Spirits guide survivor in quest for healing

NEW YORK (NY)
Associated Press

Dec. 19, 2019

By Juliet Linderman

Salvador Bolivar puffs smoke through a long wooden pipe. Two braids hang just past his shoulders. Bear totems perch on the piano, a bundle of dried sage pinned to the wall. Resting beside him is a small drum; he’s just sung four songs in Taino, a lost language of the Caribbean islands, to calm his nerves.

Bolivar doesn’t like to talk about what happened to him without first calling in the spirits of his ancestors to give him courage. It was an encounter with these spirits, he said, that compelled him to break his silence.

They came to him 11 years ago, in a sweat lodge in the Colombian mountains.

“My heart was blown open,” he said. He cried for days. “It was the beginning of the process of letting it go.”

He returned to New York and, for the first time, told his mother and father that the dean of his Catholic high school had sexually abused him.

The experience in the mountains set him on his spiritual path and altered the course of his life. The spirits told him, “You’re going through what you’re going through to have compassion and empathy or someone else, so you’ll be able to help others,” Bolivar said. He clings to this belief. It gets him through his most difficult days.

Bolivar, 48, was born and raised in New York City, the son of immigrants from Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. He spent his teen years drunk, angry, reckless, prone to outbursts, quick to jump into the middle of any brawl.

His life changed in his early 20s, when his first baby arrived. Fatherhood steadied him, he said. It still does.

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