Copyright © 2015 by Alberto Villoldo, PhD Charlottesville ... · xiv A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools...

Copyright © 2015 by Alberto Villoldo, PhD

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Cover photo by Matt Morrissey / www.TheMoreWeSee.com Interior designed by Howie Severson

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. Charlottesville, VA 22906 Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, llc www.redwheelweiser.com

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ISBN: 978-1-57174-737-2

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Preface

It is cold. When it’s winter in the high desert, we get flurries of snow. I glance at the clock on my nightstand: 2:00 a.m. It’s time. The words keep coming, demanding that I get out of the warm bed. I try not to disturb my sleeping husband as I pull on my thick woolen socks and heavy robe. Turning on the dim light in the hallway, I quietly make my way to the small office at the other end of the house. I have work to do.

But first, the candle. The work must begin with ritual, always. The top of a small bookshelf serves as my altar. There stands the candle surrounded by objects symbolic of my spiritual journey. I strike a match, asking for the protection of fire, and shadows begin to dance on the walls. Light and darkness—that is the nature of this shamanic work. Opening sacred space, I invite the spirits of the four directions, reminding them that I cannot do this alone. They are needed. Of course, I am the one needing the reminder.

The computer springs to life, and I sit there motionless, wait-ing, absorbing the stillness, the quiet so befitting the middle of the night. The phone will not ring; the doorbell will not ring. The only distractions will be of my own making. I must get centered. Who is the client that will be with me tonight? He said his name is Jered.


xii A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools for Healing

We had talked at great length, and his story is within me, all but memorized. I reach out to him, slip into his presence. What is he thinking . . . feeling . . . what are the words? It’s like opening a door and stepping into another reality. This I must do if I am to speak for him, tell his story of healing. Ah, the trust! I do not take this lightly. In fact, it quite amazes me. I also understand it.

These are Alberto’s clients whose stories I am to write. They are the ones who have come to him asking for help, for healing and light, ready for the shadows they must face.

I put my cold fingers to the keyboard.This was my routine, flowing with the seasons over years.

Story by story, A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools for Healing took on life. Initially, I had interviewed the clients in-depth, followed by consultations, emails, and as many drafts as necessary leading to final approval on all sides. Always, Alberto was there—no word would escape his scrutiny. After all, this was his book, his creation. The sense of privilege to be part of the process as coauthor with this gifted shaman was always with me.

I have no idea just when this project was a mere spark in the eyes of the Shaman. I do know when the journey began for me. It was in July of 2001. That summer day, the day of my first meeting with the Shaman, is deeply etched in my mind. I was bringing to him a terminal disease wrapped in a spiritual crisis. Shamanism was unfamiliar to me and seemed foreign, strange, and mysterious. I was intrigued. A part of me believed without doubt that this man had something very important to give me—and I better listen. I was exposing the wounds of my soul to him, wounds developed over a lifetime. Alberto was sitting across from me, notepad in hand, jotting notes. Suddenly, he stopped, reached out, and handed me his pen, saying, “Here, Anne, take this and write for your life!” Neither one of us—at least that I


xiiiPreface

am aware—had any idea just where that pen would take me. It became part of my mesa, my shaman’s altar, and remains there to this day.

Numerous sessions with Alberto followed, as my wounds were many and needed to be healed if I was to claim the fullness of life. I experienced a wide spectrum of shamanic healing prac-tices, including illuminations, soul retrievals, and extractions—all practices that you will learn about in this book. I also went through the Light Body Energy Medicine School of the Four Winds Society, founded by Alberto, a professional training pro-gram that leads to certification in energy medicine and provides a space for personal healing. It was an uphill battle all the way due to my physical limitations. (Well, I have come to learn that nothing is purely physical.) By the time I graduated, I was danc-ing around the ceremonial fire.

My feet were firmly planted on the shamanic path long before I picked up that pen and began to write the healing journeys of others. It would have been impossible otherwise. Beyond my experience of the shamanic work, I have been a profes-sional writer in Hollywood, working mainly on documentaries. Knowing this, Alberto discussed the possibility of the two of us working together on this project. I went through the usual pro-cedure of creating a book proposal, including sample writings. I suggested that the stories of healing be told through alternate voices of client and shaman.

