, and make our descent. This was the first iteration of Cihuateotcalli. It went on to take the form of many workshops for womxn, culminating in six retreats that served more than one hundred womxn.
Like any sanctuary, Cihuateotcalli was not built by one pair of hands. Every woman who entered its doors helped shape its walls, deepen its halls, and reveal rooms I could not have discovered alone. Their trust remains part of its foundation.
The sanctuary evolves
From container to living temple
Although Cihuateotcalli began as circles for women, the philosophy itself continued to evolve. As my research into Mexica thought, the Tonalpohualli, symbolism, and ancestral knowledge deepened, I realized that what I had been cultivating was never limited by gender.
The feminine remained at its heart, but the work itself belonged to anyone willing to enter into relationship with it.
The understanding of Cihuateotcalli has been revealing itself to me for years. It went from an imagined basic structure or temple to one with levels, halls, depths, and heights. As I continued to bring fire through the doors, each time it showed me more and carried me further along my own transformational journey.
As my grays take root, so has my wisdom.
Cihuateotcalli is now a sanctuary, no longer only a container. It lives not just in my heart, but in the hearts of all those who have walked through its doors.
The philosophy
The spiral path reveals
Relationship sin conquista.
Teaches reciprocity.
Honors descent as deeply as ascent.
Expression embraced as a sacred art.
Cihuateotcalli embraces the practices of art and expression as ritual acts through which we explore and rediscover the self. Like the generative principle from which it draws its name, it is a container spacious enough to hold transformation.
It is through our relationship with the earth and cosmos that we come to know ourselves more fully.
Entering within
So what happens inside this temple?
Those who step within will find that what they enter is not something external, but an entrance into themselves.
For some, it is the first time they have entered their inner temple, so the door is full of cobwebs and hard to open. Others are rediscovering the door. For some, the door is familiar, but they are given a compass and fire to go deeper.
Within its walls are tomes of forgotten languages and memories that can only be accessed when we can transcend the stories we were made to believe, colonial remains, and re-enter into relationship with the natural world not as something apart from us, but as something to which we belong.
To enter Cihuateotcalli is to enter into relationship with self, the cosmos, and Tonantzin Tlalli.
It is a path of embodiment and stewardship of life. It requires integrity, responsibility, accountability, and, above all, love. It is a deeply human path that makes way for compassion and understanding so that we may become good ancestors to the generations to come.
We accomplish this by returning to observation, curiosity, dance, symbolism, expression, and reception.
To be immersed in the halls of Cihuateotcalli is to be nourished.
It is to make a true home within yourself and, from that place, re-enter the world and share from that fire.
The Seven Serpent Paths
The Path of Chicome Coatl
Cihuateotcalli is the meeting place of many years of study, ceremony, artistic practice, research, and lived experience. To remain a sanctuary capable of welcoming the beautiful and eclectic beings who find their way here, Cihuateotcalli remains in respectful relationship with the lineages, philosophies, and fields of study that have shaped its evolution.
Over time, I came to recognize these seven paths through my tocaitl, Chicome Coatl (Seven Serpent), my calendar name within the Tonalpohualli. This name is shared with the Mexica goddess Chicomecoatl, whose presence and teachings I have only recently begun to cultivate more intentionally. While much of my path over the past several years has unfolded under the guidance of Chalchiuhtlicue, the regent of my Coatl day sign, these Seven Serpent Paths have become another way of understanding the relationships that continue to shape Cihuateotcalli.
Symbol
We listen through image, myth, and dream.
Expression
We make meaning through creation.
Ceremony
We embody what we know.
Language
We shape reality through naming.
Community
We transform together.
Lineage
We honor those who came before while becoming good ancestors.
Cihuateotcalli, like any living relationship, continues to deepen through practice, study, humility, and a commitment to listening to the land, to community, to the ancestors, and to life itself.
Ways to enter