Brenda Salgado: Healing for Collective Liberation
Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism
Dear Friends, autumn equinox blessings to you. As night and day find balance in this season, may we find balance in ourselves and in our world. This month, I am pleased to introduce Brenda Salgado. Her activism is rooted in her Indigenous ancestry, and in the prophesies of the ancient peoples who foresaw the times of upheaval we face today.
Brenda Salgado is a spiritual teacher, curandera, ceremonialist, organizer, and movement leader. She is the program director of the Racial Healing Initiative, and the founder of Nepantla Healing and Consulting. In the past, Brenda has served as director of the East Bay Meditation Center, associate director at Wisdom & Money, and was a senior fellow at Movement Strategy Center. Her book, Real World Mindfulness for Beginners, features the voices of a wide range of next generation mindfulness leaders.
Brenda’s approach to activism is deeply compassionate, grounded in our belonging to Nature, ancestors, and one another. Her work is focused on racial healing, land and ancestral healing, sacred economics, and the interweaving of mindfulness and Indigenous teachings.
Brenda has received training from elders in traditional medicine and healing ceremony in Purepecha, Xochimilco, Toltec and other Indigenous lineages. She always introduces herself in relationship to the people and lands that have shaped her, beginning with her parents, Carlos and Esmerelda Salgado, her maternal grandmother Maria (now a powerful ancestral guide), and her ancestors of both Indigenous and Spanish heritage. She honors the land around the Volcán Masaya in Nicaragua, where her ancestors lived for many generations, and the land here in the San Francisco Bay Area where Brenda was born, the unceded territory of the Ohlone peoples. She also honors her teachers, especially naming Grandmother Amalia Salas who taught her about harmonization and healing with roses, and Sergio Magaña, a mystic and healer in the ancient Toltec traditions of Mesoamerica.
My friendship with Brenda spans many years. She is one of the people I turn to when the rising tide of calamities in this era of polycrisis begins to overwhelm me. Most often we meet in one another’s gardens, over a cup of tea, to catch up on life and talk about the spiritual demands of the times we inhabit. It was during one of those visits that Brenda first told me about the Toltec prophecies of the Sixth Sun.
She explained that in the Toltec calendar each “Sun” represents a period of 6,625 years, and is part of a larger cosmological cycle of 26,500 years. According to the calendar, we are now in transition from the Fifth Sun to the Sixth Sun. These transitions are marked by a period of upheaval, as the shadow of the outgoing Sun amplifies what needs to be healed and cleared. Everything we are seeing—increased natural disasters, extreme weather, systems collapse, mass turmoil and death are common. However, she said, if we work with the energies of destruction to clear ancestral traumas and karmic imbalances, these times can lead to a more harmonious world.
This prophesy, and others, form the context for my interview conversation with Brenda for this blog. She elaborates, “the time of the Fifth Sun was known as the Knife of Justice. It was a lot about war, patriarchy, separation, domination over women, domination over the Earth, and because of that separation, all the -isms.
“The Sixth Sun is marked by coming into our Quetzalcoatl nature, standing in our identity as a child of the Earth and a child of the cosmos. Restoring the relationship and respect for the feminine, for the Earth, for the mystic. It's not a switch from the patriarchy to a matriarchy, but about the energies of the masculine and the feminine coming into balance. To become a child of the Six Sun means to live primarily from your heart, and the integration of the intellect and the intuition, the cosmos and the Earth. Taking up your staff of power in such a way that you're in power with others, as opposed to power over others. So not being in the oppressor-victim dynamic, because that is actually the Fifth Sun dynamic.
“We’ve got to clear that heavy karma and those patterns in us so we can take up our staff of power in this time of the Six Sun with integrity, with self-love, with love for others, with sovereignty, with healthy boundaries, and to do it in such a way that other people feel safe taking up their staff of power alongside us. And we have to start doing a lot more ceremony with the Earth to restore that relationship, because it's been degraded and harmed for so long.”
She pauses thoughtfully before continuing, “The more that I began to train with my Indigenous elders, the more I understood that healing work is not just a nice add-on, but this is part of the calling of this time—the ancestral healing, the karmic healing, healing with the Earth, healing with each other. We can't actually get to the world that we're trying to build if we are not doing that work. On some level, I think I always knew that, but I’m grateful for the context that Indigenous elders gave me around calendar and time and prophecy, and why this work is so urgent now. It's always been urgent, and it's more urgent now. And also, there's a lot of support in the universe to make those shifts if we're willing to do the work together.”
