An Interview With Shaman Alberto Villoldo
In Healing the Luminous Body: The Way of the Shaman, Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., a psychologist, medical anthropologist and renowned shamanic healer, shares a captivating story of the first time he entered the Amazon rain forest as he embarked on his own shamanic journey.
With his first and second step, he could hear the symphonic song of numerous creatures. With his third step, there was silence. The jungle knew he did not belong.
It took fifteen years of study with Amazon and Andean shamans for Dr. Villoldo to be able to walk into the rain forest and be recognized as someone who belonged in the garden.
The Way of the Shaman
Now, Dr. Villoldo is teaching people how to grow new bodies that resist disease, heal quickly and age differently through modern-day shamanic rituals.
In addition the wisdom he has shared with Gaia in the past, he recently agreed to an exclusive interview. Read the interview with Dr. Villoldo below.
Q and A with Alberto Villoldo, PhD
I am inspired by the simple solutions you share for an array of complex problems. I watched One Spirit Medicine, Part One and One Spirit Medicine, Part Two, and I plan to cleanse my liver, simplify my diet, practice bearable fasting and take live probiotics in an effort to cleanse my body and clarify my mind.
In the meantime, I am hoping you can enlighten us about your role as a shaman and I want to start with understanding Shamanism.
How do you describe a shaman?
Shamans are mediators between the visible and invisible world. With the dawn of modern science, we stopped attending to the invisible world. In fact, the visible world was whatever we could look at under the microscope and we forgot about the spiritual world. This is one of the causes of today’s great disconnection that humanity is living. We are not only destroying nature but destroying our own nature in the process. Therefore, we’re becoming disenfranchised from Spirit and ignoring our role as offspring of one mother–Mother Earth.
Shamans were and are individuals that can help you come back to your own essential nature. They can help you to see how the ancient models that you follow, and the beliefs that you have about the nature of reality, create your health, create disease. Shamanic healers help create extraordinary health for willing humans so that their lifespan equals their health span and good health can last a lifetime.
How did you become a shaman?
I’m a medical anthropologist by training and I always had a sense of superiority like all Westerners about these primitive societies until one day I discovered that we were the primitive ones. In the process, I recognized my calling from Spirit.
How did you recognize your calling?
I believe that we all have a calling from Spirit and if we respond to it then we start walking the medicine way–the way of the shaman, which is the way of stewardship of earth, of bringing beauty and healing to others and being of service to all beings, including the plants, the animals and all humans. It is a calling that we all have.
Have you ever felt conflicted between the ancient knowledge of shamanism and modern ways of thinking?
You know, I never really did. I knew enough science to be able to understand what the shamans are doing. Today, neuroscience in particular, corroborates these ancient wisdom teachings that shamans have discovered over millennia.
In the first half of One Spirit Medicine, you highlight that there are 14,000 diseases and conditions recognized by Western medicine. There is only one in shamanism: “disconnection from nature” and Spirit. Can you share some of your wisdom on re-connecting with nature?
We have to start with our inner nature. Our inner nature is our gut flora. Nine-tenths of the cells in our body do not belong to us. Ninety percent of “us” are not us. We have 100 trillion cells and 90 trillion belong to over 10,000 species of bugs–bacteria that live inside of us that process all of the foods we eat. They turn broccoli–something that is not “us”–into us. This is where we begin to get in-touch with our inner nature. It’s not through meditation but by having a really healthy gut flora.
Most of us that have taken antibiotics have wiped out our guts, so we have lost our gut instinct. We cannot tell the people that want to help us from those who want to hurt us. We keep falling in-love with all the wrong people. When we’re not connected to our inner nature, it’s very difficult to connect to our outer nature.
You can meditate on a mountain top or a beach and if your gut flora is out of balance, you’re going to be worrying about what else you should be doing because the bacteria in your gut are so out of balance and their poop (because they too eat and then poop) is causing mood swings and anxiety so you cannot be fully present on your meditation retreat.
It is liberating to know that we can improve the world by working on our health.
We can start with ourselves, with the nature that lives within us. Ninety trillion other creatures–that is who we are. If you look at who you and I are from the perspective of bacteria, they’ve been around for two billion years and from their perspective, they created us so that they could travel and see the world. We’re wiping them out with antibiotics, pesticides, sugar and carbs. In turn, they are casting us out of the garden.
