Sunday, November 10, 2013

Shamanic Ecstasy

by Alberto Villoldo
27 September 2013
from RealitySandwich Website

You are not your genes,
you are your dreams.


Several decades ago, I was a medical anthropologist doing research in the Amazon rainforest.

My salary and expenses were paid for by a research grant from a pharmaceutical company hoping to find the bark or root that could become the next great cancer cure. After all, the jungle is nature’s pharmacy, filled with exotic plants whose powers have yet to be discovered.

I spent many months canoeing to villages that had seldom seen a white man and wherever I went, I found there was no cancer or heart disease, even in the elders of the communities.

Clearly, the indigenous people of the area knew something about health that we westerners didn’t know.

What was their secret?

I returned home with my backpack empty, and my sponsor could not accept that I hadn’t brought back the key ingredient for a blockbuster drug that would make all of us rich and save some lives at the same time. However, I did return with insights from having been taught the wisdom of the shamans by several mentors who took me under their wing.

I learned there was a magic ingredient to health that could be found in the rainforest, but it would not fit in a backpack. It was shamanic medicine. It was, the shamans told me, the medicine that would allow a person to become like the jaguar (below video).

And it could only be found in the invisible world of Spirit...

(Alberto Villoldo is one of the world’s most respected shamanic teachers and authors, and the founder of the Four Winds Society, where he trains individuals throughout the world in the practice of energy medicine. A psychologist and medical anthropologist, he has studied the healing practices of the Amazon and Inca shamans  for more than 25 years. While at San Francisco State University, he founded the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory to study how the mind creates psychosomatic health and disease.)

The Shaman and the Jaguar

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