Around the Lake and Back
By Gale Park
Foco Tonal

     Places known for spiritual power and healing energy exist in various parts of the world, but few people know there is a special place at Poncitlan, near Ocotlan, that draws hundreds of people in search of help and healing.
     Foco Tonal (light and color) was identified as a power place by a clairvoyant from Reynosa, Tamaulipas. As Manuel Dominguez, owner of the land where Foco Tonal is located, tells the story, Don Jose Sebastian Zamora was a visionary and healer who had visited three times, in astral travel (the consciousness traveling without the body) a special place of healing and light, but he didn’t know where it was located in the physical world.
     In 1994, Don Javier Salcedo Arevalo, a man who credited Don Jose with saving his legs from amputation, invited him to visit Ocotlan. Dominguez wanted to meet Don Jose and invited him to the fanciful castle home, complete with turrets and dragon gargoyles, that he was building next to Lake Chapala. As Don Jose walked around the house and wandered the grounds, he recognized the spot as the power place he had visited spiritually. He located an area that held two vortexes of energy that drew energy upward and one that brought energy down from the heavens and marked the location with a stick.
     Having identified the energy center, the men began the construction of a sort of temple without walls. Dominguez said the open air, roofless structure, shaped something like a shallow, circular swimming pool with seven pillars of different colors rising from the rim, was about 60 percent complete when the emergence of an amazing echo proved to him that it was a sacred place. The echo can still be heard when visitors speak their true names at a mark inside the circle.
     Don Jose returned to check out the echo. During a month of prayer, he was told that Saint Germain, an ascended master (a spirit that has been incarnated on earth, mastered Earth’s lessons, and now helps from the other side) had asked to be the protector of Foco Tonal.
     Dominguez said Don Jose had given Foco Tonal its name, then said “This was my mission. It is finished.” About five months after giving Dominguez complete charge of Foco Tonal, Don Jose died quietly in his bed.
     Now Dominguez calls the place “a heritage for the world,” and claims many healings take place there, as Don Jose foresaw.
     To get to Foco Tonal from Chapala, go north on the highway toward Guadalajara. Take the Ocotlan turnoff and go east about 28 miles to the outskirts of Ocotlan. Just past a golf course, go right at the sign for Foco Tonal/Cuitzeo. At the fork, bear right and then go straight through Cuitzeo on a bumpy, narrow street until you reach a “T” intersection. Go right at the T, and a short distance outside town, look for a green Foco Tonal sign directing you to turn left toward the lake. The parking lot is just past the castle. You can”t miss the castle!
     Entry costs about $1. Hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, including holidays. A gift shop offers colored stones, which may be taken into the circle to infuse them with energy, and other spiritually oriented merchandise.