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NEW >> - POST CONFERENCE with Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. more... Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. - In 1984, Dr. Villoldo founded the Four Winds Society to bring the teachings of these master healers to the West. The Four Winds Society is preserving a thousand year old tradition of knowledge to achieve personal and planetary healing. Prior to founding The Four Winds Society, Dr. Villoldo founded and directed the Bio-Self Regulation Laboratory at San Francisco State University, investigating the effects of energy healing on blood and brain chemistry. Dr. Villoldo also founded The Sanctuary Project, which provides support and shelter to indigenous master healers as they descend from the Andes to live in Peruvian cities. Dr. Villoldo's books include: The Four Insights (2006); Mending the Past, Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval (2005); Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000); The First Story Ever Told (with E. Jendresen, 1996); Island of the Sun (with E. Jendresen, 1994); Dance of the Four Winds, Secrets of the Inca Medicine Wheel (with E. Jendresen, 1994); Healing States (with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., 1985); Millenium, Glimpse into the 21st Century (1980); The Multi-Cultural Developmental Inventory and Guide to Early Education (1978); and The Realms of Healing (with Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., 1976). Website: www.thefourwinds.com Post Conference with Dr. Alberto Villoldo, “Healing the Luminous Body: The Practice of Energy Medicine”, I day workshop Monday, March 26, 9am – 4pm, $135 Sacramento Convention Center, Room 203, 1400 J Street • Sacramento, CA 95814 (directions to Convention Center) Workshop: A luminous energy field surrounds the human body, and holds within it a record of all our emotional, physical, and spiritual traumas. It predisposes us to the way we will age, the way we heal, and the way we will die. In this one day intensive you will experience firsthand the luminous healing traditions of the high Shamans of the Americas. You will learn healing practices that have been employed for ten thousand years and are presented in a scientific and eminently practical system of energy medicine. Shamanic healing brings balance to the body, to the soul and to the earth. It allows you to discover states of exceptional health and well-being, and to consciously participate in your future evolution. You will learn techniques for renewing your connection to nature, for creating sacred space and engaging in ancient ceremony, and learn to identify the presence of intrusive energies that may be affecting your client’s health. This is a transformational healing and learning experience and a rare opportunity to learn long kept secret techniques from the “new world’s” most evolved ancient civilizations. Anthropologist and psychologist, Dr. Alberto Villoldo, author of over ten books, has been researching the shamanic paths of South America for over 25 years, and is one of the foremost teachers of Incan healing methods in North America. To register, click here or call 530-265-9255 for assistance. Directions to Convention Center FROM SAN FRANCISCO I-80 (DAVIS, VALLEJO, OAKLAND, SAN JOSE) FROM RENO I-80 (NORTH HIGHLANDS, ROSEVILLE, AUBURN) FROM HWY 99 SOUTH (STOCKTON, MODESTO, FRESNO, ELK GROVE) FROM SOUTH LAKE TAHOE HWY 50 (FOLSOM, PLACERVILLE) FROM I-5 NORTH OR SOUTH Homo Luminous: The New Human The prophesies of the indigenous Americans speak of this time in history as a period of great transformation. Some legends tell of an archangel who saw that humanity would face enormous tasks at the beginning of the 21st Century. These would be difficult times in a challenging world, and would require extraordinary efforts to bring about peace and healing. “Who would like to volunteer to be born in this world?” the archangel asked. Knowing we could make a difference, all of us jumped up and said, “Me!” We all signed-up to be healers and angels in this time of great change. The problems humanity is facing are huge. It is no longer a matter of global warming only, but of the possible collapse of the entire climate system—a catastrophe beyond imagination. At a more local level, the distribution of water in the world is a huge problem. Who owns the rain? Can private interests own the water? And how do we distribute water to villages in Africa that don’t have it? The problems we face are vast and overwhelming. But from the perspective of the planet, the problem the Earth is facing is simple: do away with the parasite infecting it. For humans have become a parasite that is threatening to kill its host. Like the human body, the Earth has an immune system that will recognize what is foreign and toxic and will do what is necessary to eliminate it. Unless we make a difference now. The indigenous peoples of the Andes have a prophesy that says up to two-thirds of humanity may be become extinct between now and 2012. There is to be a tremendous culling of humanity because the earth can no longer sustain the noxious parasite humanity has become. But every crisis brings with it a marvelous opportunity and this is why we stood up and said, “me, ” and volunteered to be born at this time of change. Our work is to rediscover a new relationship with the Earth. To become a new human, homo luminous. This is what we