I must be cautious about interpreting things I don’t understand. This is written, of course, from my limited perspective as a woman from the USA, born in the 1970s.
As we walk through the Ecuadorian mercado, my eyes roam broadly over the color and commotion. I taken in the broad mix of scents, cut flowers, fresh fruits, organ meats and cooking stews. I hear the laughter of children, people seated in communal tables sharing meals with strangers, vendors asking me as I pass, “Que buscas? followed by offers of sweet potatoes, fresh queso, fruits.
Gracias, I say as I walk past.
Today, we are looking for the curanderas.
We weave past piles of unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, staring like the foreigners we are - at the stalls with whole cooked pigs splayed open, snouts and eyes still in their heads, as vendors pull meat from their bones and serve it with mote and potato cakes.
At the back of the big open building, we find them; the healers, the plant women, the medicine people. Elder women in colorful woven shawls and silky skirts, each in her own stall with towering piles of fresh herbs, remedies, herbs, incense, aguas floridas, soaps, oils.
Some are busy performing limpias on clients from the market. Breathing audibly, they shake stemmed herbs, spay infused waters, brush the body with whole chicken eggs. It’s a ceremonial cleansing - releasing negative energies, calling in guides, praying for health, intuiting information about the health and wellbeing, sensing what’s not immediately visible.
As I turn a corner, a strange orange root catches my eye.
¿Qué es esto? I ask
I notice an eager smile spread on my face. I am a bit surprised the question has so readily escaped my mouth.
The healer answers, gives me a name I won’t remember.
I am not really listening anymore.
I can feel myself pull back—pushed inward by the energy of her response. She’s not warm. Not inviting. Not unkind exactly… but indifferent, maybe even slightly annoyed. Unimpressed by my curiosity.
And instantly, I remember.
A similar energy from a Mayan healer I met years ago in the U.S.
As a young woman, I was invited to lunch with her. She was tall and formidable—long black hair wrapped in a bun, long colorful skirts, piercing eyes, soft brown skin. Her presence made no attempt to be palatable. She was unmistakably powerful.
I tried to charm her—with smiles, humor, politeness. The thin scaffolding of femininity I had been shaped into.
Unimpressed, she didn’t respond.
Not unkind, not rude, not aggressive—but unmoved.
And I could feel that she had no interest in the kind of sweetness I had been taught to offer. The kind shaped by the conditioning of colonial patriarchy.
I froze.
Everything I thought I knew about being a charming woman—and even about being a healer—began to wobble like a house of cards in a windstorm.
I spent most of that meal perched on the edge of my chair, posture perfect, listening as she told stories of stones that opened other worlds and improbable events that shaped her life and furthered the causes she championed in this world. I barely spoke.
For years, I returned to that memory. Each time uncovering another layer of what had been laid over my true nature—conditioning, disconnection, performance.
And here I was again, in a mercado in Ecuador, standing in front of another elder, feeling that same dynamic.
The familiar cloak of niceness rises up—especially in a moment where I feel uncertain, out of place.
But this time, I notice it.
And this time, I can take it off.
I don’t believe women like me need to abandon our capacity to be kind, relational, caring. That would be a mistake.
As a trauma therapist, I’ve come to see that there are often gifts in the strategies we develop. Hypervigilance, for example, can become a powerful refined awareness when it’s no longer running the show unconsciously.
I think of “niceness” in a similar way.
May we not lose the ability to connect, to soften, to put people at ease.
But may it transform.
May it melt from people-pleasing into something more grounded—true compassion, relational leadership. Something we can choose, rather than something that automatically takes over.
I suspect that part of this transformation is learning how to be with something many of us were taught to avoid:
Anger.
I think of a client (let's call her Bridgett) who experienced years of abuse and ridicule from her mother.
Recently, she told me she had been feeling intense anger when she thought of her. Her instinct was to calm it—breathe, ground, move away from it.
Instead, we went into it.
Slowly, carefully. Expanding the felt sense, listening, letting it move through her body.
“I’m right here with you,” I reminded her.
She had spent a lifetime suppressing her anger through shame, tension, control.
But this time, she allowed it.
And what came wasn’t chaos.
It was relief.
Later that day, she wrote to me: “I’ve never felt more like myself.”
She sent a photo. There was a softness in her I hadn’t seen before. Not smiling—something deeper. A grounded, steady presence. Fully her.
I know this place.
When I was younger, I used to have dreams filled with anger—immense, almost overwhelming in its intensity. I would wake up feeling ashamed.
What’s wrong with me?
Because anger is everything women like me are taught not to be—too much, too loud, too disruptive.
In my own somatic work, I was invited to let it be.
To feel it fully.
And what I found surprised me.
It didn’t take me over.
It moved. Expanded. Crested. And then settled into a quiet, sweet, steady relief.
That was the beginning of learning how to be with my anger without needing to act it out.
It remains one of the most powerful pieces of healing I’ve experienced.
Not because I go around disrupting people—but because I know, in my body, that if I need to make someone uncomfortable in order to be true to myself, I can tolerate that.
Back in the market, I feel the old habit of niceness rise again.
The impulse to soften, to smooth the interaction.
But I don’t follow it.
I stay.
And something shifts.
I’m no longer orienting around being received.
I’m orienting around being real.
And from there, something deeper becomes possible.