Because of her many years as an activist, and her relationships with organizations both locally and nationally, Brenda is often called on to hold sacred space in movement settings, sharing ceremony and facilitating circles for healing. She is grateful to be able to bring her whole self—healer, activist, wisdom keeper—into these spaces. But it wasn’t always this way. Brenda recalls, “I remember being a young activist and having these conversations with executive directors of like, I really love the mission of what we're doing, but sometimes how we're doing things doesn't align with the Indigenous and spiritual values I was raised with. And I just struggle with that.” Sometimes her concerns were met with a receptivity that led to changes in the culture of the organization. Other times she was met with resistance, and made the decision to move on.
Eventually she found her way to Movement Strategy Center (MSC), a national Oakland-based organization committed to transformative social change. Brenda acknowledges, “It was the beginning of coming into a larger healing conversation with people in different organizations, really thinking movement building-wise around bringing in somatics, the Forward Stance practice [developed by Norma Wong], shared leadership. Just being in our spirit, our body, our intuition as a way to move together.”
For many years at MSC her work included Boys and Men of Color programs, youth organizing, and community leadership development, but unlike past settings, she was able to incorporate healing, spiritual, and ancestral work. “I remember we, along with other folks, co-led a transformative movement building track at the US Social Forum. And that was the first time I'd been in a movement space where we were talking about the inner work that feeds the outer work in a different way.”
Her experience at MSC showed Brenda that she never again needed to leave parts of herself behind. The wisdom and practices that she had learned from her elders, and through direct teachings from what she calls the Beloved Unseen, were the spiritual medicine needed to meet these times. She tells me, “I feel really grateful because I've gotten to be in these different places, holding space and circle to talk about Indigenous prophecy and the calendar and why this work is so important right now. It's all hands on deck. Whoever's ready to roll up our sleeves, it's a sacred time to be doing this work. And not just healing ourselves, but healing our ancestors and the ancestor realm, and a lot of the heavy karma that they're still carrying.
“That’s also liberating for the future generations. They're counting on us to do this work, the same way our ancestors did so we could be alive today and inherit a different possibility. If you're in that Seven Generations mindset, you know that you're responsible for that with everything you do. It's all part of a commitment to the next generations. We're all in training to be an elder, and we're all in training to be an ancestor someday. If we want to be a good ancestor, we’ve got to practice here to be a good elder and a good leader.
“So much of my work now is trying to give people more capacity and inner tools and ceremony and healing practice so they can break the old patterns that were indoctrinated in this culture and society, patterns that have a lot to do with their ancestors' trauma and challenges that have been passed down.”
“I've come to understand that if we want to do this healing work, this world-changing work, yes, we need to be talking about our healing with each other, but if we're not also talking about our healing with the ancestors and the Earth, then we will not succeed, because they're all braided together. I can't separate them as an Indigenous person. They're all connected. It's about being a good relative to myself, being a good relative to you, being a good relative to ancestors, to past and future generations. And when we're connected in that way, we're not as powerless. We're not as controllable. We can't fully be in our power and in our vision if we're not doing that healing work… And we also have to play and celebrate in joy.”
This perspective guides Brenda’s approach as director of the Racial Healing Initiative (RHI). A program of the Retreat Center Collaboration, they strengthen the capacity of retreat centers across the country to advance racial healing and systemic change in their organizations and communities. Unlike DEI training and racial equity workshops that focus on education and compliance, the RHI centers racial, ancestral, and land healing for collective liberation. Brenda sees this as sacred work, acknowledging, “spiritual elders have shared how important racial healing is for our human family, so we can remember our belonging, purpose, and dignity, and mend the hoop of humanity together. It is also central to healing our relationship with land and place.
“Justice work is about everyone doing what they have to do to come back into wholeness; to heal and break these patterns that have been passed down for so long. I often say to people when I'm working with them, these patterns of oppression that were from the time of the Fifth Sun that we're ending—whether that's racism, patriarchy, all the -isms—they dehumanize everyone in the system. They just dehumanize us in different ways. You have to turn off a part of your humanity to do some of the atrocities that these ancestors did, that people are doing now. And so I see that as a spiritual illness or disconnection. It doesn't mean we don't have to defend and protect ourselves. But justice is not possible if we're not doing this healing work together.
“We actually are far more powerful than we realize when we're connected with the Beloved Unseen, and we're co-creating with the Beloved Unseen. There's so much help for us in the non-human realm. And yet because we're out of relationship, we don't call on that help. It's part of the pathological individualism, part of the lie that was perpetuated in order to control us. Because when we're separated, we are very powerless in comparison to when we're connected.
