Sacred Healing

By Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

By my mid-twenties I was the youngest clinical professor at San Francisco State University, directing my own laboratory, the Biological Self-Regulation Lab. I was investigating how energy medicine and visualization techniques could change the chemistry of the brain. Using energy medicine, we were able to radically increase the production of endorphins — the natural brain chemicals responsible for reducing pain and creating ecstatic states. It wasn’t long before my lab research left me wanting more. I was on my way to proving that the mind, body, and soul work together to create health. But I had no idea how to help a person suffering from disease to regain health. Ultimately, the microscope could not lead me to the answers I was seeking. Anthropological stories hinted about the existence of indigenous peoples around the globe who claimed to know what I wanted to learn, from the Aborigines in Australia to the Inca in Peru. I traded in my lab coat for a good pair of hiking boots and headed for the Andes.

Don Antonio Morales, a revered shaman I worked with in Peru, believed he could track his luminous nature, what we call the soul, through time the same way he could track a deer through the forest. He claimed to have followed the luminous threads of his being as far back as the Big Bang. And just as he traced his luminous being back to its origin, he had traced forward to glimpse who he was becoming, to a time when our universe will again return to the singularity from which it was created. I was one of the first anthropologists to meet Antonio. Although I originally sought to study him, I soon realized what he could teach me about luminous healing, and felt very fortunate when he offered me the opportunity to train with him.

Together, we perfected an ancient technology I call the Illumination Process. It is a healing practice that erases imprints for disease that lie dormant in the luminous energy field surrounding the physical body. The luminous energy field contains a template for our health that has been influenced by our ancestry and our traumas. It contains a record of how our souls might live, heal, and eventually die. When there are no imprints for disease in this field, recovery from an illness happens at tremendous speed. Similarly, the presence of an imprint can depress the immune system, slowing down recovery and pre-disposing us to health and emotional problems.

The Illumination process works in sacred time, and is designed to erase energetic imprints caused by traumatic events from our past, so that our future is no longer scripted by our history. It is not that the process magically undoes the past, but that feelings of pain and loss subside, and we cease to feel attached to the story surrounding a painful memory. Entering sacred time offers us an experience of our own infinite nature; we begin to understand that we are much more than our stories. It shatters our illusions about death, disease, and the aging process. It begins to re-inform every cell in the body, so as we experience the natural process of generating new cells, the physical manifestations of a wound begin to reverse.

The experience of sacred time, of being one with the universe, should not be confused with eternity which is a heavy term, referring to an endless number of days that shoot forward like an arrow. To Don Antonio, time was more like a river than an arrow. Although it clearly has a steady current running downstream, simultaneously, beneath the surface, there is an undercurrent moving steadily upstream. Just like salmon can swim upstream by following this undercurrent, a shaman can track backwards through time to heal events that have already occurred. She can erase an imprint for disease before it manifests itself.

Imprints in our luminous energy field are comparable to icons on a computer screen. An icon sits harmlessly in the far corner of our screen until we double click on it. But when we double click, it opens up to take over the entire screen. We may have an imprint for a breast condition that runs in our family, and as a result of stress, it gets energetically double-clicked, manifesting as a life-threatening problem. Imprints in one’s luminous energy field can arrange strange and apparently unrelated events in the outside world. They work to orchestrate fate, or a series of events that happen to us, seemingly beyond our control. When we find ourselves in fate’s grip, it is hard to steer the course of our lives, to align ourselves with a high destiny. So we can see why negative imprints are something best cleared before they begin to manifest. When they are not addressed, those imprints keep organizing the same job, abundance, health, and relationship realities we have tried so hard to move away from.

If we scrape our leg, we don’t need to see a healer to set our life in order. But if our immune system is not responding, a loved one is faced with a life-threatening illness, or we find ourselves encountering an obstacle similar to the one we’ve just endured, it may be time to look beyond the concrete. It may be time to step into sacred time and experience an Illumination.

Alberto Villoldo, Shaman, healer and Sage, is author of Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval. He will teach a post-conference workshop as part of his participation in the Celebrate Your Life Conference. See www.thefourwinds.com or call 888-437-4077 x 12 for more information.   

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