by Jessica Hoppe.

Christine Gutierrez, a licensed psychotherapist, life coach, and the author of I Am Diosa: A Journey to Healing Deep, Loving Yourself, and Coming Back Home to Soul, has always followed her instincts.

Born in Queens, New York, Christine was raised Catholic but also felt pulled towards the Indigenous healing practices of her family's native Puerto Rico. “I went to Catholic school, my whole life, even Jesuit college. I was at Fordham for my undergrad. I remember going on strike one day in elementary school. I was really upset and decided I wasn’t going to do Our Father’s anymore. I was only going to do Hail Mary's because I wanted to pick my own feminine face of the divine.”

Though she didn't have the language as a child, that same instinct returned during her graduate study in mental health counseling and guided Christine to explore more holistic, feminine, and culturally relevant approaches to therapy. Over the past 11 years of practice, she’s championed the mind-body-spirit modality to great success and galvanized a sisterhood of healing-seekers she lovingly calls, “Diosas.”

Sad Girls Club caught up with the curandera, known as @CosmicChristine on Instagram, via Zoom from her new home in Puerto Rico to celebrate the official launch of her debut book.

For more on her work, visit christineg.tv and follow her on Instagram @CosmicChristine.

SGC: The “soul” is central to your work—can you explain what you understand the soul to be?

CC: The soul goes beyond the physical realm. It’s that space within you that is, that has always been, and that will always be. It is the place that's connected to your higher self, to the spiritual world. It’s untouched by culture, humanity, in the sense that anything that's happened to you, anything that's hurt you, anything that's pain, anything that’s wounded or traumatized you, your soul stands and exists beyond that. It’s your spirit, your wisdom—the place that always guides you.

SGC: For those who feel they struggle to connect to the soul, how would you recommend that they gain access to that part of themselves?

CC: There are so many different ways to connect to your soul. And there’s no one way to refer to it. You can interchange it for anything that resonates with you more. Maybe the soul for you means finding a place of stillness, or that feels strong. Maybe that's what your soul is for you? Or maybe it's finding a peaceful place within you that knows what to do next, that guides you. But the most important thing to do to connect with the soul is to listen to where you are most yourself. And that can be anything from being in nature to crying or listening to your favorite song. It can also be a moment in your deepest breakdown where you feel lost and yet there's a glimpse of hope. It can be when you're meditating or while connecting with another person. There's no one way.

I remind clients that the soul can be found in any place that you feel most yourself; where you feel at home, as I like to say, the soul home. I think it’s important to encourage people to not get caught up on the language or on an idea of there being one pathway to the soul. Poets, mystics, anyone that's gone through any kind of deep dark shit can tell you that there's usually a moment when you feel a connection—a feeling that you're not alone, that there's something more.

SGC: I relate to that very much and it reminds me of a passage in your book. You discuss your experience in graduate school when you felt there was something lacking, which led you to study more holistic approaches of spiritual wisdom, such as energy work, meditation, tantra, and studies of the divine feminine. Your research guided you towards the mind-body-spirit approach which fuses the clinical and the spiritual—two modalities that are classically seen as separate bodies. Do you find that they produce the best result together?

CC: When I first found out that the word psychology is the study of the soul, not the study of the mind, that was really important for me because it was what I’d intuitively felt all along. And when I saw the actual proof for that, I was like, okay, well, my intuition was spot on. And the thing about it is, our spirituality, our therapy, even psychology has been colonized. First of all, it's a patriarchal system colonized by whitewashed ideas of what it means to be a therapist. I naturally take on the role of being more of a curandera or a healer. You can be a licensed therapist and also be deeply spiritual. It’s common to weaponize westernized standards of medicine—say some are less of a professional if they believe in these things when these are the very things that heal people.

Meditation, for example, and a lot of other practices or rituals were known to heal people, to connect people, to unite the community. But unless they're phrased in a specific way and put through so many tests, it's not good enough. And so for me, when I worked hands-on with people—over the last 11 years now, I realized, especially within the Black, Indigenous POC communities, the mainstream traditional approach didn't work.

It just wasn't culturally sensitive. A lot of the people that were coming in had some sort of spiritual belief, and that warmth was very much a part of the culture. I saw that this was missing and, for me, there is no healing without spirit. That is a fundamental part of my work as a therapist, but it's not this dogmatic version of religion. It's your own relationship to spirituality, finding peace, and a deeper connection. It’s that mind-body-spirit approach that incorporates every aspect of a person so that they can really be assessed at each level.

Clinically, we know that trauma exists in our nervous system. We know that we need actual exercises, such as breathwork, embodied somatic practices to release the trauma through the body. Likewise, shamanic and other spiritual practices intuitively did these things. They did rituals. They used ceremony. So it is really a reclaiming of a lot of our ancestral wisdom—things that our, well, my mama did and bringing it back—acknowledging that, actually, this is therapy. This is healing.

SGC: Absolutely. We are definitely waking up to the harmful effects of assimilation and the violence of having our practices appropriated. You recently moved to Puerto Rico but you were born and raised in New York?

CC: Yeah, I was born in Queens, raised in Brooklyn, and moved back to Queens. The majority of my life was in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and Ridgewood. And then, I moved to Puerto Rico for the first time after I graduated with my master's because my intuition told me to. Then I came back to New York and spent a lot of time going back and forth. I wanted to connect with my culture deeper—my roots, my ancestry.

