Interview with Alberto Villoldo

Devra: Let’s talk about what you do and what your background is some of the readers, may not know much about you yet, and this is a good chance for them to get to know you – who you are and what you do. You probably get the same questions all the time and that gets boring, so let’s just have a conversation.

I find it interesting that you were trained as a psychologist and a medical anthropologist. How do those two go together?

Alberto: My interest in psychology had to do with how we create psychosomatic health. We know you can create psychosomatic disease and, after a while, I realized that you cannot create psychosomatic health because the mind is what makes us sick to begin with. So, the only way to create psychosomatic health is to shut the mind off. In our western culture, where the mind goes 100 miles an hour all the time, we’re very prone to stress-related problems, cancer, psychosomatic conditions, and emotional distress, coming from the mind. What I did, after spending a few years in the laboratory, slicing and dicing the brain and putting it under a microscope,  I went off to the Amazon to study people who do not rely on high technology, do not have the technological resources that we have, but have to use other resources, of the soul, of the mind, of the spirit, in order to maintain health.

Devra: Did you find, in these regions, that people suffered from the same kinds of stress-related diseases or distresses that we do in America?

Alberto: No, very different. In the states, we live in a constant state of fight-or-flight. I remember being in Africa in a game reserve and seeing a little buck being chased by a lioness. This little buck goes to a pond, hesitates, and darts across the pond, with the lioness chasing him; then, out of the water, like a torpedo, comes a crocodile. This little thing was flying. I was holding my breath and cheering it on. It gets to the other side and the lioness drops off and the croc drops off. There’s this quiver that goes through his body. He just quivers, shifting back into neutral. Then, he goes back to feeding, calmly, like nothing had happened. Meanwhile, my heart was racing at 100 miles an hour, with palpitations, cold sweat. This buck’s fight-or-flight was turned on and then it gets turned off and shaken out of his system. The more distant we are from nature, the more difficult it is to turn fight-or-flight off. So, we live in a state of constant perceived danger, whether it is emotional danger, physical danger, terrorist danger, or tsunami danger. So, the levels of stress that we experience are unheard of anywhere else in the world.

Devra: Do you think that’s partially due to the economics of this country, where we are always a pay check away from homelessness?

Alberto: Absolutely. I know that one. That’s part of it and part of it is that TV News gives us the daily level of terror that we should be experiencing and the level of alert we should be on. It’s the combination of all these things that make it so difficult for us to have any sense of authority in our lives. We are at the mercy of so many things. Anyway, I ended up going to the Amazon, walking away from my laboratory at San Francisco State University, and spending ten years working. I had spent years working at the wrong end of the microscope. I really had to start going bigger and bigger, instead of smaller and smaller.

Devra: So, stepping out of that into the Amazon must have given you a 360 degree difference to what you were seeing.

Alberto: Absolutely. I had spent time with the Hopi and the Shoshone and the Navajo in North America, and the Maya. I ended up in Peru because I had read in an anthropology journal how the last remaining office of The Inquisition operated in Peru. I thought The Inquisition had shut its doors in the 1600’s. It was still run by the same order, the Dominicans, who sentenced Joan of Arc to death and burnt her at the stake in the 1300’s. There are 26 million Indians and it was the white people that lived in reservations. In North America, the largest indigenous group is the Navaho, with 300,000 members and they have been in reservations for 150 years. The genocide and destruction is dreadful and it was a vibrant culture. Then, through anthropologists that I knew, I ended up being the first American anthropologist that had contact with the last group of surviving Inca, who were the religious leaders who fled at the time of the conquest to mountaintops at 18,000 feet. Curiously, I befriended them because I started taking them western medications because they had, even though they had no contact with white man, diseases of the west had caused them to die and their herbs and remedies were not effective against these parasites that were inflicting their babies that our medication was so effective was so effective in treating. They considered me a medicine person of sorts and, over the years, we developed a dialogue. I discovered that they worked on healing the luminous energy field around the body, not on the body.

Devra: Explain that a little bit because I see that in a lot in your work and I want people to really understand what luminous energy field is or means.