Alberto saw the possibilities of what I had submitted, saying, “The book will mean a great deal to many people.” While the fires burned within me to say yes, they quickly could be extinguished by waves of inadequacy. And Alberto was straight with me, add-ing, “This is a big project and will require a lot of work.” (He was right about that.) Nevertheless, I firmly believed I would be any-thing but alone in this endeavor and that whatever I needed would


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be there for me. And so we began—in the year 2005. The project took on an absorbing intensity for me and to this day has never been far from my mind.

Prior to my involvement with this project, my husband, Laban Strite, a psychologist and fellow graduate of the Light Body Energy Medicine School, had been laying the ground-work, interviewing nearly one hundred clients per Alberto’s instructions. Back then, there was many a night when I sat alone reading a good book for pleasure while he was on the phone doing the preliminary work on this one. I can’t say I felt too positive about that—after all, the evening was our special time together. Nevertheless, with the information he had gath-ered in hand, I could begin my in-depth interviews as soon as I came on board.

The twelve individuals selected to participate in the proj-ect came from different walks of life and various parts of the country. They all shared the experience of private, one-on-one sessions with Alberto. Their journey into healing did not nec-essarily mean they were cured, but it can be said that they were all changed by the experience of working with the Shaman to achieve healing—as was I.

Writing this book was much like the flow of a river on an unpredictable course, rushing happily along, tumbling over rocks and stones, and then at times threatened by drought. Would it disappear altogether? Other commitments and responsibilities, as well as unexpected changes in Alberto’s life and in mine, left the book to simmer on a back burner for considerable periods of time. Letting something wait until later is a familiar concept in shamanic work—and even a positive one. “The book will find its time,” I would reassure Alberto. He, in turn, would encourage me not to give up, saying, “These are stories that deserve to be told.” We stayed the course. And the river would flow again.


xvPreface

And the clients to be interviewed? They waited patiently, in silence and trust, aware of the privilege that was theirs in par-ticipating. I’m sure there had been many changes in their lives as well over the course of these years. And the work is never over. Before the metaphorical ink dries on the paper, the story may have become something else, never to be told. A valuable, though often painful, dimension for the clients was looking back, remembering, and even reliving the events in order to tell their stories. Often, this brought new insights, deepening and reinforcing what they had learned. “What did Alberto do?” I would ask. To describe their non-ordinary experiences in ordi-nary words did not come easily to the interviewees. And for me, words often felt like mercury slipping around the palm of my hand as I tried to put them down on paper.

It was not an easy task. For many of the interviewees, it was like trying to tell someone of a journey we have taken to a foreign land where the terrain, the customs, even the language may be unfamiliar. It’s tempting to say, “You must simply travel there yourself to understand!”

The spiritual journeys of these chosen few, who represent the many who walk this path, began a long time ago and reach into a far distant future. Let’s spread our wings and rise with eagle to greater vision and see with his sharp, penetrating eye. With each flap of his powerful wings, the scene below grows more immense, its boundaries widening. We see the years of experience that led up to the client meeting and working with the Shaman. Alberto has said, “It is what you bring to the work that matters.” No one is fresh from the womb, so to speak. Who knows what’s behind that first cry of the newborn? Sometimes, we can even see back into former lifetimes, one flowing into another.

We continue to ascend and see that lifeline extending for-ward into the future, lifetime upon lifetime. A limitless horizon


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of potential . . . possibilities . . . destiny . . . and beyond. The eagle is suspended now, his heart beating wildly with the magnitude of his vision. Vast, beyond telling.

The sessions with the Shaman came to an end for these clients at some appropriate point. But that was not the end of their journey. Rather, it was one more beginning for them. The work of the shaman is to know intimately the ways of death and renewal. The story they would tell today might bear little resemblance to the story of yesterday, and even to the story that found its way onto these pages. Their healing has taken them into clearer, deeper waters where they create even finer stories. The goal, of course, is to shed them all, like the serpent shedding his old and once-comfortable skin, and to become free.

