Episode 183: Indigenous Wisdom Conversations: Tending the Casita with Juliana Guerrero
Sep 16, 2026What is a casita, really — and what happens when it gets crowded with somebody else's stuff?
Julia Carmen sits down again with her granddaughter Juliana Guerrero for another J&J, this one sparked by a question Juliana asked after their last conversation on the overculture, when Julia mentioned going back to her casita. Julia has used the word since Juliana was too small for kindergarten — what she's also called the little blue light, the flux capacitor, the place within each of us connected to the Soul Self of Being. Not a house. A homing pigeon that says, wherever you are in the world, this is you.
The two trace what happens when a casita goes neglected, locked up, or overrun — Juliana reaches for the movie Encanto, where the family's casita cracks under the weight of what it's been made to hold, and comes back whole once the truth gets spoken. Juliana shares her own experience of a casita gone dark in high school, clouded over until she started asking herself what she actually wanted rather than what she was told to want — and how, looking back now, she can see her blue light was leading her the whole time, to the work, the people, and the marriage she has today.
Julia tells the story of a friend, decades ago, who asked her a simple question that reshaped how she tends her own casita: if someone knocked at your door, would you just let them in? The two talk boundaries as a form of care rather than withholding — deciding who gets access to your energy, your casita, your peace, and why that discernment runs in both directions. Julia is direct about the limits of this work, too: if what you're carrying is more than a casita can hold on its own, get the professional support you need — she does, and names it plainly.
Juliana offers her own practice for coming back home to herself: sun, a walk, a good cry, writing it down, the ordinary things that clear the fog over her own casita. Julia adds her wind bath — inviting her ancestors and guides to move through her and release what she's been carrying — and pulls a dragonfly card live on air with a message for anyone listening: rest in the sleep of yourself, and know that how will show itself in its own time.
"Come back to your own casita. It never actually breaks — it's just waiting for you to tend it."