“If we want justice and we want to restore these relationships, we want to restore a world that works for everybody, we have to actually be in relationship. How do we know the world works for everybody if we're not in a relationship with each other and ourselves? We’re so often operating from the stories that were put upon us.”
The time with Brenda passes quickly, and I look at the list of questions that I have mostly ignored until now, trying to decide where to direct us that would be most valuable to readers. I ask Brenda what she would offer to people who are newer to activism or are inspired now to engage it in a different way, one that contributes in a transformative healing manner? What would she put in their pockets to help them move forward through these times of struggle, to support both their inner lives and our collective wholeness?
“I might connect to some Toltec breath and energy practices that can help them both in terms of releasing things they need to release, and also storing energy for the work. I think it's one of the things that really stuck with me when I was training with Sergio. He would say, ‘I see too many healers in the world that are doing healing work with others out of their own life force energy. I need you to store energy to do your own work, and I need you to store energy to work with others, so that you're not healing out of your own life force and depleting yourself.’”
Brenda points out the connection, “I think we do that in the activist world. We have the same martyr-like programming, where we feel like we have to give and give and give to the point of getting sick and harming ourselves. So I really want to give people a few breath and energy practices that help them to store energy and do some clearing, so that they're resourcing themselves as they're doing activist work. She adds, “there's so many practices available, and this may not be the right one for you. Try it on. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't, find another practice. But get some practice that keeps you grounded, and rooted, and helps you center. A practice that begins to settle you into your body, that reminds you that you belong to that sacred energy and that you're in a relationship with it.” (You’ll find a 20-minute Toltec practice that Brenda leads about 30 minutes into the embedded video below.)
She explains that it’s not a transactional or exploitative thing, but a relationship of mutuality. We make offerings, and respectfully ask for help. Brenda smiles, “I tell people all the time—pay attention to energy and relationships, and the rest will work out. If you drop into paying attention to that instead of trying to figure it out, things will unfold in a different way. It won't feel as hard. There still will be hard things in life, but you're not holding it alone anymore, right? I love that framing, because it’s really about what connects you to the larger whole—connects you to Source, whatever you call that—connects you to intuition and wisdom beyond you, that wants to help you. And cultivating that muscle to listen to it.”
“I think we've been so trained that that’s unreliable, it's our imagination. Yada, yada, yada, yada. I think the universe, our higher self, our ancestors, the Earth is talking to everybody all the time. And we have been taught to not listen, to not slow down enough, or be in our breath or our body enough, to listen.
“Of course, the ‘Powers That Be’ don't want us connected that way. They want us separated. They want us feeling powerless, because it's easy to control people who are in fear and powerlessness. It's not easy to control people who are connected to each other, connected to the Earth, connected to the ancestors, right? And so, part of our liberation is reclaiming those relationships and those listenings.
“I really want people to cultivate that discernment and listening, and to be in their power around saying: I only want messages that come through that are of good intention and high vibration and mean well. You know, there's healthy and unhealthy people in our lives. And there's some people that we have to have boundaries with, because we just can't engage in a healthy relationship with them at this moment in time. And we pray on them, and want them to get better. And when they're ready to be in right relationship, we're ready to do that, too.
“And the same is true with ancestors; the same is true with spirit beings. I'm not afraid of any of it. I'm not afraid of people who are unwell and try to override my boundaries. But I can be loving, and have that boundary. I don't have to have it be this big charge, and this fire and this anger. I remember seeing a quote like that on Facebook, saying not every boundary has to be a raging wall of fire. Some of them can be a gentle voice that says: I will be respected.
“The more I go down this path of connection with the Beloved Unseen, the easier it is for me to be in confidence around those boundaries, and my worth, and that negotiation of what it means to be in a relationship together. Finally, develop your relationship with self-love. It's hard to love other people well if you're not loving yourself.”
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To learn more about Brenda’s work visit:
Brenda’s website: https://www.nepantlaconsulting.com
The Racial Healing Initiative: https://www.retreatcentercollaboration.org/rhi
Excerpt from Brenda’s book, Real World Mindfulness for Beginners.
Science and Nonduality (2022) - “Time of the 6th Sun: Toltec Teachings on Life, Death, and Transformation”
Thank you, Liza. I’ve known Brenda for years, but not well enough. This invites me to want to learn more about her work!