You are refreshingly honest about death during the second half of One Spirit Medicine. You describe it as, “a mystery of awe and terror because it’s a great journey to the unknown.” Additionally, you say that if we die consciously, we can visit other realms of light. However, Western medicine is known for medicating and operating on the human body in an effort to deny the inevitability of death. Can you offer further wisdom on dying “differently” that people can integrate into their daily lives now and with future loss?
Everybody is trying to come up with their own immortality project. For the shaman, immortality is a possibility, not a given. If you can acquire enough consciousness and enough personal power, which is acquired through service to others, you can take your consciousness and power into the great beyond. You don’t have to be returned back to molecules of energy to be reorganized into something else again.
The metaphor that I like to use is, if you take a drop of water and you drop it into a glass of water, where is that drop? We know it is in there but it is no longer in drop form. This is what happens to your energy body.
You want to maintain your identity so that when you return back to the great pool of consciousness, someone is there to witness it. That’s you. That consciousness requires deep discipleship and dedication to your spiritual practice as your top priority. Then, you do your work, take your kids to school, do your chores and do whatever else you need to do. Your prime agenda for dying differently is your spiritual practice.
You describe the luminous body as, “the subtle essence of who we are,” in addition to addressing steps to heal our physical bodies. As more and more humans access the Internet and rely on digital devices to stay connected and perform their jobs, there is a growing awareness of high-energy blue lights and their harmful effects on the eyes. Can you address how exposure to artificial light, in addition to other artificial materials does or does not interfere with our luminous body?
To start, for your computers, you have to download a program called F.lux, that dims the light of your computer in the evening. It takes the blue out and gives you the orange and red hues. For millions of years, we told stories around the fire–red, orange and yellow light–that stimulates and stabilizes melatonin production in your brain. The constant exposure to blue light from various devices interferes with your ability to fall asleep and achieve a restful night’s sleep. You want the blue light in the morning. It wakes you up and stops your body from producing melatonin.
In general, we have to be careful. Right now, consciousness is at a fork in the road. One direction is digital, silicon-based. We, all of us, are uploading ourselves to The Cloud and pulling the plug on the human because we are messy. You have to feed us. We poop. That’s one path.
On the other path, at this time when there is so much ecological devastation happening, we have the opportunity to quantum leap into an entirely different human that ages, heals and dies differently. This is the privilege that we, being incarnated today, have. We can become that human. This is the path I’m signing-up to take! This path will protect us from harmful elements.
I love that you describe humans as, “light trapped into form.” Our earthly bodies are primarily composed of water. Should we be equally vigilant about the water we consume and how do we protect our bodies from toxins such as trace pharmaceuticals, lead and chlorine found in drinking water?
I don’t know if you remember being a kid and playing with mercury. Less than a century ago, if you cut yourself, your mother would douse you with Mercurochrome. Well, eventually, they took it off the market because it was mercury and could poison you!
We have been exposed to so many toxins and the body stores toxins in fat cells because they are the most stable molecules. The brain is eighty-percent fat.
Now, when I was a medical anthropologist in the jungle, I got a grant from a Swiss pharmaceutical company to help them to create the next blockbuster drug for curing primarily Western diseases–cancer, Alzheimer’s, hypertension. For months, I went through villages that had never seen a white person. In fact, the kids would run up to me and rub my skin to see if the white “dirt” would rub off. I came back empty-handed because these native villagers had no heart disease, no dementia, no cancer. Of course, they also weren’t exposed to chemicals such as lead, chlorine and fluoride in the water or pesticides in their food.
Today, the first step that we all need to take is to detox. Detox the brain so we can create psychosomatic health. Otherwise, we’ll continue to create disease. Once you detox the brain, you can access states of consciousness that can help you become that new human that is being born on the planet right now.
Create Health
Do you ever get the sense that you were meant for something significant in this life? In fact, you are! We came to earth now to heal an apocalyptic world together. When you heal yourself from the inside, you create the optimal environment for dreaming the world into being.
For more information about the shaman’s way of healing or to begin your own shamanic journey with Dr. Alberto Villoldo, please visit his website.
About the Author
Shamanic Soul Retrieval: How to Recover Parts of Our Soul?
