Santería as a Healing Practice in Diaspora Communities: My Cuban Jewish Journey with Oshún

For quite some time now, I have realized that my professional commitments to culturally informed, community-based teaching and practice are intertwined with a personal quest: to understand my own Cuban-eastern-European-Jewish family and how our multiple diasporas redirected the flow of our family lives. Dissatisfied with the received knowledge of an individualistic, psychopathology-oriented mental health field, I have tried to understand my own life course, and that of others, as deeply intertwined with the many souls, among the living and the dead, with whom we share our evolving family lives. My life as a woman between cultures has not been easy, as I sought and failed to find personally acceptable choices among my family’s and society’s prescriptions for a good daughter, wife, mother, teacher, psychologist, healer. But the struggle to discover more inclusive life sources, to learn how to learn from life’s inevitable losses, has been rich with cherished opportunities to discover, again and again, unexpected harmonies in apparent contradictions. I have found that sharing the lessons learned from my own profoundly human struggle is itself one of my most powerful resources as a teacher and healer.