Alberto: The luminous energy field is the blueprint of the body. It organizes the body in the same way that a magnet organizes iron filings on a piece of glass. In medicine, for example, we remove organs and tissues – we move the iron filings around on the glass. When we could just shift the blueprint, shift the magnet, all the iron filings would follow. We work by clearing. If your father died of heart disease and your grandmother died of heart disease, you have a predisposition or certain risk factors that predispose you to heart disease and they are genetic. It is not only encoded in our genes, it is also encoded in this luminous blueprint around the physical body.

Devra: That can be altered?

Alberto: That can be altered. They can be cleared and erased before they manifest into a physical condition. The luminous energy field is keeps the shape and form of the body, so that, when you cut yourself, for example…I cut myself with a kitchen knife a couple of days ago…there is a tremendous healing process that is triggered. Cell division is accelerated tremendously; I mean 1,000 times its ordinary rate, until the skin grows back to exactly the same level it was at before. It doesn’t keep growing back into a bump because the blueprint of the luminous energy field maintains that form.

Devra: So that’s why, when you cut your thumb, it doesn’t change or alter your thumb print.

Alberto: Precisely. It replicates it exactly. It’s a brilliant analogy, Devra. It like, if you want to remodel the kitchen, it’s best to sit down and do it with pencil and paper first. Then, with a hammer, which is a kind of medicine dart. These people work on the energetic blueprint that organizes the body and they learn to shift that luminous architecture that will shift the body, emotions, and childhood trauma. They were able to achieve extraordinary healing. I spent 20 years studying with these people, at first as an anthropologist, and then becoming a student of the shamans.

Devra: You are a shaman now, right?

Alberto: Now, I teach and train other shamans, here in the west. We train nurses, physicians, psychotherapists, and lay people, housewives and house husbands to become healers, to practice energy medicine.

Devra: So, you feel that this is training open, and anybody is capable of learning.

Alberto: Absolutely. Anybody is capable.

Devra: That’s such a refreshing point of view, that you don’t have to go to somebody, that you can actually be trained to do this work yourself.

Alberto: Completely. I think, ultimately, that’s the strongest healing. Very early on, I discovered that the techniques we use to heal someone are identical to the techniques that you use to kill someone or harm someone. You just have to learn the techniques and learn them by going through your own healing. That’s how we train our students. We don’t teach them a bunch of healing techniques to do on other people. They learn it by going through it themselves, through their own healing process. Then, they can work out of a place of integrity and wholeness.

We train people in 4 core healing disciplines, which are the illumination process – how to clear imprints from the luminous energy field, how to erase these imprints that predispose you to either genetic or karmic or psychological events in your life, so you can heal it at the energetic level and you don’t have to heal it in the next relationship, job, or kid. The core healing practice is the erasing and overwriting imprints in the luminous energy field, so we heal things before they’re born. There’s no amount of medication that will help you if you don’t clear the imprint anyway due to symptoms. If you don’t clear the imprint, it will come back. Even if you have a healing crisis, you essentially clean the blueprint out, so you don’t have a recurrence six months or six years later.

The second is the extraction process. We learn that not all of the energies inside of us belong to us. These energies can be incredibly toxic; they can pierce the luminous body, aura, and penetrate into the physical body, causing tremendous harm. These are energies that are sometimes called generational curses. They are the unhealed parts of our mothers’ and daughters’ inheritance, the unhealed parts of our fathers’ and our sons’ inheritance – that are handed down from generation to generation. One of the ways you can see this is in people whose grandparents went through the Depression. They have really terrible scarcity issues. It’s an imprint, so we learn how to clear the wounds of our ancestors out of us by clearing their energies out of our joints and our cells. Intrusive energies can also come from someone you were very close to, such as a divorced partner, someone you loved and thought the sun rose and set around them, but now think they are the incarnation of all that is evil. Those energies can be incredibly toxic. They may feel that you ruined their life or that you’re responsible for their happiness or they gave you the best six years of their life – you know those stories. So there’s an energetic component to those, as well, that can embed themselves in the body.

