Someone put it on a slide deck recently. La cultura cura. Culture heals. It was in a sans-serif font, centered, inside a colorful box, sandwiched between a diversity statistic and a call to action about employee resource groups. I do not know who made that slide. But I know they did not learn that phrase the way I did.
I learned it from healers. From people doing the work the way it was meant to be done. The phrase itself comes from Jerry Tello and the National Compadres Network, whose framework on transformational health and healing has been shaping communities for decades. Tello describes La Cultura Cura as a philosophy rooted in the understanding that within an individual’s, family’s, and community’s authentic cultural values, traditions, and indigenous practices exists the path to healthy development, restoration, and lifelong wellbeing. That is not a tagline. That is a way of seeing the world. And it is a way of seeing that took generations to develop, long before anyone put it on a PowerPoint slide.
What bothers me about the slide deck version is not that someone borrowed the phrase. Ideas travel. That is how wisdom works. What bothers me is what gets lost in the translation. When culture becomes a corporate initiative, it gets flattened. It becomes a checklist. It becomes a committee. It becomes a workshop on unconscious bias followed by a survey that nobody acts on. It becomes the thing organizations point to when they want to seem like they care about people without doing the harder work of actually changing the conditions that harm them. That is not culture healing anyone. That is culture being used as cover.
Dr. David Livermore, one of the leading researchers on Cultural Intelligence, describes culture simply as “the way we do things around here.” That definition is useful precisely because it is behavioral. It is not about values posted on a wall. It is about what actually happens when no one is watching. And when you sit with that definition honestly, most organizations have to reckon with a difficult truth: the way they do things around here is often very different from the way they say they do things around here. That gap is where people get hurt.
Real culture does not announce itself. It shows up in whether people feel safe telling the truth in a meeting. It shows up in how a team responds when someone is grieving. It shows up in whether the person who cleans the building is greeted by name or looked through. It shows up in the gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually rewards. Those are the places where culture either heals or harms, quietly, consistently, every single day. No slide deck required.
I am not saying organizations cannot build healthier cultures. They can. I have seen it happen. But it requires something most institutions are not comfortable with: honesty about what is actually broken, and a willingness to sit with that discomfort long enough to do something real about it. It requires leaders who understand that culture is not a communications problem. It is a relational one. And it requires the humility to recognize that the wisdom needed to heal a workplace might not come from a consultant or a framework. It might come from the people who have been holding communities together for generations, the ones whose knowledge got dismissed as tradition instead of respected as expertise.
Ancestral wisdom has always understood something that modern organizations resist: relationship requires reciprocity. Every tradition I know, every healing practice rooted in community, operates on the principle that you cannot take without giving back. You cannot extract without restoring. You cannot ask people to pour from themselves endlessly without replenishing what is being emptied. That is not a spiritual idea. It is a relational law that communities have understood for generations.
What I see in most workplace culture initiatives is a fundamental imbalance. Organizations want to do the least, spend the least, and get the most. They talk about equity and equality in every town hall and then design systems that keep taking. They ask people to bring their whole selves to work and then penalize them for being human. They speak the language of belonging while maintaining the conditions that make people feel disposable. Ancestral wisdom calls that what it is: a broken relationship. And broken relationships do not heal with a better onboarding process or a new set of core values. They heal when the giving matches the taking. When the care is real and not performed. When reciprocity becomes the actual foundation of how an organization operates, not a talking point in a leadership retreat.
La cultura cura. Culture heals. But only when it is honest. Only when it is relational. Only when it is willing to look at what is actually wrong and stay in the room long enough to fix it. The phrase is not the problem. The performance is.
Justin Tomas Gomez is a curandero and Belizean traditional healer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He writes about healing, culture, and what it means to build more human workplaces.
Ancestral Ways 
Leave a comment