Give yourself permission to build from within.
Welcome. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to guide and witness you in your healing journey.
My Healing Language was born from years of work across community, clinical, educational, organizational, and cultural spaces. In each setting, I witnessed a shared challenge: individuals and institutions often lacked a common language to engage healing with courage, accountability, and relational depth.
My Healing Language exists to restore sacred relationship — to self, to children, to community, and to the land and waters that sustain us.
Our work integrates ancestral wisdom, holistic practice, and embodied relational skill-building. We support leaders, parents, educators, healers, and cultural stewards in engaging honest self-examination and developing the capacity to shape homes, organizations, and systems that protect life across generations.
At the heart of this work is the cultivation of your Sacred Home — your inner foundation of sovereignty, integrity, and grounded presence. This is the place within you where clarity replaces confusion, where your voice aligns with your values, and where you build the courage to live in right relationship with yourself and others.
Through our offerings, you will:
Clarify your values and responsibilities
Align your voice, boundaries, and leadership
Strengthen embodied relational skills
Reconnect with ancestral wisdom and sacred stewardship
My Healing Language is not only about personal healing. It is about transforming the way we relate — in our families, our communities, and the systems we shape.
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Glenda Macatangay
Founder, My Healing Language
Glenda Macatangay, MSW
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Glenda Macatangay, MSW, is the visionary founder of My Healing Language, a transformative movement dedicated to making indigenous and ancient holistic healing practices accessible to all. Through this initiative, she empowers survivors of trauma to heal, cultivate spaciousness within their bodies, and reclaim their inherent worth, dignity, and power. Her work encourages a return to ancestral wisdom, inspiring people to deepen their relationships with land and waters and to commit themselves to protecting these vital sources of life.
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A first-generation Pinay with immigrant parents from Batangas, Philippines, and a mother to four intuitive children, Glenda infuses her life’s work with her family’s rich cultural heritage, helping youth harness their purpose and creativity. With over 25 years of experience across community-based mental health, wellness, and education, she has shaped programs that foster resilience and well-being for youth and communities impacted by trauma, foster care, and the juvenile justice system. Her expertise spans roles as a psychotherapist specializing in sexual abuse and trauma, a clinical director for K-12 youth in urban and rural settings, and a social worker serving unhoused adults with severe mental health needs.
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Glenda co-founded Community Responsive Education, where she advocates for equity-driven education and designs culturally responsive curricula and ethnic studies. She also co-founded the Youth Wellness Movement, which includes a community responsive wellness survey validated by Black and Brown youth, offers professional development to educators and school leaders, and provides youth centered programming with partner organizations such as The Art of Becoming, a platform celebrating self-discovery and creative expression.
With over 30 years in arts, activism, and grassroots organizing, Glenda has produced documentary films on youth wellness and family healing, public arts programs, and culturally rooted immersive experiences. She is certified in Family Constellations, Embodiment and Somatics, Hypnotherapy, Meditation, and Past Life Regression. Through her initiatives, Glenda inspires a powerful movement of healing, deep allyship, and commitment to justice, standing as a resource and friend for survivors, youth, and communities to find purpose and protection in our collective journey.
My Training & Approach to Healing
My practice is rooted in Filipino ancestral healing, professional training in psychotherapy and social work, embodied and energetic practices, lived experience, and my ancestral roots in Batangas.
I have received training and ordination in Hilot and related Filipino ancestral healing practices, including Tawas, Bentosa, Suob, and Dagdagay. My education and experience also include psychotherapy, breathwork, Reiki, family constellations, Functional Family Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, hypnotherapy, trauma-informed care, and additional healing modalities.
I am grateful for the teachers, practitioners, communities, and experiences that have contributed to my formation. I now practice independently and am not affiliated with or representing the entity through which I completed my initial Hilot training.
No single teacher, institution, or practitioner represents the fullness of Hilot. Filipino healing traditions are diverse and shaped by family, region, community, land, and spiritual lineage. I do not claim mastery, an unbroken ancestral lineage, or authority over all expressions of Hilot. I offer the practices I have been trained and prepared to hold while continuing to deepen my knowledge through study, relationship, consultation, and practice.
