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SACRED BRIDGES HEALING ARTS

Pialli/Greetings!

I'm Michela Hernandez

Welcome to Sacred Bridges Healing Arts, my community work as a practitioner of Trauma Informed Bodywork (massage therapy), Full Spectrum Birthwork (birth + postpartum doula), Deathwork (death doula), Indigenous Healing, Herbalism, Childbirth + Birthworker Educator, Reproductive + Death Rights Activist + Advocate, and Space Holding.

I am also a daughter, a sister, an auntie, a homesteader, a lover + cultivator of plants, a soccer coach, a forever-student + book-worm, a proud bi-racial Chicana and the result of my ancestors prayers as I reclaim my Indigenous Traditions.

I'm grateful to be living on and stewarding land within the borders of Sinkyone Intertribal Lands, bordering Wiyot Territory (Southern Humboldt County, CA).

Being born and raised in Humboldt, I know these lands, waters and forests as my home, my teachers. I regularly give thanks I was called back in 2009 to begin my journey as a practitioner and to have held space for my Humboldt + Mendocino fam for the last 14+ years.

My passion for anatomy and biomechanics blossomed while at university as a kinesiology major. My clinical massage therapy education at Cortiva Massage Institute (Seattle) helped guide me on how to embody those passions in a helpful way. Both offered me an opportunity to learn the language of our country’s medicalized healthcare. It was working with my clients that taught me its deficiencies and inspired me to find ways to support the navigation process, particularly at the intersections of medical autonomy and the cross-section of allopathic and non-allopathic care in rural communities.

Educationally and experientially, my gateway to space-holding and the power of touch was bodywork/massage therapy. Chronic and acute pain management; injury rehabilitation + recovery; prenatal, postpartum + infants; and palliative care have been a part of my client base since my student-clinic days. Once in private practice, offering bodywork in clinic rooms eventually lead to sessions directly in the homes and hospital rooms of birthing and dying individuals.

The experiences shared in these, often impromptu, supporting moments were my first lessons in medical advocacy, trauma informed care, and whole-family space-holding of birth + death.

My community has shown me my role of support.

The bodywork, birthwork, deathwork, and traditional teachers I’ve been blessed to learn from have shared the tools to help me do that in a good way.

I am grateful to them all.

We are the Sacred Bridges between our ancestors & our decedents, between our intangible and tangible selves, between our own initiation into & completion of our time in this body, between the wound and the medicine.

The Traditional Mexikah (Mexican) Medicine I offer is learned from years of ancestral reclamation. The Indigenous Healing + Wellness Wisdom that I've been blessed with the opportunity to receive over the last decade+ from Curandero/as, Parteras, Elders, mi Maestro/as are something I am humbled to share with my community as they were shared with me to be shared with others.

These Traditional Healingways ground and inform my clinical practice in ways science may never affirm. It has been healing for me to reclaim my ancestral traditions and I’m grateful to share that healing with others.

My offerings are a bridge between my clinical education & ancestral traditions because I am. I hold colonizer and colonized blood within my veins. I hold westernized learning styles within my mind that intersect with my Indigenous heart, spirit, and blood. I hold the hands of birth and death as each are an opportunity for beginnings and endings. For transformation in life. For learning ourselves even more deeply. For ceremony. For grief and for joy. And we hold this, experience this full spectrum in our Bodies, in relationship with our Bodies.

I see our bodies as the keepers of our stories. To work with it intentionally and in an informed way, can be like speaking another language. Each body I work with being a dialect of it’s own. As I continue to learn the nuances of the way fascia, the nervous system, and our tissues communicate (with us and each body system), I feel more honored to support my clients’ experience of ease within them. They hold so many beginnings and endings to the individual and collective experiences that make our lives.

To me, my work feels very unified rather than being different offerings, and that is where the name for my “business” was birthed from. The unification of seemingly separate aspects of our existence and honoring the Sacred Bridge between the womb to tomb care-work I offer.

I believe every person has the right to experience a radically self-empowered existence.

Birth through Death & all the messy, beautiful bits in between.

I believe we have the ability & resiliency to do it with intention, especially when we have the respect and support we want and we need present.

As our Birth Right.

As our Death Right.

As our Human Right.