My mom and dad are Nuyorican. My dad grew up in Brooklyn. My mom grew up in the Bronx. Both of them, not really dirt poor. I like to say, they had food to eat but their parents worked hard. My grandpa worked in a factory. My grandma worked in a factory. My mom grew up in the projects and they never lived in Puerto Rico. None of my uncles, my aunts, my cousins—they don't even speak Spanish anymore. I'm the only one out of the cousins that speaks Spanish.

From a young age, I saw the white-washing that happened in our culture because of the complicated history of being colonized by the United States. But there was always something in me that was like: No, I'm proud to be Latina! And I really pushed for that and I stood proud of that. Allowing myself to be led back to Puerto Rico was a big journey of reclaiming parts of my cultural self. I’ve bought a home and married my husband who is born and raised in Puerto Rico. It’s really special to be in the land of my ancestors and every year for the past nine, my Diosa retreat has been here.

SGC: Sounds like paradise!

Your energy is very powerful and I can see how working with you personally would be transformative. How long were you working hands-on before you felt ready to put it all down on paper and make your resources available in book form?

CC: For me, it wasn't really a practical decision. It was more like an intuitive flow. I always liked writing poems. Poetry is really my access point and eventually, I will write a poetry book, which will be darker, moodier, more mystical.

I consider myself a guide or mentor—a person that holds space for others to heal and validates their experiences. I’m here to let them know that they can be broken, raw, messy, fucked up and still be loved because we get to be human. Humanizing spirituality is huge for me, especially in a world that's been inundated with so much toxic positivity.

Even before I technically did this work with a title, I always had it in my heart and did it as a kid. When I started organizing workshops and retreats, it was like a download. I’d never gone to a retreat before personally. I had no template for it, and I say that it was literally guided. The things that I learned from my master’s program, the things that I picked up along the way, the things I learned from my family, or that have always been in my bones, led me to create experiences. I call the workshops spiritual surgery. It’s not a fluffy retreat. We laugh and celebrate, but really it's for people that are ready to go deep—to go to those places that hurt and love up their shadows, be kind to their demons and nurture themselves in ways they’ve never been given the permission to before.

The workshops led to developing tools, journals, and workbooks. The Diosa community evolved naturally as did the I Am Diosa book. It’s really a guidebook with a bunch of questions and prompts. It’s not the kind of book that is going to be easy or fun to read. It's going to be the kind of book that requires you to get a journal and a pen. You might even bring it into your therapist’s office. Anyone reading it should ponder these questions carefully and take their time.

SGC: You describe your community as a sisterhood, which sounds very warm and communal. Is this a more effective approach to therapy?

CC: There are many different ways to do it. It depends on the kind of client you're working with. I'm mostly working with high-functioning women of color that recognize boundaries and are safe and well enough to be able to relate at that level. Although I'm classically trained as a licensed therapist, the way I work is more as a spiritual guide and as a coach. I do that on purpose so that I can be creative in the way I approach my work. And there's a time and a place for those roles. It's very specific and dependent upon the mental health issues of the client.

But I do find that the sisterhood approach helps. Although I’m an expert in a certain area, I also relate as a friend. There’s a difference because we come in saying, we're at this together. I'm going to go with you. I'm going to guide you through this moment. Not because they’re not the expert—I believe that my clients all have the wisdom within them and they're just being given the space to access their own abilities.

SGC: Why Diosa? What does it mean to you?

CC: Diosa is the Spanish-language word for goddess. And a big part of my spiritual practice has been returning to the divine feminine. All of the feminine faces of the divine helped me to realize that I was stronger and more powerful than I thought. My personal experience along with that philosophy allowed me to feel more worthy, more loved, and more divine. That’s where the whole I Am Diosa philosophy came from. It reminds women, “Yeah, I am the Diosa! I am powerful. I am part of the divine goddess. I am part of the great mother. I'm part of the creatrix. I'm part of something bigger.”

SGC: Congratulations on your debut, I Am Diosa!

CC: Thank you! One of my biggest missions is to help, particularly Black, Indigenous, people of color, to have their voices heard. It’s something that my friend, Juliet Diaz and I, actually started a program to assist. The Soul Book Masterclass is focused on BIPOC communities. The program takes you through the process of writing a book from start-to-finish, from idea to book deal. We’re sharing all the things that people don't tell us—our numbers, the intel so that we can have our voices heard.

My work, this book, is important, but it's also the fact that I am a Latinx woman writing this book. I used to go through the bookshelves in the personal development market, recovering from my own experiences with abuse, and I consumed so much information. Although I did learn many things that helped me in my journey, I didn't see people that sounded like me or looked like me. I could relate to some of the experiences, maybe, but not overall. There was a part of me that wasn't being touched. One of the things that I always hear from the Latinx community or women of color in general is, “Wow, I needed this. I needed someone that was like you to help me feel that. To hear that it wasn't crazy or that I'm not alone.”

That’s the biggest thing that I want people to feel when they get this book—that they're seen and that they're represented. And that they're not alone.

SGC: That's wonderful. I think the book definitely achieved that.

***

Jessica Hoppe is a New York based-writer and creator of @nuevayorka. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Paper magazine and elsewhere. She is currently writing her first book of essays on the first-gen experience in America.

La Curandera Will See You Now: Latina Psychotherapist Christine Gutierrez Is Reclaiming What's Rightfully Ours

by Jessica Hoppe.

Sad Girls Club is a non profit 501(c)(3) organization committed to destigmatizing mental wellness for millennial and Gen Z womxn, girls, and femmes of color.