Francesca Barone

Francesca came to the medicine through her own recovery, and she says so herself, out loud, on her own website, which tells you almost everything about how she holds a room. Seven years of devoted relationship with the Shipibo maestros who first served her have grown into Anam Cara, the center she co-founded in Costa Rica around three families of Shipibo-Konibo healers and a nonprofit that funds the curanderos and their communities. Underneath the ceremony work she is a naturopathic practitioner and a long-term student of Gabor Maté in early developmental trauma and addiction, so when she sits with someone she is reading the body and the story and the field all at once.

Her own words for the containers she holds are “exquisitely safe and wildly alive,” and I have stood inside them, first at COMMUNION in Austin and now at The Mothership, the Samhain mushroom ceremony we hold together this October in the New York forest. The moment that told me the most about her happened far from any ceremony: when her neighbors in Costa Rica lost their refrigerator to a flood, she bought them a new one, and the whole family was crying and hugging it the morning it arrived.

When someone in my world is ready to go to the root, ready to sit with the medicine inside real lineage and be met with clinical depth and a wide-open heart in the same person, I send them to Francesca.