Shamanic Soul Retrieval: Sandra Ingerman on Recovering Parts of Our Soul
“Every book…has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” ~ Carlos Ruis Zafon
It has been said, “The best things in life are free.” We can all agree it’s nice to be surprised with a gift, but not just any gift. The gift that arrives in your life precisely when you are ready to receive it. The gift is clearly a message to you and for you.
In this case, the gift is Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self by Sandra Ingerman.
With graceful delivery of rarely discussed phenomena, Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self combines shamanism and psychology to explain the effects of trauma that cause parts of the soul to leave the body and the process by which the part(s) can be retrieved.
Follow along as renowned psychotherapist, shamanic teacher, and author Sandra Ingerman delves into soul loss and retrieval.
What is Soul Loss?
Sandra Ingerman’s Abstract on Shamanism states that “there are many common symptoms of soul loss. Some of the more common ones would be dissociation, where a person does not feel fully in his or her body and alive and fully engaged in life. Other symptoms include chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress syndrome, immune deficiency problems, and grief that just does not heal. Addictions are also a sign of soul loss.”
For those who have lost parts of themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, “tremendous amounts of psychic energy” are unconsciously spent looking for the lost parts.
What Causes Soul Loss?
According to Ingerman, “The basic premise is whenever we experience trauma, a part of our vital essence separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain.” This quiet occurrence, known as soul loss, takes the form of a perpetual feeling and experience of incompleteness and disconnection.
Ingerman says, “Anytime someone says, ‘I have never been the same’ since a certain traumatic event, and they don’t mean this in a good way, soul loss has probably occurred.”
Sandra Ingerman on Lost Soul Parts
Sandra Ingerman holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, professional mental health counselor, the author of more than ten books, and a board-certified expert on traumatic stress who was awarded the 2007 Peace Award from the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicine.
As a leading authority on soul loss and retrieval, Ingerman’s highly regarded career spans 35 years of conducting workshops and soul retrievals around the world.
For Ingerman, the leading practitioner of soul retrieval whose own spiritual journey to recapture her soul led her on various spiritual paths. The answer she found was in the ancient tradition of shamanism, which views soul loss as an important cause of illness and death.
The word shaman, originating from the Tungus Tribe of Siberia, means “one who sees in the dark.”
Soul Loss in Society
According to Ingerman, “A reflection of how much soul loss people are dealing with” is evident when “so many governments and businesses are valuing money over life.”
However, Western medicine has no framework for this kind of diagnosis because it only deals with imbalance when it appears on a physical and mental level.
Western medicine “treats chronic pain with pain medication, insomnia with sleeping pills, weight issues with diet and exercise, and most damagingly, may label soul loss as mental illness and cover up the symptoms with psychiatric medications that may make things worse by slapping a Band-Aid on a wound that’s not healing underneath the bandage.”
This “covering up” can lead to the deep unhappiness that many have come to consider as “simply ordinary.” Eventually, this prolonged dissociation produces a nameless void that shows itself through “a loss of meaning, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and genuine connection.”
This spiritual void, which is always present and always trying to get your attention, operates as the incessant yearning of your soul wanting to incorporate all of its highest qualities, all of God’s essence, all of you.
Simply put, the soul is always trying to reconnect with that from which it came.
Ingerman imparts, “If you are truly in your body (your whole soul present), you cannot place money over life. Planetary soul loss causes so much of the behavior we are currently seeing, behavior that no longer honors the beauty and importance of life.”
Signs of Soul Loss
The following checklist can help identify symptoms of soul loss:
- You have a difficult time staying “present” in your body
- You feel numb, apathetic, or deadened
- You suffer from chronic depression
- You have problems with your immune system and have trouble resisting illness
- You were chronically ill as a child
- Memory gaps of your life after age five where you sense that you may have blacked out significant traumatic experiences
- Struggle with addictions, for example, to alcohol, drugs, food, sex or gambling
- Find yourself looking to external things to fill up an internal void or emptiness
- Have difficulty moving on with your life after a divorce or the death of a loved one
- You suffer from multiple personality syndrome
Having read this book without prior knowledge of soul loss or retrieval, I found the concepts quite sobering.
