Past Issues :: 2007 March 1:: Cover Story
The Art of healing
Fuego taps into traditional healing practices to reach and guide at-risk youths
Ever since he was a child, Dennis was conscious of the energy within him. When he was homeless, from age 19 to 21, it was his strength that helped him survive the streets. It kept him positive in a very negative place. Still, he never really knew how to use it, he says, until he met Gregorio Acuna and the traditional healing organization Fuego.
“Everybody has their negative energy going on,” Dennis says, speaking from Fuego’s new Phoenix Rising Healing Center. “And when I come in here with negative energy, I definitely leave without it. With positive energy, it’s helped me help myself in the sense to be clear-minded and open-minded and not to be stuck in chaos. Even when I was homeless, I still had a positive mentality, and working with Gregorio helped maximize it 10 times. He really has helped me learn about myself spiritually and what my work is on earth and help me blossom into action.”
Now 24, Dennis is no longer on the streets, but he is sleeping on couches and continues looking for a job. “It’s really helpful for me to come here and keep myself together mentally.”
In the social-service world, the work of Fuego is an anomaly. The organization works with underprivileged, at-risk and homeless youths, in the client’s residence or at Fuego’s new Phoenix Rising Healing Center. Youths referred to Fuego from the youth care system receive one-on-one counseling, multicultural therapy and a slew of services you won’t find at your conventional youth services center, from Tarot card readings to sound healing sessions and “smudgings.” Healing is framed in the search for self-knowledge, identity and life meaning — for the individual and the community — and the tools are drawn from the traditions and rituals of indigenous cultures. In January, Fuego opened the healing center on southwest Jefferson Street, leasing the building from Outside In, a collaborative supporter of Fuego. The rooms in the center are creative spaces for work and expression, surrounded by instruments, incense and gifts of nature. There is definitely no “hang in there, baby” kitten poster on these walls.
“A lot of the homeless kids, they’ve got it down,” says Acuna, Fuego’s executive director. “They’re dialed in spiritually. Generally, the response is one of connection. It just feels like they’re feeling good and acknowledged — acknowledged in a way that ‘this is the kind of stuff that we want to do.’”
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With $5,000 in seed money from his former employer, Doc Martin Shoes, Acuna launched Fuego in 2000 as a pilot project through the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement. Its original focus was to serve indigenous youths from Guatemala and Mexico, and it allowed Acuna to apply his training in those traditions with a population far removed from their cultural heritage. A year later, he left OCHA, and began applying the same program to incarcerated Latino gangsters through Multnomah County. Acuna and Fuego began working with youths at Outside In, incorporating ritual into guerilla theater and his work with the youths. With the financial support from the Templeton Foundation, Fuego was able to open the Phoenix Rising Healing Center. Now its own nonprofit, Fuego works with the state Department of Human Services, providing wrap-around case management services in addition to the mentoring and healing services they provide at the center three days a week.
“The majority of the kids we service through the state are at risk of being homeless,” Acuna says. “Because when they get out of residential, the majority of them haven’t been given the skills to be able to maintain a life for themselves.”
To help develop those skills, Fuego’s network of staff and contractors develop creative and healing options for youths and the adults in their lives, including film and music production, art, theater, photography, sound healing, pottery and traditional rituals and ceremonies. While participants are welcome to think in terms of their own spirituality, these are not religious programs, but companion services to the more conventional programs in the youth continuum.
“I definitely think that it’s very important that the system really open up to this type of treatment,” Acuna says. “The cognitive therapy approach and medication, while I think is helpful on one hand, if it’s not balanced, it can really hurt a young person. And I see a lot of young people who are really challenged because a lot of the services are focused on getting them a job, a GED and getting them back on track with their life — which is totally necessary. However, when there’s no focus on the development of the self, and then they’re being pushed, there’s going to be resistance, or backlash where they’re going to rebel — and failure. And if you don’t have yourself intact, then the duration of whatever you’re doing is not going to last. They’re being pushed into doing something to just get it, and if it’s not filling them internally, as far as who they are, they’re going to end up quitting their job, or quitting school or whatever the case is.”
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Ryan Powell teaches the Taoist, Chinese practice of Qigong (pronounced chee gong), a body-centered meditative practice of yoga intended to open the energy channels in the body. Qigong is the Chinese word for “life energy,” and is described as an easy-to-learn practice to improve a person’s life and health. Powell contracts with Fuego to provide Qigong sessions with clients at the center.
