Status Wheel

Chicago is one of the most exciting urban centers in the country, if not the world. There are way too many things to do in the city, day and night, and the town has a pulse that will never stop beating. From its new dance clubs and old music venues, and rich supply of four star hotels, Chicago is a leader in culture, and demonstrates the best things that a city can become.

For all the new world pleasures that contemporary Chicago, there are also old traditions that are practices all over the city. For all the ethnic neighborhoods with their own cultural customs, there is one burning question: how does a local girl become a Mayan shaman in Chicago?

The answer, of course, is practice.

Rosita Arvago , born in Chicago to Persian and Italian ancestry, has found her life calling. But it wasn’t through practicing the traditions of her ancestors. Instead the transformation came, as these things often do, from a long line of happy coincidences. The 60s lead her to California to join the hippie trajectories, and when she wanted to become more dropped out, she moved to Mexico. There, she started working with people of Nahuatl descent in Guerrero, and they taught her about working with plants in the traditional way.

This opened up a number of doorways for future possibilities. The medical knowledge of one indigeneous group cannot be simply transferred to another, but the methods of working with herbs, where respect for the plant is central, is one that does cross cultures. She was eventually called to Belize, where she started working with the traditional Mayan priests, and the moments were unutterably lucid, and she knew she’d found the philosopher’s stone she’d been looking for.

With a medical degree and an initiation into the Mayan way of seeing, she moved back to the states, and with her husband, started cultivating land they’d bought with the idea of healing in mind. Today, she has her own practice, called the Arvigo Technique , and although she might be far from Chicago, no plant is ever truly separated from its roots.

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