Beams of soft morning sunshine flooded the hills of Rancho Ecológico Sol de Mayo, a desert oasis at the edge of Baja California’s Sierra de la Laguna mountain range. Rose Green struck a match, coaxing a flame to life in her ceramic chalice. The still air filled with fragrant smoke from the burning copal, an aromatic tree resin used for centuries in this part of the world as sacred incense for spiritual cleansing. Green whispered something inaudible into the chalice, then gently blew on the glowing copal, surrounding her body in pale plumes of smoke that drifted over the hillside cacti and emerald-hued river below.
This sacred ritual is a monthly practice for Green—and a form of self-therapy as essential as the treatments she offers her clients. As the resident curandera (healer) at Chileno Bay Resort & Residences, Auberge Collection, she spends her days tending to others’ physical and emotional needs, but these solo pilgrimages “clear the channel,” as she puts it, both restoring herself and deepening her communion with nature, her ancestors, and the four elements. They also allow her to return to the spa spiritually recalibrated and able to transmit that clarity and awareness to those in her care.
Green, whose full name is Maria Del Rosario Fernández Green, comes from a long line of herbalists, intuitives, and healers. She briefly pursued a different path—building a successful career as a pastry chef that even led to an appearance on MasterChef México in 2015—but her ancestral calling always tugged at her. Over time, a series of detours and cosmic nudges drew her back to healing, and she began to recognize and develop gifts uniquely her own. She now goes by the name Rose, a flower that “means love and compassion,” she says—and a fitting moniker, I thought to myself, as I watched her wade into the river and float two armfuls of the flower on its surface. As the final step of her pilgrimage, sealing the ritual, the flowers were an offering to Mother Nature and a symbol to honor all those in need of healing.
“All healers are different, because their mission is different,” she told me, as the roses bobbed and dispersed in the shallow, clear waters. “Mine is to help people embrace their roots, to bring union and compassion, and to be kind to themselves, because we are all searching for self-love.” That mission springs to life at Chileno Bay’s Sol, Wellbeing by Auberge, where Green shares the healing customs of her ancestors through authentic treatments rooted in traditional Mexican therapies. Part of The Joy of Wellbeing by Auberge—guided by principles of Awe, Connect, Excel, and Nurture—is the Sacred Copal Ritual, a transformative experience based on the very practices that Green engages in during her desert ceremonies
The ritual began with what Green told me would be a “gentle interview,” to identify my needs—of mind, body, and spirit. Seated on the floor, cross-legged and facing me, she took a pinch of copal from a small dish and dropped it into a burning chalice, just as I had seen her do in the desert. As the aromatic smoke rose, she instructed me to repeat my name three times, then express my intentions: what I wish to welcome into my life and what I want to let go of. “Don’t hold back,” Green told me. “This is your chance to say it all.”
The ceramic chalice Green uses in her pilgrimages is part of the Sacred Copal Ritual performed for guests at Sol, Wellbeing by Auberge.
Chileno Bay Resort & Residences is nestled into the Baja California landscape, part of the natural elements that Green incorporates into her healing therapies.
The Sacred Copal Ritual at Sol, Wellbeing by Auberge at Chileno Bay Resort & Residences is based on a pilgrimage that Mexican healers have been making for generations, allowing them to deepen their communion with nature and their ancestors.
The smoke, she explained, represents the cleansing element of fire, providing an energetic release while also opening a symbolic portal to my ancestors. I closed my eyes as Green moved the chalice around me, softly uttering prayers in light language—a channeled form of communication used for clearing energetic blockages—and enveloping my body in incense.
Earlier, in the desert, as the copal burned, Green had rhythmically chanted to the beat of a drum, her voice bouncing off the huge boulders surrounding us. In our version, at Sol, the same chants elicited in me a new sensation that I could hear men’s voices joining hers. “Those were your ancestors,” Green concluded, explaining that the ritual is a kind of transgenerational healing practice. The voices I had heard were the protectors of my lineage, showing up for me in a moment of vulnerability, perhaps.
The Sacred Copal Ritual continued with more traditional spa modalities: an herbal cleanse, using a bundle of sage and rosemary to stimulate circulation with brisk tapping and sweeping motions, then a body scrub using more of the finely ground copal. As the tiny grains of resin were worked over my limbs, I was struck by the idea of literally shedding old parts of myself to make space for the new.
With my skin freshly exfoliated, Green smoothed on a warm, copal-infused clay mask, representing the earth element. “On a physical level, it helps your skin to hydrate,” she told me, “but on an energetic level, you’re connecting with a female energy—the energy of Mother Earth, where the clay came from. We need that because, as women, we need self-love.”
Green gently guided me to an outdoor shower where I let the warm spray wash over me. The stream felt practically ceremonial, each drop carrying away the tension I had been unconsciously carrying with me. A massage followed, with Green intuitively focusing on areas where she sensed “stuckness,” as she called it—parts of my body marred by both physical and emotional tightness.
“You’ve been carrying a lot of people and a lot of situations,” Green told me as she vigorously swept her fingertips across my body, as if brushing away invisible cobwebs. “Your shoulders were so tired. The sweeping cleans the energy so you will feel lighter.”
Lighter, yes, and with knot-free muscles and glowing skin—but the most profound change I felt was the kind of calmness that comes from feeling genuinely cared for.
In the desert, Green had told me that the copal rituals are meant to bring the healing powers of nature inward. “We need to understand that the elements live inside of us,” she says, “so we can start having this connection with our roots, with Mother Earth.” Only after the Sacred Copal Ritual ended did I fully embrace the meaning of this: Tuned into myself in a way I had rarely felt in my life, I wasn’t merely the recipient of a spa treatment; Green had fostered a new connection within me—with nature, with my ancestors—and in the process, I discovered the healer within myself.