These stories may leave you with more questions than answers. Perhaps they will take you into your own journey and on to whatever path may call to your soul. Only there do answers reside. We all have to move beyond the dot of the present and ascend to truly grasp the scope of our healing journey, of our mission and purpose here on this earth. None of our stories define us; none pull the strings of our existence. We are not our stories. The perspectives we gain in our ascent tell us we are so much more: spiritual beings having physical experiences, infinite beings becoming gods.

Ascend high enough and we see the lifeline forming a circle: complete, whole, fulfilled. So many dots that they are no longer dots at all but prayer beads, linked together by the shamanic journey of transformation.

The eagle must land. He must touch the earth. And so we find ourselves beginning in the shaman’s cave with the first story of healing and transformation in this book.

Except for a few, I have not met these clients face-to-face, and would not recognize them if we passed on the road; but what


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they have given to me will never be forgotten. At the most unex-pected times, their words will speak to me in a most personal way—just when I need to hear them. That is how I know the stories are effective and hold great power. As we bring this book to completion, the voice of the Shaman comes from its pages: “Do not be attached to the outcome!” How fitting. The shamanic work has a way of bringing us down to earth even while we are reaching for the stars.

—Anne O’Neill

Preface


ChAPter 1

Extracting Intrusive Energies

We bring toxic energies with us from our childhood trauma, and even from former lifetimes. These energies are stale and dark and taint the luminous energy field, settling into the chakras in dark pools, and informing and affecting the mind and body. They contain memories of painful events and hurtful people we have not been able to heal. Eventually, these toxic energies can manifest as disease. In Sharon’s case, they had settled in her hip joints, which looked dark and lifeless in medical X-rays, and also when I tracked her with my shaman’s vision. She had to be careful not to break her hip, and she was crippled and barely able to walk.

Often, it can seem that stark pain is directing the course of our lives when all the while it is nothing less than the pull of destiny.

AlbertoAccording to psychology, there are thoughts and beliefs that are not truly, fully ours. Many of these we inherit from our parents and from our culture. Yet, psychology is based on the assumption that all the energies we have inside us are ours—but shamans know differently.


2 A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools for Healing

The extraction process allows the shaman to remove toxic energies from an individual’s LEF so that physical healing can take place. Once the thick, dark pools of stagnant energy are extricated, the body knows how to repair itself. In fact, one of the tenets of shamanic medicine is that by extracting energies that do not belong in the body, illness goes away.

It’s very difficult to discover these stale, dark energies unless you’ve developed the shaman’s way of seeing. I learned to peer into the world of Spirit during my training with the Amazon shamans. Over years of practice, my inner vision opened, and now I see more clearly in this numinous world than I do in the world of concrete and steel. At first, it bothered me to see the spirits of people who had passed away, or the shards of glass sticking out of Sharon’s sides that made her body look as if she had been thrown through a plate-glass window. But I’ve learned to control this ability as if I were merely taking off or putting on a pair of glasses, which is important. After all, a person can get tired of seeing ghosts, even if they are sometimes more interest-ing and animated than the living.

SharonThe mirror reflects someone out of the past. I sit there, studying the face that stares back at me. She’s quite lovely, really—rather regal with long wavy brown hair. I pass my fingers through it, enjoying its silky feel, the lustrous waves.

I’ve been working with Dr. Villoldo now for about one year. At the time of our first session, my hair was short, a lighter shade, and certainly not wavy. “Straight as a stick,” as my mother would say. What does this mean? The image in the mirror has become a haunting presence out of an unknown past. Now . . . am I becoming the past? Or is the past intruding on my present? The mind of an analyst never stops. I should know better. In my


3Extracting Intrusive Energies

practice as a psychotherapist, I deal with that sort of thing—the impotent dissection of the soul. Alberto does agree with me that this recurring image may have a deeper meaning, hinging on something beyond imagination. But what do I make of the fact now that I am becoming that image? This is a new development. Well, I’m seeing the shaman tomorrow.