came here to do. I see the main problem facing us today as a mythic one. Not a problem of natural resources, or forests and water and earth, but the problems centered around human beliefs. These beliefs originate from certain troublesome and enigmatic elements found in our mythology. Western myths holds that all the Earth, including its animals and forests, were created for the pleasure and consumption of humans. This had led to the belief that we have dominion over al creatures on the earth. It is a mythology that is predatory, that is abusive, that reaps the cream of the earth—timber, water, topsoil—and passes the costs onto future generations. Our mythology is collapsing all around us. These greedy, rapacious, beliefs that pose humans as a dominator over nature are no longer sustainable. One day, I was walking with a medicine woman and her husband deep in the Amazon. “Alberto, go across the clearing,” they said. “Go back into the rainforest and see what happens.” So I turned and went back into the woods. All around me, the forest was full of song. The sounds of the macaws and the monkeys and the parrots were as an orchestra on the first step I took, the second step, and then everything stopped. The shamans came up to me and said, “See? They know that you’ve been kicked out of the garden. They know that you don’t belong here.” Certain that all of the creatures could smell my deodorant, my toothpaste, my athlete’s foot powder, I looked around for a way to cover up my scent. By the edge of the river, I came upon two Indians cooking a boa on a spit. I asked them for the fat they had been collecting from the snake. Stripping down to my shorts, I smeared myself with the boa fat, thinking this would conceal my smell. I walked back into the rainforest. First step, the forest was full of song. Second step. Third step, and again, everything stopped. Except for the flies, hundreds and hundreds of flies swarmed about me. It took ten years of apprenticeship with the indigenous medicine people before I was able to walk through the rainforest and have it continue singing. No longer did the forest recognize me as someone who did not belong. I belonged in the garden again. Mythology This incident revealed to me a great deal about our Western mythology. Remember that what we call reality are those myths that we haven’t quite seen through yet. Mythology creates our beliefs and those beliefs inform our reality. We have the only mythology on the planet in which we are kicked out of the garden. Nobody else was cast out of the garden. The aborigines were not kicked out, the sub-Saharan Africans were not kicked out, the indigenous Americans were not cast out. These peoples were given the garden to be its stewards and caretakers. We, on the other hand, were not only cast out, but as we are being cast out, a voice says, “and cursed is the earth because of you,” pointing to the woman. And to the man, condemning him to a life of hard work, “with the sweat of your brow you will take your fruit from the earth and the earth shall grow thorns and thistles for you.” This is the original damnation. The Bible doesn’t say, “and the earth shall grow strawberries and mangoes and papayas for you.” It says thorns and thistles. From the beginning of Western mythology, we have a hostile relationship with the feminine (with woman, who is the cause of our problems), and with Mother Earth itself. And if we look still deeper, even before we were cast out of the garden, we learn that on the seventh day of creation that all of the food on the planet was given to us. The animals and the trees and the flowers were created for our pleasure and for our feeding as humans. Instead of putting us in a position of stewardship with all life on the planet, it puts us in the position of the consumer. The assumption is that all of the bounty of the earth belongs to humans. It doesn’t. The food on the earth belongs to all living beings on the earth. Another element unique to western culture is that we have the only mythology on the planet in which the masculine gives birth to the feminine. Eve is made from the rib of Adam. Nowhere else, except in later Greek mythology, does the man become the creative force. As the ways of the feminine began to be lost, Zeus became the dominant god in the Pantheon. In the early Greek mythologies, the goddess Hera, the “creatrix” was predominant. Although Zeus took Hera for his bride, she refused to submit to him. Thereafter, she was known in mythology as “the bitch goddess” because you cannot repress the feminine without ill effect. The paradigms of the west are the paradigms of the masculine. This is at the core of the problem. We have to break free from a mythology that sees the earth as ours to consume and sees the feminine as damned. These beliefs express themselves in our economic, political, social, and educational systems. Even our medical practices are, by their very nature, hostile, masculine, and aggressive. These paradigms hold that we can rape, loot, and pillage as we wish, we can spoil the earth and postpone the price of clean-up to future generations. This mythology postulates that there is an independent evil principle in the world, and that we live in a predatory universe. We have been in the grip of this mythology for nearly 6,000 years. Today, our economy, our political system, education, and even our relationships —all show signs of collapse. The old mythology has taken