#80: Iruka Maria Toro
"Everything you want now, you will want forever. Listen to your visions and ignore the rest."
Iruka Maria Toro (@iruka_maria_toro) is an artist, herbalist, and bodyworker born and raised in Borikén. No matter the form (collaged Medicine Bodies, flower essences) or modality (Craniosacral therapy, Ayurvedic massage), there’s a sense of cosmic, divine play that permeates her work. You can book a divination reading with her here.
#80: Iruka Maria Toro
Cancer/Gemini/Capricorn
Upstate NY/Latin America
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Health to me means a bright radiant life force that shines through my eyes and the way I move through the world. The way I make people feel is a reflection of my health. I feel healthy when I am light on my feet, light in my heart, and am easily moved by the creative ideas and visions on my path. Gratitude is health. Health means having an openness and willingness to flow, change, rest, joy, and love, despite whatever might be happening around me. Health is being my authentic self.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
My lifestyle is in motion right now. I am learning to move around more gracefully, and find rest where I can. I am envisioning and building a new future for myself.
How do you start and end your days?
Right now, I am traveling a lot and adapting to where I am. I either walk to the local market and get a giant green juice with parsley, celery, spinach, lime, ginger, and pineapple, or I make a big cacao at home in my VitaMix with about 700 powdered herbs in it. I start out with liquids, medicine, and movement. I like to light an incense — these days, Hawaiian Sandalwood — and play some soft music in the kitchen as my consciousness comes online. I have a tiny long-haired chihuahua and when I am not on the road, he sits on my lap when I am drinking my juices and elixirs. We arrange flowers and listen to Meredith Monk, and Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.
I have been doing a sweet guided Anapana meditation in the morning that I found on YouTube. It's a recording of the voice of S.N. Goenka which makes it feel really special.
I am an herbalist, bodyworker, and artist. My art practice is what holds all of my visions and interests together.
I spend a lot of my day working on ideas and projects. Researching. My library of books and apothecary full of plants are my pride and joy. I have been on a month-long journey through mountains in South America and am full of ideas for artworks and new formulas. I am spending much of my time writing them down and making plans/drawings. I am dreaming of very site-specific works and documenting them over time.
Lately, I have been going to a tiny bodega in this mountain town I am in. It has imported health foods and I am making these nori wraps full of fermented veggies, fresh organic avocados, raw olive oil. sometimes quinoa, sea salt, jalapeños, and microgreens. Before this journey, I was watching a lot of videos of Dr Sebi's children talking about his legacy. I started craving raw fresh foods despite it being a bit of an Ayurvedic cardinal sin to consume them this season.
Tea and ritual are a big part of my day. While in South America I have been trying out all the local warm drinks. Emoliente with Ayrampo seeds is my current favorite. Often I will walk across town for a combination of tea and socializing with a friend for a couple of hours. A real luxury. Today, it was my new herbalist friend who is also traveling solo. We talk about her plans to have an herbal conference in her home country.
Evenings are a combination of a warm hippie macrobiotic babe kind of meal and a long slow walk through the cornfields and the mountains where I am staying. My bed has a huge window overlooking the land and I am able to fall asleep while looking at the stars. I have been focusing more on my dreams. These have been really beautiful days for dreaming and drawing. Lots of sheets of paper, bundled up in soft fabrics, and getting thoughts down until I pass out. Jasmine is blooming and there are flowers all around my pillow and tucked into my hair.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
In my late teens and early twenties I started to get into health foods and lifestyles as an act of rebellion. My family growing up was not into healthy food. I grew up in Puerto Rico, and my family tree goes back to seemingly endless generations of islanders on both sides. I love yucca, platano, and Aguacate. But a lot of our traditional foods are fried, and centered around meat. As a kid in the 90's immigrating to the US, I would lust after the aesthetics of a health food store that were too wild for my family of origin. I wanted to know everything about each plant in the supplement isle. I wanted to drink juice and eat dehydrated bananas. I wanted acupuncture. It was all exotic.
The overall vibe of the health food of the 90s still appeals. While in Art School, I spent half my time painting and the other experimenting with plant-based formulas and ordering bulk herbs online from fringe websites. You better believe I was on Erowid in the early days of the internet, corresponding with psychedelic plant nerds. It's almost like I was born with an interest in plants, psychedelics and ethnobotany from another lifetime and this was a continuation.
Yes, I have read PiHKAL and TiHKAL.
For me, beauty and art are the central points that the plant medicine orbits around.
As soon as I was an adult who could call the shots, I was juicing, dehydrating, studying Macrobiotics, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Alkalynity, Collecting rare flower bulbs, and traveling to taste the food of chefs who were cooking up the most interesting things. I still lust after a big lunch at Pure Food and Wine after many hours at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in NYC.
In many ways, this was a journey of becoming my true self. I wanted to eat a certain way, live a certain way, and be an artist. For me, it all represented freedom. It still does.
