Who is Alberto Villoldo, and what is the Four Winds Society?

Who is Alberto Villoldo? #

A scientist who became a shamanic teacher. He began in psychology and then medical anthropology, and in the 1980s spent long hours in anatomy laboratories, trying to understand how the mind could make the body well or ill.¹ He has studied the healing practices of the Amazon and the Andes for more than twenty-five years.²

His Andean teachers are at the heart of his work. He describes himself as the first North American anthropologist to have extensive contact with the Q’ero, a people living high in the Peruvian Andes whom he calls the last of the Inka, and names among his teachers a mentor he calls Don Antonio and the Q’ero elder Don Manuel Quispe.³ The Q’ero are farmers and herders, growing potatoes and maize at different heights of their mountain lands and keeping llamas and alpacas higher up. His books include Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000), Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval (2005), The Four Insights and One Spirit Medicine.

What is the Four Winds Society? #

The school Villoldo founded to teach his approach. It describes its training as “the world’s most thorough training in Shamanic Energy Medicine”, combining shamanic practice with nutrition, biology and neuroscience.⁴ Its core training is the Healing the Light Body School, which Villoldo directs. Each student begins with their own healing, learning to turn their own soul wounds into strength and wisdom, the path of the wounded healer, before being professionally trained to work with others, including doing soul retrievals for them.⁵ See What is the wounded healer?

What does Villoldo teach? #

That each of us is surrounded by a ‘Luminous Energy Field’, a field of energy whose source is in infinity and which keeps the physical body healthy, and that old wounds leave imprints in it. His central healing practice, the Illumination Process, aims to clear those imprints.⁶

His soul retrieval is a journey to the Lower-World, which he describes as divided into four chambers, each holding a record of the soul’s history. The first is the Chamber of Wounds, where a person looks for the original wound that caused part of the soul to flee, something from childhood, from the womb, or often, he says, from a former lifetime. The journey also brings back a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, and a further journey to the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer seeks a person’s destiny.⁷

He is open about where these methods come from. He writes that they are “my own synthesis and interpretation of ancient healing practices”, that he does not speak for his teachers or for the Inka, and that he makes “no claim to be representing a body of Inka traditions.” He also credits Sandra Ingerman’s Soul Retrieval as the book that first made many people aware of these practices.⁸ See Who is Sandra Ingerman, and what is her approach to soul retrieval?

How does Therapeutic Shamanism see his approach? #

There is common ground. Both see the healer’s own healing as the place to begin, both put soul retrieval and the Power Animal near the heart of shamanic work, and both accept that old practices have to be adapted for modern people. Villoldo’s frankness that his methods are his own synthesis also sits easily with Therapeutic Shamanism’s own test of a practice. It does not ask whether a practice comes from an unbroken tradition, but simply whether it works.⁹ See What is plastic shamanism?

The differences are about the map. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Lower-World is the realm of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and of nature, of the Animal, Plant and Stone Peoples, not a store of one person’s history. A person’s own wounds and past belong to the middle-world, and what we push out of awareness forms the under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer, which is a very different place from the Lower-World. The soul partsSoul-part. A small-s, middle-world part of the self that can be lost (sent away) and can be retrieved. Not the capital-S Soul. Read the full answer brought back in a soul retrieval are usually middle-world parts of us. See What is the Lower-World? and What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World? Nor are past lives part of the animist picture. Reincarnation is not part of original animism, because the idea of a lasting individual ‘I’ that is born again comes with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, so wounds from former lifetimes play no part in Therapeutic Shamanism’s healing. See Do animists believe in reincarnation, and what are past lives?

The other difference is about the Inca. Many people think of empires such as the Inca, Aztec and Toltec as shamanic, and depending on how shamanism is defined, that may be true. But they were also Fallen societies, largely city-based, deeply unequal, extremely hierarchical, patriarchal and violent. So a practice that comes from a society, or a heritage, of that kind is not necessarily free of Taker thinking, however old or indigenous it is.¹⁰ This is a criticism of Taker thinking wherever it is found, never of present-day animist peoples, who still live in a far healthier relationship with the Earth than most and to whom an incalculable debt is owed for keeping shamanic knowledge alive.¹¹ See What is the Fall?

Is Western shamanic tourism to Peru cultural appropriation? #

Opinions differ. Writers on Western interest in shamanism, such as the historian Andrei Znamenski in The Beauty of the Primitive, place the tours that bring Western seekers to Peru for ceremonies with local healers, Villoldo’s among them, within a wider growth of ‘spiritual tourism’. On the other side, Villoldo says openly that his methods are his own adaptation and do not claim to represent Inka tradition, and Znamenski himself records that Villoldo’s organisation also gives food and medical help to indigenous people each year.¹²

Therapeutic Shamanism’s own way through the question is to stay ‘culture-lite’. It builds on core shamanism, which belongs to no one culture, adds what Paul Francis has been taught directly by his own GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, and does not base its practice on any particular indigenous culture.¹³ See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?