So much has happened to me. And I’m not that old to be this crippled. Shall we say forty-something? I had such dreams when I was younger.

I peer more deeply into the mirror, past the lovely woman with the wavy hair to the young, vulnerable child. She, too, had waves, now that I think about it—at least for performances. Mother saw to that.

It’s dance class, 1984. My ballet slippers are so tight! But that’s the way they have to be, I’m told. My feet hurt so bad sometimes that it’s hard to walk. It hurts when I do those fast spins on my toes across the stage. Everyone tells me how lovely I am, how beautiful I look in my tutu—just like a princess, so sweet! Mother says I have a “presence” on stage, whatever that means. It must be good because she smiles when she tells me that. I’m only a child, but my dreams are big, much bigger than dancing. I want to fly! I want to catch the wind and float with the clouds.

It wasn’t long before the image of a princess went out the win-dow along with the ballet slippers. No more pain! Classical ballet had become a bondage, one I would not wish on any child. Still, gnawing deep inside me was the desire for artistic expression in some flowing form. It did not become clear to me until my seventeenth year when I discovered modern dance, dance that honored bare feet—and bared souls. It offered the freedom to move from within. It offered true creativity, free from anyone else’s ideas and instructions.



I refocus my gaze, my attention back on the reflection in the mirror. I banish the child and strain to see the seventeen- year-old who had the freedom to be an artist. The eyes grow more intense; the mouth, more determined.

Seventeen. It was then that comments had changed and words like hypnotic and powerful were used to describe me. I had moved beyond lovely, sweet.

Ah! So what describes me now? I turn away from the mirror, not wanting to see. Just a few years after seventeen, the pain became my life. My youthful, promising fantasies were soon extinguished by dire dictums of medicine. Scoliosis was only part of the problem. Avascular necrosis of both hips was diag-nosed. My arterial blood flow was failing to give life. Death to the femoral head of both hips, it said in my medical records. Yes, death. No longer did I have that supple, fluid body or the heart of one who could snatch the clouds. That special part of me got packed away in a darkened closet along with the flowing gowns of dance—a place no light could reach. I had lost forever the instrument of my artistic expression as a dancer. But the yearn-ings were still there to move through space, free of the pulls of this earth.

That sensation of being drawn to the earth grew stronger with time, anchoring me to a cold, harsh ground: pain. There were numerous surgeries, including bone grafts and consequent com-plications. Other joints began to trouble me as well. And there was more . . .

I grip my abdomen in pain, remembering. That woman with the lustrous hair who haunts me had been stabbed in the abdo-men. I can’t explain how I know this . . . I just know. Am I feel-ing her pain? In his shamanic way, Alberto now has seen what happened to her. It’s not my imagination. It’s a relief to know that, anyway.



I’ll tell you what I feel like now when I can’t walk, can’t stand straight: anything but a person of grace. I feel like an awkward pup-pet on a string with jerky, stabbing movements. There I go again . . . stabbing. When there’s been so much trauma in my life, I have to ask, Is this pain psychological, Alberto? He assures me it’s not, that I have done my psychological work. I must hear that or I don’t think I could bear all this. It feels as if panes of glass are bisecting my torso. That’s what I really want to present to Alberto tomorrow. It’s hard for me to say this to anyone as I realize how strange it sounds. I’ve learned to compensate for this dissection, but as a result my body is constricted and contorted. What this body has become . . .

The realization transcends my flesh and pierces my spirit.

AlbertoI’ve seen Sharon for three sessions now. When she first came to my office, she could hardly walk, but there has been prog-ress. I think her job as a therapist is exacerbating her condition because Sharon is very sensitive and prone to picking up toxic energies from her clients. These energies settle in her luminous energy field like pieces of a puzzle. She must learn, as I did years ago, to protect herself from their noxious influence. Physician, heal thyself.