Do you have a spiritual practice?
Spirituality is the central sun of the universe of my life. I am extremely private about it, though. I am a creature of devotion and there really isn't anything I do that can't be linked back to my devotion to God and the great big gorgeous mystery of creation. It's what I love most. It's the reason for all the work that I do and don't do. Faith walking towards the unknown and trusting in it. I am always trying to connect deeper, receive messages, make gifts, and walk the walk to try to be a mirror or a replica of what I feel in my heart. Everything comes down to that. There are a lot of pathways and practices and teachers, and moments of ecstasy. But they aren't shareable right now. They're still very much just for me.
Devotional and animist art from all corners of the world is the most clear thing I can point to as my reason for being/existing. I belong to that family tree in the great forest of humanity. I am here to point towards God's infinity in a million different ways until I am gone.
What’s your relationship to self-healing?
For me, self-healing is an act of creativity and rebellion. Of sovereignty. I have healed myself of many things that have come up over the years, and when I am on the move, my house becomes a community clinic of sorts for humans and animals.
I love being able to show up for myself with what I need. It's a way to soothe my own soul and make sure that it's safe, sound, and pleasurable to live in my own body. Through healing modalities, folk wisdom, storytelling, clinical herbal work, touch therapy, energy work, song, hydrotherapy, heliotherapy, sleep, sex, walking, meditation, infusions; flower essences; we can heal and move through so, so, so much.
I am always up for seeing a physician or specialist when needed. I have many incredible practitioners who are also my teachers. I am a believer in taking a vocation seriously, and being a meticulous lifelong student of art and healing is my path. My hands are always in the work, and part of that is seeing great practitioners to remember what it is like to receive as a patient. It's a balance and, if I have learned anything over the years, it's that attuning to our bodies and deep listening is the best way to know what we need.
The body knows everything. The body is the primary physician. We just have to ask and listen to our own unique answer.
This applies to all the bodies: physical, spiritual, mental, emotional.
Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?
The answer to this is complicated. I have quite a few things I do. At this moment there has been an emphasis on my meditation practice and a very intentional getting-very-quiet in order to hear the messages of the subtle world from a new level of maturity. I have commitments to certain plant cosmologies, certain universes; and right at this moment, I am in a serious phase of recommitting myself to what I know is true in the realm of plants/art and the path I have chosen. It's a big turning point. It is still unfolding.
I have certificates in at least ten different types of healing modalities and therapies. So between my own practice and the constant exchange with teachers, friends, and colleagues I am always learning something new. My North Node is in Gemini. This learning will go on forever. This moment has me reconnecting with my tropical roots and letting the little guardian universes of specific plants open up to me. My guard is down, and my hands and heart are open.
When do you feel the most nourished?
I feel the most nourished when life is really, really simple. Give me a little open air hut on the beach, or a simple adobe house on a mountain; some beautiful flowers and ripe mangoes and I am a happy, happy woman. Also, I unapologetically love who/what I love and nothing could be better than that.
How do you reset?
I have a lot of resets. It depends what part of me needs a reset. One of my favorites is soaking in hot springs while simultaneously drinking a lot of spring water, in and out for hours and hours. By the time I come out, I am not only so relaxed that I have the most incredible sleep in the evening, but I feel hydrated from the inside out in a way that feels like I am born again. My favorite hot springs are in California.
Do you have a favorite meal?
My favorite food is Japanese food. I miss my favorite restaurant which used to serve my favorite meal. It was the exquisite Shojin Omakase at Kajitsu in New York. It was different every time and based on the seasons and phases of the moon.
My fridge and pantry are full of eccentric things I collect from cooks and friends as well as some old school classics.
I love good ghee, good dark chocolate. I am a notorious consumer of kombucha, and every herb known to man fills my shelves. I love having different kinds of salt, right now I am loving my short-grained brown rice for the cold season, mushroom broths, miso, lentils, and some exceptionally good smoked fish to keep it warm and cozy. It's autumn and I am craving all things warm and nutrient dense [note: these responses were recorded in late November/early December]. South American tubers and roots in every color of the rainbow are hitting the spot right now. Learning their names is my current romantic pursuit.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Don't hold back. Everything you want now, you will want forever. Listen to your visions and ignore the rest. The map drops off and by then you will be familiar with the art of being an explorer.
To the person reading this?
Follow your heart. Give yourself what you wish for in this lifetime. Tell the truth. Don't rush the process. Be kind always.
What would you like to see or create more of in the world?
I want to see and create more gardens, libraries, and public spaces that are architectural wonders beyond what any private spaces could ever be. I want to see utopian schools of art and of life. I want to see healing centers, sculpture gardens and big communal tables full of food and people in public parks. I want to see more secular temples, fountains, bathhouses, block parties, poetry readings, concerts, food markets, and I want to make a tunnel of love.
