Spirit of the Healer
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| Sun, 11-06-2005 - 9:35pm |
"Spirit of the Healer
November 06,2005
James Osborne
The Monitor
McALLEN — Youthful- looking, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt advertising a 1970s cartoon icon, Bobby Estrada easily could pass for a college student.
Only instead of talking to classmates about midterms or last weekend’s party, he prefers communicating with an aged woman who mentored him in folk medicine and died some years ago.
"I see the dead all the time. When I was 4 or 5 years old, we were living in Wisconsin in a haunted house. I would play with this blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in the house," he said. "I never questioned it because I saw him as if he was you. But no one else could see him, and eventually I figured out he was dead."
The 35-year-old Estrada is what practitioners of the Mexico-based folk religion called curanderismo refer to as a spiritualist. A step above the more common curandera — who purport to cure ailments through prayer and traditional medicine — spiritualists also claim to be clairvoyant, reading people’s minds and having an open line to the afterlife.
And Estrada’s client list, which he says includes academics, politicians and even a celebrity or two, is growing by the week.
"There’s more curanderas now than there were 20 years ago," Estrada said.
"There’s a big demand. People are more into it now. Before it was a hush-hush thing. You might get a consultation, but you’d never say anything to anyone, not even your closest friends. There’s still some of that, but nowadays people are more open about it. It’s more acceptable."
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I thought this article was interesting, of a modern day healer. Wanted to share. :D
Thoughts? Comments?
Gypsy

I bet there are still a lot of closet patrons of spiritualists and psychics, who would NEVER tell the relatives that they went to one!