I have been using the extraction process to clear Sharon’s field of these intrusive energies, and the illumination process to bathe in pure light her chakras, the funnel-shaped energy vor-texes lined up along her spine. Sharon’s energy system and her chakras have become clogged with heavy energy that is like nox-ious sludge. She speaks of a long process of “losing her health,” which matches with what I am seeing. An acupuncturist would say that her meridians are blocked and unable to flush away the stale chi, or life force.



I remember how fascinated I was when I first realized that the ancient systems of medicine from China had many similar-ities to the energy medicine systems in the Americas. I perceive the acupuncture meridians as rivers of golden light flowing an inch or so above the body, next to the skin. Yet Sharon’s were grayish black, and barely moving. Her entire energy system was sluggish and stuck, unable to eliminate toxins or circulate life-giving chi.

The process I’m using is effective, but it takes time. You clear one layer of sludge from the chakras and another reveals itself. It’s like peeling an onion. Eventually, you get to the core. Sharon is gauging her success by how quickly she regains her ability to walk pain-free. But true healing is much deeper than skin and bone, or even muscles and ligaments. It happens in the LEF, which must be brought back to an optimal state of health. Otherwise, even if physical symptoms disappear, illness will return. Sometimes, clients improve quickly after a few ses-sions with me, but I tell them to hang in there, as the symptoms may be disappearing but they are not healed yet. Only when their LEF is restored do I tell them they are well. I suspect that in Sharon’s case, healing will be a long process. I’ve come to see over the years that every client heals at a different pace and with a different rhythm, with sudden breakthroughs and frustrating plateaus.

Yesterday, I “saw” the shards of glass dissecting Sharon’s torso. It sounds outrageous, but even as Sharon was describing them, I could perceive large, angular pieces bisecting her. I have developed the skill of seeing using non-ordinary perception. It’s essential to shamanic work. It’s not a gift, really, as I had no nat-ural talent for this. I was fortunate to have shaman teachers who trained me to “see” the invisible world. Non-ordinary perception is a skill we all can develop with training and patience. It’s a skill



I teach our students at the Light Body Energy Medicine School. But this work isn’t for those looking for the fastest way to earn their shaman badge. It involves experiences that are humbling, unsettling, and even terrifying, as you first have to be willing to “see” all the hidden and terrifying aspects of yourself, what Carl Jung referred to as the “shadow” that we tend to project and see in others only.

“Sit back, Sharon. Relax. Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. Slowly. Deeply.” I breathe with her. Sharon has been through this before. She knows what to do to enter the state I call One Spirit, in which she is experi-encing stillness and her LEF is open to healing. I shake my rattle to help her reach this quiet state, and the effect is hypnotic. The steady rhythm is helpful to me as well. I, too, have to relax and surrender to that other form of seeing that appears when I let the ordinary world fade into the background.

In our session today we are going to do a destiny retrieval to track the luminous threads that extend outward from her LEF and into the past and future. Like a hunter narrowing my focus to see far into the distance, I follow the threads to see where they lead. Each is connected to a possible future, some terrible, some beautiful. Some very probable, others less so. I want to find the thread that leads to vibrant health and strengthen it. In this way, I can affirm this possible future into her LEF and make it a more probable destiny. It will act like a magnet, drawing her toward the healthy state she’s capable of reaching, despite the odds against it. It’s a kind of time tracking, selecting a healed destiny rather than leaving the outcome to chance and fate. I know I have to find this healed future before I can intervene in the present. It’s not complicated, really. I do this every time I write a book. I track forward into my future and find the finished book, and this informs my writing every chapter.



But it’s different when I am tracking for a client’s destiny. As a shaman, I understand that I can change anything in my client—change disease for health, or death for life—as long as I am will-ing to take on the karma. So I tread very lightly. I must persuade the spirits involved that my patient deserves to live or heal, that she has gifts that she will share with others, and that I will help her learn the lessons she needs to master in order to heal. The lessons are what matter. A shaman calls these lessons the “med-icine” that will both heal his clients and deepen their wisdom.

Minutes pass. When I find the future healed state I am search-ing for, both Sharon and I let out an involuntary sigh and take a deep breath. It’s happened. I’m not quite sure how it happens, I just know that it does—and it did in that moment. For just as a shaman is able to track into his client’s past to do a soul retrieval, he is able to track into the future to retrieve a desired destiny.

