By his mid-20s Alberto Villoldo was the youngest clinical professor at San Francisco State University. He was directing the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory, investigating how energy medicine could change the chemistry of the brain. One day in his laboratory, Alberto realized that his research had to get bigger instead of smaller, that he was looking out of the wrong end of the microscope. He needed to find a system larger than the neural networks of the brain. Many others were already studying the hardware – Alberto wanted to learn to program the mind to create psychosomatic health.
Anthropological stories hinted that there were people around the globe who claimed to know such things, including the few remaining “shamans” in today’s modern world.
Alberto traded his laboratory for a pair of hiking boots and a ticket to the Amazon – determined to learn from researchers whose vision had not been confined to the lens of a microscope, from people whose body of knowledge encompassed more than the measurable, material world that he had been taught was the ONLY reality. He wanted to meet the people who sensed the spaces between things and perceived the luminous strands that animate all life. Scattered throughout the Andes and Amazon were a number of sages or “Earth Keepers” who remembered the ancient ways. Alberto traveled through countless villages and hamlets and met with scores of medicine men and women. The lack of a written body of knowledge meant that every village had brought its own flavor and style to the healing practices that still survived.
For more than 10 years, Alberto trained with the jungle medicine people. In healing his own soul wounds, Alberto walked the path of the wounded healer and learned to transform old pain, grief, anger and shame to sources of strength and compassion.
From the Amazon, Alberto trekked the coast of Peru, from Nazca, the site of gigantic markings on the desert floor that depict power animals and geometric figures, to the fabled Shimbe lagoons in the North, home to the country’s most renowned shamans. Then, in Lake Titicaca – the Sea on Top of the World – Alberto collected the stories and healing practices of the people from which, the legends say, the Inka were born.
Through it all, Alberto discovered a set of technologies that transform the body, heal the soul, and can change the way we live and the way we die.