A Decolonizing Approach to Healing
I am committed to continually decolonizing my approach to healing. For me, this means questioning systems that separate the body from the spirit, the individual from the community, and healing from culture, land, history, and collective conditions.
It also means examining how colonization, racism, forced assimilation, patriarchy, capitalism, and institutional power have shaped what is recognized as legitimate knowledge, whose wisdom is credited, and who is granted authority to heal.
Decolonizing my practice does not mean rejecting everything I have learned through Western psychotherapy or other healing traditions. It means engaging those approaches critically and intentionally—recognizing what may be useful while refusing to treat any single framework as complete, universal, or superior. I do not present practices from distinct cultural or clinical traditions as interchangeable, nor do I rename contemporary or personally developed practices as ancestral medicine.
My work seeks to restore relationship: with the body, spirit, ancestors, land, community, culture, voice, and personal agency. Healing is not approached solely as an individual responsibility. I hold awareness of the familial, cultural, historical, and systemic conditions that shape our wounds, survival strategies, and possibilities for repair.
My Approach
My role is not to position myself as the source of another person’s healing. I offer accompaniment—listening carefully, tending to the body and spirit, and creating conditions for reflection, restoration, reconnection, and greater choice.
Depending on the person and the purpose of our work, I may draw from Filipino ancestral healing, psychotherapy-informed practices, breathwork, energy work, embodiment, ritual, storytelling, and the My Healing Language framework. I clearly distinguish between practices I was directly taught, knowledge received through cultural and ancestral sources, modalities learned through professional education, and approaches I have developed through my own work.
Not every modality is used in every session. Practices are selected with intention, explained clearly, and offered only with consent. Spiritual impressions are shared with humility—never as unquestionable truth, diagnosis, or prediction. Each person is encouraged to remain connected to their own discernment and to decide what feels meaningful, appropriate, and aligned.
My Commitments
I am committed to:
Truthfully representing my training, education, experience, and current affiliations.
Distinguishing Filipino ancestral practices from clinical, energetic, spiritual, and personally developed approaches.
Practicing within the scope of my preparation and referring people to qualified medical, mental-health, bodywork, or other professionals when appropriate.
Seeking clear and ongoing consent for touch, breathwork, prayer, ritual, divination, heat, oils, cupping, energy work, and other elements of care.
Recognizing that consent can be changed or withdrawn at any time.
Honoring each person’s right to pause, decline, question, or end any practice without pressure or judgment.
Protecting the privacy, dignity, stories, cultural identities, and vulnerability of those who work with me.
Never using fear, spiritual authority, claims of exclusivity, or promises of healing to create dependence.
Remaining attentive to power, accessibility, financial barriers, cultural difference, and the ways institutional and systemic harm may appear within healing relationships.
Crediting teachers, communities, and cultural sources without claiming teachings, titles, or lineage that are not mine to hold.
Continuing my education and developing relationships of consultation and accountability beyond any single teacher or institution.
Receiving feedback, examining impact, acknowledging limitations, and taking responsibility when repair is needed.
Remaining thoughtful about what I have the preparation, cultural grounding, and permission to practice, adapt, teach, or transmit.
I honor what I have received without claiming what is not mine. I remain accountable to the people who entrust me with their care, to the cultural roots of the practices I carry, and to the generations who preserved these ways of knowing before me.
Our Commitment
Relationship & Responsibility to Land, Water, & Natural Resources
MHL is invested in supporting Malama Huleia by contributing 15% of all retreat profits directly to the organization.
MHL is invested in supporting Black, Indigenous, People of Color and LGBTQQIP2SA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Pansexual, Two-Spirited, and Asexual) healing practitioners' participation in training and healing retreats. 15% of all 1:1 offerings will go towards BIPOC and LGBTQQIP2SA scholarships for retreats and training programs.