Inca Shamanism

The way of the Earth keepers

For millennia, secret societies of Native American medicine men and women carefully guarded their wisdom teachings and acted as stewards of nature.
These "Earth keepers" existed in many nations and were called several different names; for example, in the Andes and the Amazon they were known as the "Laika".

In 1950, a group of Laika from high in the Andes travelled to an annual gathering of shamans that occurred at the foot of one of the holy mountains.
It was a group of medicine men and women thought to have vanished after the time of the Conquest.
These high-shamans, knowing that human kind was on the verge of a huge upheaval, had finally come out of seclusion, to offer all people the wisdom that would sustain us through the great changes we were about to face, which would help us alter our reality and give birth to a better world.

The Earth keepers teach that all of creation-the earth, humans, whales, rocks and even the stars-is made of vibrations and light.
Nothing we perceive as material and real exists, other than as a dream that we´re projecting onto the world.
This dream is a story, and we believe it to be real……even though it isn´t.
Earth keepers' practices and wisdom teach us how to rewrite our stories about our lives, to do what the shaman´s call "dreaming the world into being!"

Teachings of the Shamans

The Spanish conquistadors came to Peru seeking gold and therefore left the Inca spiritual traditions largely undisturbed. These gold seekers brought a set of beliefs that were incomprehensible to the Indios.
The first, was that all the food of the world belonged by divine rights to humans-specifically the Europeans-who were masters over the animals and plants of the Earth.
The second was, that humans could not speak to the rivers, to the animals, to the mountains, or to God.
And the third was that humankind had to wait until the end of all time before tasting infinity!
Nothing could have seemed more absurd to the Native Americans.
While the Europeans believed they had been cast out of the mythical Garden of Eden, the Indios understood they were the stewards and caretakers of the Garden.
Another fundamental difference between the ancient Americans and the modern ones is that we are today people of the precept.
We are a rule-driven society that relies on documents to bring order to our lives.
We change precepts (rules or laws) when we want to change the world.
The ancient Greeks where people of the concept. They believed that a single idea could change the world and that there was nothing as powerful as an idea whose time had come.
Shamans are people of the percept. When they want to change the world, they engage in perceptual shifts that change their relationship to life. They envision the possible, and the outer world changes.

One reason why the practices of energy healing have been kept so guarded is that they are often mistaken for a set of techniques, in the same way that Western medicine is sometimes regarded as a set of procedures.
We mistakenly think that we can master energy healing practices by learning the rules. However, for the shaman it is not about the rules or ideas. It´s about vision and Spirit. And while the healing practices often vary from village to village, the Spirit never varies. True healing is nothing less than an awakening to a vision of our healed nature and the experience of infinity!

Alberto Villoldo

Alberto, a psychologist and medical anthropologist, has studied the healing practices of the Amazon and Inca shamans, for more than 25 years.
Inca shamans practiced energy medicine for more than five thousand years, transmitting this knowledge from one generation to the next through an oral tradition.

His own journey, but mine as well, into shamanism was guided by his desire to become whole. In healing his own soul wounds, he learned to love himself and others.
He walked the pad of the wounded healer and learned to transform the pain, the grief, anger, and shame that lived within him into sources of strength and compassion.

Alberto directs The Four Winds Society, where he trains individuals throughout the world in the practice of energy medicine and soul retrieval.
In this study every student embarks on a journey of self-healing in which he or she transforms soul wounds into sources of power.
Students learn that this is one of the greatest gifts that they will later offer to their clients: the opportunity to discover the power within pain.
They learn as well that healing is a journey their clients embark upon, not a procedure the healer performs!

Text copied from: "The Four Insights" and "Shaman Healer Sage" written by Alberto Villoldo PH.D.

When we decide to take this step on our Soul's journey and to work with a shaman, it leads us to own our own power. Working with a shaman we discover a more authentic self, we discover more of who we know ourselves to be, we begin to bring forth our gifts and talents so that we step into our becoming and as we do so we create and hold a new map for ourselves that shapes our destiny and that of the world.
We begin to know absolutely that we can change our world by changing ourselves, and we can re-negotiate the soul-contracts that we made that keep us stuck in toxic illnesses, painful relationships and work that does not inspire us.

Text borrowed with kind permission from Chris Waters, my inspiring teacher at The Four Winds!  Also see her website www.life-times.co.uk

I followed the study and training program of Alberto Villoldo partly in the Netherlands and partly in Sweden.
I finally trust to complete my studies in February 2009.
For more information regarding this wonderful education I gladly refer to www.thefourwinds.com