Next, I scan Sharon’s energy field, focusing on the area sur-rounding her torso. It appears quite clearly to me: the crystal-lized, glass-like fragments that slice through the center of her body. I see the sharp edges that jut outward on either side of her LEF.

I begin the extraction process as a surgeon of energy—no scalpel needed. Extraction is essentially a practice of intention: You use the fingers to reach into the etheric realm and remove from the light body any energies that have hardened and crystal-lized, nearly becoming solid. Without disturbing the quiet state we are both in, I rise out of my chair and pull Sharon to her feet. I work quickly with my hands to move the shards, which are cold and sharp. It takes careful manipulation to grip and twist the shards this way and that in an effort to remove them from her energy field, taking the utmost care. At last, I am able to pull them out intact, leaving no shards behind. I drop the glass to the ground, where it shatters into slivers that dissolve into the earth.



As soon as energies such as these are not bound to the body, they dissipate and are reabsorbed into the environment, like water seeping into the soil.

As I work on Sharon, a question pops into my mind, one I’ve asked myself a thousand times: Is this real, or am I making this up? And really, does it matter? I try not to let the dialogue get in my way. It used to upset me when such questions crept into my awareness. I would wonder what I was doing, and whether I was truly helping people. Who am I to be doing this work, anyway? I had an ordinary upper-middle-class childhood in Cuba until the revolution came and we fled to our vacation home in Miami. These events changed my life dramatically. I wasn’t even ten when the revolution began, but its impression on my own LEF was powerful and would eventually lead me to my own healing and to doing the work I do.

Shamanic work is a far more mysterious pursuit than any I might have aspired to in my youth. The logical mind wants to know the inner workings, to feel a sense of control and predict-ability, but it isn’t my mind that is in charge when I do this work. I can’t “figure out” what to do to heal someone, yet every day I witness healing happening.

And I don’t work alone; I work with many spirits that assist me, and of course with Spirit, who works in mysterious ways but whose healing powers are infinite. I work with people by assisting them in healing themselves, but I also acknowledge the influence and will of Spirit with the sincere prayer “Thy will be done.”

Much as I used to feel annoyed by the question of whether what I’m doing is “real,” now I’m grateful when it does arise, as it keeps me honest and makes me take a second, cautious look at the work I am doing with my clients. My Western mind may not be fully confident that what I’m doing is “real,” but I try not to allow my own doubt to get in the way of being of service.



When I have finished the extraction, I gently guide Sharon back into her chair. She is shaken by the experience and seems a bit out of balance. This is not unusual, and I know I have to help her regain her steadiness before she leaves. She had adapted to living with these pieces of glass cutting into her torso, and now she must adapt to their absence. It’s an adjustment, but her new task will be much easier than coping with the invasive slivers.

“Take as much time as you need, Sharon,” I say. Actually, I also need a few moments myself, and I focus on my breath, bringing myself back to ordinary awareness. The transition to regular consciousness is slow, and I need some time before I can access the logical part of my brain and discuss what happened.

“It’s . . . out, isn’t it?” Her words are halting, breathless.“Yes. You may experience some relief right away, but it’s going

to take time to become used to what your body feels like now. You learned to compensate for the pain in your hips by walking crooked and torqueing your body to one side. Now that we have cleared this psychic debris, and your energy system is flushing the area and preventing further buildup of stale chi, you need to relearn how to walk, and how much you can rely on your body. But don’t overdo it, because you can reinjure the area easily.”

“I already feel a difference. That awful feeling of constriction is nowhere near as bad as it was. I feel better!” Relief showed in Sharon’s eyes.

“It’s going to take a few more sessions to complete clearing your field. I extracted a very dense crystallized energy. I think it’s been embedded in you for a very long time. And we need to see if any of it will come back in the next days.”