Within situations of physical and emotional abuse, negation, and trauma, many experiences in life can be too difficult to bear. Soul loss is an understandable response to spiritual woundedness and deep fragmentation of one’s soul essence that would lead to an internal dissociation from natural balance.
What is Soul Retrieval?
During the soul retrieval process, the shaman moves into an altered state of consciousness to travel to realities outside of normal perception (non-ordinary reality), also known as hidden spirit worlds, to retrieve the lost part of the soul.
In some cases, there is reluctance of the soul fragments to return, or the soul may not even know a separation has occurred. While in most cases, the soul does want to return and become whole. It is, however, important to note that when the “soul returns, it comes back with all the pain it experienced when leaving.”
Once the lost soul pieces are located, the shaman will “acknowledge the former pain and gently negotiate the soul’s return to the body.” The shaman then brings the soul back to normal reality and (literally) blows the missing soul part(s) back into the body through the head or heart.
If a person is trained in shamanic journeying, they can ask their spirit guides or power animals to perform a soul retrieval on their behalf. Or anyone can ask for a healing dream where one sets the intention to request a soul retrieval to be performed during the dream state.
If these two processes do not create change or healing, then working with a trained shamanic practitioner is recommended.
Although Ingerman is clear that you should not try to practice soul retrieval based solely on the reading of this book, in an exclusive interview, Ingerman and I discuss what can be done when someone suspects soul loss has occurred.
Shamanic Healing Practice Interview
BJB: What can someone do if they suspect soul loss has occurred but do not have immediate access for soul retrieval with a Shaman?
SI: If a person has soul loss, they can work with a shamanic practitioner long distance. Most shamanic practitioners perform long-distance healings these days.
I have been training Soul Retrieval practitioners since the late 1980’s. I have a website where I have an international list of shamanic practitioners who have sent me case studies. Of course, no shamanic practitioner can ever promise a cure, but I know their work, and I trust them.
BJB: Is there a healing exercise the person can do to begin to address and/or heal the root cause of the soul loss?
SI: Nature is our greatest healer. A person who feels they have lost their soul can walk or lie down on the ground and reflect on what is the root cause of their soul loss.
You can also do automatic writing. This includes listening to spiritual music while writing the following question on a piece of paper: “What is the root cause of my soul loss?”
You then close your eyes and allow your hand to write. This is a powerful way to let your soul and intuition give you the truth of the cause of your soul loss and other information that is important for you to know.
BJB: What has been the most surprising or unexpected part of your work as a Shaman?
SI: All of my Shamanic work is a surprise.
The helping spirits never give expected responses to the questions I ask them. This is true also when I perform the healing journey for a client. I am always given information I did not expect or would rationally think of on my own.
Also, in my 35 years of working with clients, I continue to be surprised by the miraculous effects of the work.
Power of Ancient Shamanic Practices
The shaman’s toolbox is a personal and intimate gathering of powers. Some shamans learned through direct experience, others gleaned knowledge from master teachers like Sandra, and some are gifted in journeying to the depths of spirit realms.
A few tools are so foundational that nearly every shaman utilizes them. Soul retrieval is one such tool. Not only is it universally effective, but it’s also the pervasive root cause of illness overlooked by many in the medical field.
Soul retrieval is not a modern New Age therapy but a profound healing tradition practiced for thousands of years. It involves the reintegration of lost soul parts, that’s akin to the surgical reattachment of a body part but for our spiritual essence instead. By recovering these lost soul parts, individuals can restore wholeness and harmony within themselves.
The Most Important Factor in Personal Healing
Soul retrieval is not a quick fix. Sandra Ingerman states, “If the person has done a lot of personal work, the soul retrieval might be the end of the work. If not, the soul retrieval would be the beginning of the work.”
No matter where you may find yourself, at the beginning or near the end of working through an issue, the most important factor in all healing work is you.
You have to be willing to do the work that is necessary to participate in your personal transformation. You will have to be willing to look at yourself with new eyes, from a new shamanic perspective, and as an embodiment of completion and wholeness while knowing that willingness is the impetus for great change, which always begins with the heart.
For more information on Sandra Ingerman’s work, log onto SandraIngerman.com.
You can also learn more by watching this interview on Gaia.com with Jill Kuykendall on soul retrieval.
