Alberto Villoldo

For the contemporary world, Alberto Villoldo connects Western minds with the shamanic spirituality of the ancient Andean peoples.

Villoldo is a bridge man: he was born in pre-communist Cuba, he was raised by a half-African-American, half-Indian nanny, then he followed a scientific education at an American university. Then, hearing the call of his soul, he explored the ancient wisdom of the South American continent and shared it in order for Western Cartesian mind to acces it – not to understand it, because this would be impossible. He shared it using a system by the name of The Medicine Wheel.

By the age of about 25, Alberto Villoldo had become the youngest professor at San Francisco State University. He directed the Laboratory of Biological Autoregulation, investigating how energy medicine could change brain chemistry. One day, in his laboratory, Alberto realised that his research was not going in the right direction: instead of studying smaller and smaller units of matter with a microscope, he should have looked at a much larger context. Basically, he should have turned the microscope inside out. He felt the need to find a system that was larger than the neural networks of the brain. Many other researchers were already studying the hardware – the structure of the brain. Alberto wanted to learn how to program the mind in order to create psychosomatic health.

He already heard legends about people around the world who worked like this – now he decided to visit the few “shamans” left in today’s modern world.

So Alberto traded his life in the laboratory for a pair of hiking boots and a ticket to the Amazon—determined to learn there from other kind of researchers – people whose vision had not been limited to the lens of a microscope. He wanted to learn 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 people who directly perceived the luminous threads that animate all life.

For well more than 10 years, Alberto trained with jungle doctors, medicine men in the jungle. He visited a series of wise men or “Earth Keepers” who remembered the ancient ways, and who were then scattered throughout the Andes and the Amazon. Alberto traveled to countless villages and hamlets and met with dozens of healers, both men and women. The lack of a written body of knowledge meant that each village brought its own style to the healing practices that still survived.

It is well known that every healer must first find his or her own healing. And vice versa, you can become a healer only after you find your own healing. In the process of healing his own spiritual wounds, Alberto learned to transform his old pains and angers into sources of strength and compassion.

He traveled from the Amazon along the Peruvian coast, from the Nazca Plateau to the legendary Shimbe lagoons in the north, home to the country’s most famous shamans. Then, around Lake Titicaca – the Sea on the Top of the World – Alberto gathered the stories and healing practices of the people where, legends say, the Incas were born.

Absorbing all this knowledge, Alberto developed a set of technologies to transform the body, to heal the soul – technologies that can change the way we live and the way we die.

He mentions a Luminous Energetic Field (LEF) that surrounds us and acts as a matrix or model that maintains the health and vitality of the physical body.

Alberto is the founder of the renowned Four Winds Society and the Light Body School – https://thefourwinds.com/

He offers numerous courses and trainings and is the author of numerous volumes – many of which have also been translated into Romanian.

After studying for 20 years with shamans in the jungle and in the Andes, Alberto Villoldo, as an anthropologist, psychologist and specialist in brain sciences, put together a coherent structure of knowledge derived from their teachings, aimed to be understood by the Western mind.

People educated and trained in the Western paradigm need to pass through intellectual filters everything they encounter – including shamanic teachings. So Albert Villoldo, educated and trained in Western culture, put together a mix of traditions – from the mountains and from the jungle – rounded according to the ancient circular structure of the Medicine Wheel.

Moreover, he added some psychological, Freudian elements, breathing and meditation exercises that are not found in Andean medicine – simply because the people there do not need them. Those who live in direct communication with nature do not have the same psychological brakes as we, people born and educated in Western culture, have. What for them comes naturally, for us must come through intermediaries – and this is why the teachings of a pioneer like Alberto Villoldo are very important.