She nodded as she took in my words. I could tell that she was holding herself differently. Just as the psyche compensates for pain in the body, the body will distort itself to accommodate the pain of the soul. And the pain of the soul can in time become physical



pain. Westerners are taught to distinguish emotional from physi-cal pain, but shamans know they are essentially the same.

Before Sharon left, I had to perform an illumination to balance her LEF and change the “affinities” she had for these intrusive energies. I have learned through years of practice that intrusive energies always work with affinities, with receptors we have for them. If we do not change the affinities, they come back. It’s like when you throw the bum out and get divorced; if you do not change your affinities, you are going to find and marry another person just like the last one.

When we were done, Sharon asked, “Alberto, do you think the woman I keep seeing from some other time has anything to do with this?”

I knew Sharon wanted to understand the haunting presence she had reported since the beginning of our sessions, and I saw a ray of hope in her face.

“Yes,” I said, “It’s possible . . . She could be a memory of a former existence, maybe a recollection of how you had been wounded or died in another lifetime. I really don’t know.”

She seemed a little disappointed. As a shaman, I am always ready to admit I don’t have all the answers. Many of my clients come with tremendous projections about the shaman being ever wise and knowing, and it’s simply not so. Besides, I feel that the patient has to be the one to discover her own stories. I’m just the catalyst and the guide. It’s not my place to tell someone who she was in a former life, or what the origin of her pain is. We often weave our pain into stories of suffering that justify our feelings of powerlessness. Our stories may be what we tell others to explain ourselves, or they may be dramas we act out in our lives, playing the same scenes over and over again: the wounded child, the righteous warrior, the noble rescuer. Sharon’s stories were her own to discover, interpret, and rewrite.



This work always takes something out of me. Sometimes, I feel completely drained afterward. People often get the impression that shamans are void of human reactions and limitations, even invulnerable. Not so—usually, it’s just the opposite. As I work with a patient, I’ll experience all his emotions empathetically as his energy touches my own field. Along with the occasional feelings of elation come the more frequent feelings of loss and pain. When she has been abused, I feel the abuse; if he has been violated in some way, I feel it in my own skin. Afterward, I have to cleanse myself of these noxious energies so that I don’t carry home with me the residue of my work.

SharonMuch time has passed. In fact, it will soon be two years since I began working with Alberto. At that time, I could barely walk. Now I am good for a mile plus. I know the extraction was a critical point in my healing. It was as if I had been released from bondage. The follow-up of five or so sessions reinforced this release until my body could completely let go of the trauma of that broken glass. I was then free of the puppet strings and no longer torqued my body.

My doctors, I want to emphasize, have no medical expla-nation for the progress I have made. “Amazing!” they say. Yes, amazing: There is no question in my mind that Spirit directed the course of my healing and that the shamanic tools were pow-erfully effective.

I’m well enough now to sign up for classes at the Light Body Energy Medicine School. I feel able to meet the physical demands of this course of study over a two-year period. There is still so much to learn, and I hope that the shamanic work will enhance my clinical practice as a therapist.



AlbertoSharon is currently training with me. I’ve observed the changes in her stamina and physical endurance, and she now strides eas-ily and smoothly, like the dancer she is. Her vitality is no longer sapped by the toxic sludge in her LEF, and she has become a healer. From therapist to healer—what a journey! Rather than resign herself to the fate dictated by her medical history, she has chosen a different, if less probable, outcome—one in which she is a shaman.

I’m convinced that energy medicine can bring a spiritual solution to every problem we face, even if the resolution is to die consciously. Sharon still has some physical limitations, but while she isn’t completely cured, she is healed. I make a distinc-tion between a cure and a healing. Sharon’s spirit is whole and intact, even if her body is still impaired to some degree.

In a letter to me just recently, Sharon describes how she’s changed:

My study of shamanism and going through the process of the healing work . . . has freed me from physical problems that I thought would forever trap me in my pain. I believe I have been freed from such a future and therefore am able to create a destiny. If I had stayed with the traditional Western med-icine approach, I know I would have been trapped in that twisted, contorted body.


Copyright © 2015 by Alberto Villoldo, PhD Charlottesville ... · xiv A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools...

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