My guest, former student, and good friend, Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., has been training both lay people and professionals in Shamanic healing practices through his institute, The Four Winds Society (www.thefourwinds.com), which is currently located in Park City, Utah. In addition, Dr. Villoldo leads trips to Peru and other South American countries, where his students get to interact with native healers. It was my good fortune to first get to know Alberto when he was a psychology master’s student and I a fairly green faculty member. Since that time he has gone on to great success and we have maintained contact as friends and colleagues. Dr. Villoldo is the author of many books. His most recent is Mending The Past And Healing The Future with Soul Retrieval. Also, recommended is his earlier book: Shaman, Healer, Sage : How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the Americas. He recommends several other books which you will find when you listen to this episode. We close the show with the podsafe music selection “Come Away with me” by Isaac Angel, who is a San Franciscan of Turkish/Israeli extraction. Photo at the right by Christine Paul.
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Great Show! As you, Dr.Dave, so often say, good therapeutic work and good self developmental work has always a kind of shamanic component.
I read some books about shamanism (of course I was hooked by the Carlos Castaneda “Don Juan” books years ago), but except of Holger Kalweit’s “Dreamtime And Inner Space” most of them seemed to be kind of “fluffy” and anecdotal, though entertaining nevertheless.
One that stands out for me in the realm of shamanism, but which I never came around to read yet, is “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques Of Ecstasy” by Mircea Eliade. Eliade ist for me the great counterpart to Joseph Campbell. What Campbell did for the field of mythology, Eliade did for the field of comparative religions.
I only read a few pages of his book “From Primitives To Zen – A Thematic Sourcebook Of The History Of Religions”, in which he compares original texts of different religions of the world and secondary literature about them. And these few pages already blew me away and gave me much to think about.
The first section (that I read) speaks about the different images that different tribes or different higher cultures have of god. And it’s amazing _how_ different and _how_ diverse these images are! Very enlightening thought fodder…
So check out Mircea Eliade if you want to go a little “deeper” in all this stuff…
Reinhard from Austria