us as far as it can. And our new myths have not yet been born. Now we must discover a mythology of sustainability, of collaborative relationships with the earth. Fortunately, we have the traditions of the Earth Peoples to provide us with a model. The Earth People have an animistic relationship with all of life. They believe they can speak to the rivers and to the trees and to the canyons and to God. They believe that everything in creation is alive and sentient. This was our condition before we were cast out of the garden. We were in relationship with Spirit and with the natural world. Spirit is actually talking to us all the time. But we don’t open our ears to hear. We must find the self that still walks with beauty on the earth, and that speaks to the rivers and to the trees and to God, and to whom the rainforest still sings to, and the rivers and the trees and the voice of spirit talks back to. We need a grand kind of soul retrieval. We need to discover that self that was lost when we were cast out of the garden. I embarked on my study in shamanism more than 30 years ago as a result of my frustration with western psychology and our inability to discover the workings of the mind. I spent years immersing myself in the ways of the shaman. I began to study the techniques, methodologies and practices of the earth peoples who have developed a body of knowledge for healing through the luminous energy field that envelops the body, for living mindfully, but outside the visceral grip of the mind. My studies led me to study with medicine men and women of the Amazon rainforest. The traditions of the Andes and Amazon had been neglected because they had left no body of writing. Modern prejudice says that if you do not learn to read or write, you are illiterate and therefore, not intelligent. These cultures were dismissed as ignorant and primitive, whereas students of religion and anthropology have been studying other literate traditions, the ones that left the Vedas and the Sutras and the Koran and the Bible, for hundreds of years. Only since Margaret Meade and the advent of experiential anthropology have we begun to discover the true wealth and beauty of the indigenous teachings of our land, of the Americas. The indigenous mythologies differ radically from ours. The shaman believes that we live in a benign universe, not a predatory one. This universe does not need to be subjugated, medicated, or controlled. Evil exists, but only in the human heart. The shaman lives in a collaborative universe that will actually go out of its way to conspire on our behalf. But you have to be in proper relationship with it. For example, the shaman sees no difference between being killed by a microbe by a jaguar. To us, one of these is an illness, and one is an accident. A bacteria makes you ill and it is called a disease. A jaguar mauls you and it is an accident. For the shaman, you have to be in proper relationship with microbes and with jaguars, otherwise they both begin to look at you as lunch. When you’re not in proper relationship with the cosmos, the universe turns predatory. It begins to stalk you, and consider you part of the food chain. Life becomes adversarial—we hit obstacle after obstacle—but when we are in proper relationship, the cosmos go out of its way to conspire on our behalf. The most unlikely possibilities line up to make things work for us. This is an essential aspect of the healing process in the energy medicine: to come into proper relationship. Not to medicate, to treat, to intervene, but to come into proper relationship with all of life. When we are out of right relationship with creation no medication works well. When we come back into right relationship the chemo works, the Echinacea works, antibiotics work, and prayer works. The shamans of the Americas understand that we have a luminous energy field that surrounds the physical body. It informs the body in the same way the energy fields of a magnet organize iron filings on a piece of glass. In the paradigms of the west, we are intent on shuffling and moving the iron filings about, trying to change things at the level of the physical through surgery and medication. In contrast, energy healing brings about change at the essential level—moving the magnet, shifting the energy field—and the physical body follows. The shaman works at the core level of reality where everything is energy and light, and healing happens. Infinity The shamans discovered that time runs in figure eights, that it loops in wormholes back into itself. With this understanding they were able to heal events that occurred in the past and influence destiny. They discovered this by breaking free of the grip of time and experiencing infinity. The core healing practice of the medicine way—the illumination process—happens outside time, in infinity. It happens when we access a self that never entered the stream of time, that cannot be affected by disease, that cannot be touched by ill health. Once we contact infinity, we can re-inform who we are today. We can grow bodies that age differently, that heal differently, that die differently. From the perspective of infinity death ceases to be a problem and becomes a process of renewal and rebirth. In the course of our lives we are challenged to face many little deaths; a relationship ending, the loss of a loved one, a career coming to an end, a cherished time in our lives finishing. During