I remember one client, who was also a student, who was a ballerina in her early 40’s and who was crippled. She could not walk any further than 20 feet. When I worked on her, I extracted energies that had crystallized in her hips. They were like slices of panes of glass that were wedged in her hips. We spent six sessions doing that. After the sixth session, she came back in, crying, saying, “I was able to go to the mall and walk the full length of the mall. You don’t know how important that is to a girl.” These were embedded energies in her joints. We’ll occasionally run into an intrusive entity, which are generally relatives who died with a lot of unfinished business, who have become attached to the nearest psychically open relative. Even though they are dead, they are caught between this world and the next in a nightmare they can’t wake up from.

I remember when I went to New York to pitch my book to the tough sales people in Random House. I had ten minutes and my talk was about shaman healers. This guy walks into the room, raises his hand, and says “You all know I’ve had a problem with alcohol for the last ten years. I went to see one of his graduates. I had three sessions with him last Christmas. I have not had a drop of alcohol since and my craving is gone. This stuff really works. Thank you very much.” He gets up and leaves. I have no idea who this guy is and I called my graduate. She said this man walked in and his father’s spirit was right behind him, who had died ten years earlier and was an alcoholic his entire life and had become attached to his son. I asked her what she did and she said she helped him go back home and helped him to die. You can’t just exorcise mom, you have to help her out, too. Suddenly, everybody is interested and wants to schedule sessions. So, in the second module, we learn how to heal our ancestors by dealing with the intrusive energies.

The third process is soul retrieval. The notion of soul retrieval is that the shaman heals an original wounding that may have happened to you 2,000 years ago and not version 27 of that wounding that might have happened two weeks ago – the original tape.

Devra: I always visualize somebody having a jukebox and pushing J-8. At the bottom of the records is the original and there are 80 million stacked on top of it. That’s what you’re talking about – going back to the original.

Alberto: Going back to the original – back to Chubby Checker. You do that by journeying back along your client’s timeline to discover an original event that derailed her destiny. When you find the original traumatic event, that by itself is tremendously healing because you realize that you’re not nuts, because she is afraid of fires and died in a fire 2,000 years ago. Secondly, we need to recover those quanta of energy that fragmented during trauma. Many women, for example, who have been raped, report observing the incident from the ceiling or the corner of the room. Men, who have been in the heat of battle, will observe the battlefield from above.  That’s dissociation because of all the fear accompanying it, which can produce fragmentation. Those resources are no longer available to us. In doing soul retrieval, we learn that we can journey to recover that soul part that left because it was too painful for it to remain. Then, we coax it back, we bring it back, we invite it back.

Devra: It’s like putting a puzzle back together.

Alberto: Yes, it’s like putting a puzzle back together. With a gaping hole in the puzzle, you can’t fill it with the next relationship or love affair or set of clothes or car. You have to retrieve that which you lost.

Devra: Finally, somebody who can explain that. You hear so much about soul retrieval in books and people speaking about it. Nobody really simply explains it. Thank you.

Alberto: To do soul retrieval, we do four things. We observe the original wounding that occurred. We recover the lost soul part. We renegotiate contracts that we entered into at that time that were bad, terrible contracts in order to survive. Then, we bring back a medicine gift, which is going to help this new soul part express itself. The soul retrieval process mirrors a mythic process in which we lost our original nature, when we were cast out of the Garden of Eden. We lost a part of ourselves. Religion says we can get back to this at the Day of Judgment, but shamans say that’s a long time to wait, how about tonight? Then, the original nature that still walks with beauty of the earth, that speaks to the rivers and trees, that still talks to God and that God talks back to. When we were cast out of the garden, we inherited a wound that’s been passed down, the original sin that we learned, and a generational wound we inherited. We came into a really bad contract with God, where God said, “Now, you can’t go back into the Garden.” We should have negotiated a better deal. We could have said, “God, maybe we screwed up. How about if we go away for nine months of the year, but for three months, we can come with a nice bottle of wine, a little cheese, and sit under the Tree of Knowledge.” Ultimately, after we heal ourselves with the soul retrieval process, we have to go back and recover that self that never left the Garden, that still walks with beauty on the earth, which touches everyone with beauty, which speaks to the rivers, trees, and God. So, we recover that innocence, that self that still lives in grace because we fell out of grace with that original soul loss. The art of soul retrieval is really a mythic one, a very archetypal one.

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