Because I Am You and You Are Me
Brenda Zepeda spent years carrying pain she didn’t have the words for. Then she found it living in her hands, and built Lakshmi Massage San Miguel de Allende around every back that reminds her of her own.
Massage Therapy · Obsidian Stone Work · Sound Healing
Brenda Zepeda didn’t set out to become a massage therapist. She became a mother first, and for years her time belonged entirely to her children. Then came a divorce, and with it, the disorienting work of finding out who she was outside of the roles she’d already built her life around.
What followed was less a plan than a slow accumulation — people she met, plant medicines like ayahuasca, small pieces of guidance gathered from a hundred different places. Somewhere in that accumulation, she found the thing she was good at. It wasn’t in a classroom. It was in her hands.
“I understood that one of my strengths lay in my hands and in my ability to use them to help others feel better.”
From The Land of Juventino Rosas
Brenda is from Santa Cruz de Juventino Rosas, Guanajuato — a town, she says, of hardworking people used to moving forward. She’s spent nearly all her life in the region, though years in the coastal towns of Sayulita and Puerto Vallarta left their own mark, including a formative kind of practice: touching bodies whose language she didn’t speak, and having them return, months later, specifically for her.
She was never a theory learner. Her education came through observation and practice, and she wanted a trade that gave something back — noble, steadfast, healing. Crafts helped her find that thread while her children played nearby. Eventually, the question she’d been circling her whole life resolved into something simple: what could she do with her own hands?
A Lineage of Hands
Traditional medicine was never a discovery for Brenda — it was the water she grew up swimming in.
Her paternal grandfather treated his own ailments with herbal remedies he made himself.
Her grandmother’s sister was a midwife.
Her father drank rue tea with chocolate for pain, and the household ran on tea, rice water, and whatever the land provided each season.
Her mother gave birth at home every time, guided by a partera, never once inside a hospital.
Her father planted corn, sorghum, and beans.
Nature wasn’t a wellness concept in that household. It was simply how the days were organized.
What Pain Taught Her
Brenda built Lakshmi Massage in San Miguel on a foundation she’s direct about; empathy born from pain she recognizes because she’s lived it herself. In recent years, she carried burdens and responsibilities without adequate support. Her body kept the record her circumstances didn’t allow her to put down. She knows what that particular exhaustion feels like from the inside — physical, emotional, and mental all at once.
That recognition is the foundation of her work now. Pain, she says, doesn’t check anyone’s bank account first.
Stone, Steam, and Sound
Brenda’s technique draws directly on what she inherited. She works with obsidian stones combined with river stones for hot stone massage. Obsidian carrying, in her understanding, has a long history of cleansing and protection. She performs hip-closure massage after childbirth and builds herbal pindas from rosemary, mint, lavender, and other plants, using the heat and aroma as part of the therapeutic experience itself.
Every session closes with a sound bath from a singing bowl. She describes it as a massage for the organs. It reaches places her hands can’t, through vibration and frequency instead of pressure.
She doesn’t use modern equipment. Her instrument is her presence, and when a client needs something beyond what manual work can offer, she refers out to chiropractors, physiotherapists, or psychotherapists rather than stretching her own practice past where it belongs.
“My work is primarily manual. The best balance I find is in recognizing the extent to which my hands can help.”
I Am You And You Are Me
Ask Brenda what a session at Lakshmi Massage looks like, and she’ll tell you it begins with listening — learning about a person’s surgeries, injuries, the shape of their life — before any touch happens at all. What she’s building in that time isn’t just technique applied to tissue. It’s a space where someone is allowed to actually rest.
She carries her own history into every table she works on. When she feels tension in someone’s back, she recognizes it, because she has held that same tension in her own body.
“I give each massage with the intention of giving it as if I were giving it to myself. Because I am you and you are me.”
Her clients notice. Some, she says, no longer want to be touched by anyone else — they’ll wait rather than book with another therapist after a trip. For Brenda, that’s the clearest confirmation she has that the work is landing the way she intends it to.
What She’s Building Toward
Brenda is currently teaching herself Thai massage, with hopes of eventually training formally. She’s also holding a bigger, more speculative idea close. She wants to bring short wellness sessions into factories and workplaces across Guanajuato, for the people working long hours under NOM-035 who rarely get access to preventive care. It’s an idea she’s candid about not yet having the contacts to build, but one she hasn’t let go of either.
“Trust, breathe, let go, and be grateful.”
Massage, in Brenda’s view, shouldn’t be something people reach for only once the pain has already arrived. It’s a form of prevention, a form of listening to a body that has always needed care, long before anyone called it wellness.
“Pamper yourself.”
Brenda Zepeda is the therapist behind Lakshmi Massage in San Miguel de Allende. She works with obsidian hot stone therapy, herbal pinda massage, hip-closure massage for postpartum recovery, and singing bowl sound healing.
Drawing on a family lineage of traditional Mexican medicine and her own experience healing from years of unaddressed physical and emotional strain, she works with clients carrying heavy physical or mental loads who are ready to finally stop and rest.
Find Brenda Zepeda / Lakshmi Massage on the EnForma Wellness platform and book a session through the EnForma app.
EnForma was born in Mexico. Not inspired by it, not transplanted here — born here, in the salt air and slow mornings and something harder to name that this country does to the people who stay. Raíces is our way of introducing you to the people who know that feeling best: the practitioners who came to Mexico and never left, who built their practices here, who found in this land a deeper expression of the work they were already called to do. Each post in this series is a conversation — about healing, about Mexico, about what it means to root yourself somewhere and let that place change you.