transitions, we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. When we don’t, a deadening happens. If we go through these little deaths elegantly, they become opportunities for new life. Instead of being wounded by transitions we become inspired by them if we have the prerequisite courage. How we respond to adversity turns us into courageous individuals. Courage can come out of frustration, illness, from many sources, sparked by adversity or by the divine. I remember when my daughter was thrown from a horse at age six. The horse stepped on her and ruptured her liver. She was very close to death for three days. I was in the Amazon at the time. It was the longest journey of my life coming back to upstate NY. When I arrived at the hospital, she was in pediatric ICU, hooked up to tubes and IV’s. We didn’t know if she was going to make it. I sat beside her, praying to God that she heal, when an immense clarity came over me. My sadness disappeared and I spoke to her soul. Although she was unconscious, I said to her, “Sweetheart, I love you, and you have to make a choice if its time for you to go or not. It’s your choice. I love you, your soul knows if your journey is done.” Three minutes later, she regained consciousness. She chose yes. The Way of the Hero To go from being a victim to becoming a hero requires that we go into a deep exploration of the ways of the feminine, of the ways of mother earth. As a psychologist I’ve come to understand that this also means healing all of your unresolved mother issues. But as a shaman I know that exploring the ways of the feminine is much more than that. It means honoring the feminine within you; it means power with instead of power over; it means intimacy instead of domination; stewardship of the earth instead of exploitation; and many more. If we do not embrace these attributes we remain victims and bullies, and miss the path of the hero. The hero understands that our personal journey embraces the greater journey of the planet. That as we heal, the earth heals. The heroic tales always involve accepting the calling to a destiny that is greater than our individual, personal stories. A destiny is something you make yourself available to by saying yes to life, yes to God, and yes to your own growth. It requires the courage to say yes. The medicine way is the way of the hero. It is as contemporary today as it was 50,000 years ago. My mentor believed that the new shamans would come from the west. We are the ones who can bring healing and transformation to our families, to our communities, and to the earth. This is a critical time in history, a time for a reawakening of the way of the feminine. It is a time of tremendous transformation. All the old models are being shredded and torn apart. We have to reinvent every facet of society. And we are the change agents. That is what the shaman has always been. The shaman is a map-maker. We need new maps to navigate our lives with. But these can no longer be mind maps, masculine maps, or predatory maps. The Archetypes The shaman calls on four great archetypes: the serpent, the jaguar, the hummingbird, and the eagle. These archetypes are representations of the four organizing principles in the universe. They are known by different names among the Hopi, among the Shoshoni, among the Navaho, the Maya and the Inca. The important thing is not what you call it, not whether it’s the jaguar in the west or the buffalo, the important thing is that when you call it, it comes. That is the shaman’s agreement with spirit, that when you call, spirit responds. Not 60% of the time, not 90% of the time, but 100% of the time. Each of the four archetypes is the embodiment of organizing principles of life, described in an animistic fashion. For example, physics has also discovered four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear force) and biology has discovered that the DNA code is composed of an alphabet with only four letters in it. These forces are the same as the one’s the shaman calls upon through each of the archetypes. Each one of the archetypes represents one of the four great pillars of knowledge. The shaman differentiates between information and knowledge. Information is what we are flooded in every day. Knowledge is wisdom. Information is knowing that water is H2O. Knowledge is being able to make it rain. Mastery of the energies of the archetypes allowed the shaman to participate actively in creation itself, by ‘dreaming the world into being.” The greatest act of dreaming that we are called to today is to help birth a new human that is emerging on the earth. I call this new human homo luminous. Shamans understand that evolution can happen within generations. In the west, we believe evolution happens only in-between generations: that maybe our children will be smarter and more handsome, that maybe the indigo children will climb to the next rung on the evolutionary ladder. The shaman, on the other hand, understands that evolution is possible for us, for you and I. It is up to us to take the quantum leap into who we are becoming. We can evolve into homo luminous in our lifetime. This is our greatest task. As we take that quantum leap individually, we do it for the entire planet. Each and every one of us, when we choose truth, when we choose beauty, when we choose light, we are transforming the world. Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. |
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