“One of the most powerful things it does is allow people to take over their own health care,” says Powell, who doesn’t eschew conventional medicine, but speaks for the additional healing powers of this type of therapy. “It’s a complete system of self-healing. That by opening the energy channels of our body we’re allowing the universal energy to flow, and it’s like water cleansing our body of disease and stagnation.”
Powell says he sees it empowering the youths at Fuego, allowing them to restore control over their bodies and lives.
“As people cultivate their energy themselves, they become stronger,” Powell says. “And they share that cultivation with everyone they connect with it.”
Powell and his partner, Kristin Bowen, also facilitate sound healing sessions at Fuego. Participants meditate sitting or lying down, while Powell and Bowen move about the room messaging their senses with the music of world instruments — digeridoo, gongs, rattles, bowls, and other items. The high and low-frequency sounds of the session help retune the body, mind and spirit.
“At the end, we invite everyone in to begin sounding with us with their own voices, and make pure tones, and a very powerful connection and healing happens through that,” Powell says. “Very often we have people who start crying and have emotional releases during the ceremony. It’s a release. It brings up old stuck emotions within the body.”
Bowen also instructs Hatha yoga at the center, teaching flowing asana sequences coordinated with breath and sound to help participants energize and reconnect with themselves.
Powell and Bowen have their own company, One Root, but working with homeless youths is a new extension of their work. Powell says the experience for the youths will help them have more self-confidence in their own lives.
“[It is] helping them disconnect from the illusion of fear and helplessness and powerlessness, and reconnecting them to a power that is their birthright, which is their essential higher self… I feel like the street kids that we’ve been meeting are already so awake — and it’s just a quick remembering. They’re remembering this energy.”
Sara Mapelli has practiced energy realignment for 17 years, and with the youths at the Phoenix Rising Healing Center she’s working to help heal the trauma incurred in their lives. And like the others at the center, she’s found that youths are ready for a new form of healing.
“If you’re feeling healthier and feeling good about yourself, you’re going to perpetuate doing better things,” Mapelli says. “Plus, they’re just really responsive. They’re very open and really able to feel it and work with me. It’s exciting.”
In addition to directing the organization, Acuna works hands on in conducting life planning sessions and traditional folk healing sessions. Acuna uses traditional tools such as herbs, stones, feathers and other items and facilitates a “cleansing” ritual passed down through generations within the Native communities where it is still used as an alternative health treatment.
Tarot card readings are a popular offering at Fuego, where they become a technique for stimulating discussion about conflicts and resolutions, and help the recipient better understand and take charge of their lives. In the words of one young woman receiving a reading, the experience helps provide clarity, direction and assurance in her life.
“It just helps you take things that you otherwise wouldn’t connect and use to your advantage to put together the puzzle,” says the girl, who did not want her name in print. She’s 18, has been homeless, and is now living in a shelter. She started coming to Fuego a few weeks ago for Tarot card readings, among other services, and has found a sense of support and clarity she wasn’t finding through other programs.
“It’s something to relate to,” she says. “It’s different, getting it from yourself. In the Tarot readings, it’s different when you hear it from other people, and talking about it with other people.”
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From Acuna’s perspective, all kids are in a crisis. Some are in a deeper crisis than others, he says, and adults these days are doing a poor job of considering the next generation’s future — socially, environmentally and politically. And the kids know it, Acuna says. They’re being bombarded with the negativity through the media and in their own families.
“What is that doing to their psyche?” says Acuna. “And how are they looking at us as adults? There’s a sense of helplessness that comes out of looking at these people who are supposed to be facilitating a positive ground for you to be able to move forward from. And I don’t see a lot of kids having a lot of faith in us as adults because of what’s going on.”
Nor are adults today fostering an environment for young people to create a new future of their own, and encourage them to question the work of previous generations.
“I don’t see how young people are questioning what we’re doing,” Acuna says. “And then, if they’re in the system, the minute they start questioning us they get punished. I really feel like it’s time for all of us to step up and open up, and open up our minds to the possibility that the way that we’ve been doing things could definitely be improved.”
While Fuego, as an organization, is a rarity in the youth continuum, Acuna says he’d like to see more programs connecting with more traditional practices.
“There are a ton of artists and healers out there and a lot of people who want to offer this. They just don’t know how to engage with the system,” Acuna says. “So we’re also trying to build a bridge to start helping other people and organizations do that.”
