The underlying principle is that the human body is surrounded by a luminous energy field which contains imprints (dense heavy energy) due to trauma in this life or past lives which cause us physical and emotional illness.

The focus of a healing session is to clear these energetic imprints. What distinguishes this work from many other energetic healing modalities, is that the affinity for the imprint is also cleared. It doesn’t just go away for a few weeks or months only to return, with its physical or emotional charge, again and again.

A person is used to reacting to a situation or person in a certain way. To change this pattern, once the imprint is cleared, a new pathway to respond to this situation or person must be in place. Otherwise, it’s just too easy for the person to go back to what they are used to doing. The client takes responsibility to live by a different map, or way of being in the world. Shamans refer to it as a mythic map.

By stepping into this beautiful transformational journey, the client - with support from the shaman - creates a very specific and personalized new mythic map. This creates new neuronal pathways, new wiring in the brain, allowing the energetic shifts from the session to fully integrate into the person’s life, resulting in personal transformation, that gets reflected in the family, work and in the world.

Alberto Villoldo often says ‘If you break a leg, you see an MD. If you want to know why you broke your leg, and shift that momentum, see a Shaman’.

Here are some considerations.

• Repeated patterns that do not serve: You have patterns that are not working in your life. These same patterns repeat in your job, your family, your health, your behaviour. There may be patterns that have been noticed in your family for generations.
• Illness can start as energy first: For example, stress. This initially manifiests as a busy mind, thoughts racing and going around in circles, being unable to relax, to sleep. Over time, this could develop into high blood pressure, and even later, a heart attack. In shamanic work, we treat ‘upstream’, at the stage where this illness is energy, to shift the entire course of things.
• You have symptoms and no one knows what you have: After visiting many health practitioners, having test after test, it’s still unclear what’s going on, or there’s no response to treatment. A Shamanic session can illuminate the underlying energetic pattern of what’s happening.
• You feel a deep longing in your life: You feel a sense of wanting ‘more connection’. There’s so much fear and distrust in the world, so much consumerism, so much joyless day-to-day routine. You know there must be something more in life. Often, we think that a new haircut or a divorce or moving to a new place will solve this feeling. There are obstacles, belief systems, and patterns that keep us colluding with our life as it is. Shamanic sessions can clear these limitations and connect us to our soul’s journey.

Typically it can take four to five sessions to clear an issue, the affinity and all the vectors that hold it. It’s important to have time between sessions to allow each shift to fully integrate.

The minimum time between sessions is a week. Two weeks to a month between sessions is suggested.

Both of us, Linda Ludwig and Fiona Rattray, have completed all seven of the week-long classes in the Light Body Certification at The Four Winds School, a programme that is taught all over the world, and referred to as ‘the Harvard of Shamanic training’ by Harpers Magazine.

We have also completed many of the post-graduate courses, including Advanced Divination, Advanced Soul Retrieval and Mastery of Time. We are certified in teaching ‘Dying Consciously, the Greatest Journey’. Together we support and assist in teaching The Four Winds Light Body training in Canada. Linda is honoured to be one of only ten people in North America trained and licensed to teach The Four Winds Inkan Medicine Wheel programme.

We are both trained to teach and transmit the Munay-Ki Rites.

Community is important to us, and we hold monthly New Moon and Full Moon Fires and Despatchos, as well as Solstice and Equinox ceremonies.

We do ongoing personal work and community ceremony to be clear vessels for this energy medicine. Likewise, our many trips to Peru and Chile are sacred journeys to continually deepen our connection to this beautiful medicine lineage.

The techniques used during a session may include: the illumination process, extractions, soul retrievals and seven chakra cleanse.

Sessions always occur in sacred space. The process includes an intake interview to clarify what the person wishes to work on. The client uses one of the shaman’s medicine stones to blow the essence of the issue into. It is this energy that the shaman will track and clear.

Each session is unique. The client plays a key role in their own healing. They are supported by the Shaman in creating a personal mythic map and will always have something tangible to do or practice after the session to integrate this new wiring, this transformed self, into all aspects of their life.