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The Shaman's Book of Living and Dying
“Profound age-old wisdom in twelve stories of profound transformation and growth.” —Joe Dispenza, bestselling author of Breaking the Habit of Yourself
The Wisdom, Power, and Beauty of Shamanic Energy Medicine
One of the pioneers in energy healing and shamanism recounts twelve miraculous stories in which, through the use of shamanic energetic techniques, people experience extraordinary physical and emotional healings. Meet a dancer who could barely walk until a series of sessions with Alberto Villoldo, a businesswoman who is freed from headaches and discovers the benefits of an integrated interior life, and a young woman who confronts her past and recovers from crippling depression. Each of these stories is rooted in Villoldo’s experience as a healer, mental health professional, and devotee of Indigenous wisdom and lore from around the world.
Ultimately, Villoldo demonstrates how a shaman assists us in discovering our own capacity for self-healing. He introduces us to physical, mental, and spiritual disease and presents techniques that can heal us, make us whole, and make us new. Having devoted 25 years of study to the healing practices of the Amazon and Andean shamans, Villoldo is teaching people how to actually grow new bodies.
By learning ancient shaman wisdom from Alberto Villoldo, you can heal disease, eliminate emotional suffering, and even grow a new body that ages and heals differently. The stories in this book are amazing and inspiring.
This title was previously published in 2015 as A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools for Healing (ISBN 978157174372)
The Wisdom, Power, and Beauty of Shamanic Energy Medicine
One of the pioneers in energy healing and shamanism recounts twelve miraculous stories in which, through the use of shamanic energetic techniques, people experience extraordinary physical and emotional healings. Meet a dancer who could barely walk until a series of sessions with Alberto Villoldo, a businesswoman who is freed from headaches and discovers the benefits of an integrated interior life, and a young woman who confronts her past and recovers from crippling depression. Each of these stories is rooted in Villoldo’s experience as a healer, mental health professional, and devotee of Indigenous wisdom and lore from around the world.
Ultimately, Villoldo demonstrates how a shaman assists us in discovering our own capacity for self-healing. He introduces us to physical, mental, and spiritual disease and presents techniques that can heal us, make us whole, and make us new. Having devoted 25 years of study to the healing practices of the Amazon and Andean shamans, Villoldo is teaching people how to actually grow new bodies.
By learning ancient shaman wisdom from Alberto Villoldo, you can heal disease, eliminate emotional suffering, and even grow a new body that ages and heals differently. The stories in this book are amazing and inspiring.
This title was previously published in 2015 as A Shaman’s Miraculous Tools for Healing (ISBN 978157174372)
- GenresSpiritualityNonfiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2021
23 people are currently reading
97 people want to read
About the author
Alberto Villoldo
71 books354 followersBy his mid-20s Alberto Villoldo was the youngest clinical professor at San Francisco State University. He was directing his own laboratory, the Biological Self-Regulation Lab, investigating how energy medicine and visualization could change the chemistry of the brain.
One day in his biology laboratory, Alberto realized that his investigation had to get bigger instead of smaller; Alberto needed to find a system larger than the neural networks of the brain. The microscope was the wrong instrument to answer the questions he was asking. Many others were already studying the hardware – Alberto Villoldo wanted to learn to re-program the SYSTEM. Anthropological stories hinted that there were people around the globe who claimed to know such things, including the Inka in Peru, the few remaining “shamans” in today’s modern civilization.
As he did initial research into the Inka, Alberto decided that he needed to personally investigate the roots of the Inka civilization itself to collect the vestiges of a 5,000-year-old energy medicine known for healing through Spirit and light.
A few weeks later, knowing this investigation was not going to be a “part time” pastime or a brief sabbatical for a few weeks’ time, Alberto Villoldo resigned his post at the university.
University colleagues thought Alberto Villoldo was absolutely mad.
Not to be dissuaded, Alberto Villoldo traded his laboratory for a pair of hiking boots and a ticket to the Amazon. He was 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 Alberto 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 remnants of this ancient Amazonian empire 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 Villoldo trained with the jungle medicine people. Along the way, he discovered that his journey into shamanism had actually been guided by his personal desire to become whole.
In healing his own soul wounds, Alberto Villoldo 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 Villoldo 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 sorcerers. Then, in Lake Titicaca – the Sea on Top of the World – Alberto Villoldo collected the stories and healing practices of the people from which, the legends say, the Inka were born.
Through it all, Alberto Villoldo discovered a set of sacred technologies that transform the body, heal the soul, and can change the way we live and the way we die.
These ancient teachings and understandings explain that a Luminous Energy Field (LEF), whose source is located in infinity, surrounds us. The LEF acts as a matrix that maintains the health and vibrancy of the physical body.
Today, Alberto Villoldo is a best-selling author and founder in the world-renowned Institute of Energy Medicine, The Four Winds Society. In all of his teachings and writings, Alberto shares the experience of infinity’s easy ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age and disease.
Over the course of two decades with the shamans in the jungles and high mountains of the Andes, Alberto Villoldo would discover that we are more than flesh and bone, that we are a
One day in his biology laboratory, Alberto realized that his investigation had to get bigger instead of smaller; Alberto needed to find a system larger than the neural networks of the brain. The microscope was the wrong instrument to answer the questions he was asking. Many others were already studying the hardware – Alberto Villoldo wanted to learn to re-program the SYSTEM. Anthropological stories hinted that there were people around the globe who claimed to know such things, including the Inka in Peru, the few remaining “shamans” in today’s modern civilization.
As he did initial research into the Inka, Alberto decided that he needed to personally investigate the roots of the Inka civilization itself to collect the vestiges of a 5,000-year-old energy medicine known for healing through Spirit and light.
A few weeks later, knowing this investigation was not going to be a “part time” pastime or a brief sabbatical for a few weeks’ time, Alberto Villoldo resigned his post at the university.
University colleagues thought Alberto Villoldo was absolutely mad.
Not to be dissuaded, Alberto Villoldo traded his laboratory for a pair of hiking boots and a ticket to the Amazon. He was 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 Alberto 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 remnants of this ancient Amazonian empire 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 Villoldo trained with the jungle medicine people. Along the way, he discovered that his journey into shamanism had actually been guided by his personal desire to become whole.
In healing his own soul wounds, Alberto Villoldo 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 Villoldo 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 sorcerers. Then, in Lake Titicaca – the Sea on Top of the World – Alberto Villoldo collected the stories and healing practices of the people from which, the legends say, the Inka were born.
Through it all, Alberto Villoldo discovered a set of sacred technologies that transform the body, heal the soul, and can change the way we live and the way we die.
These ancient teachings and understandings explain that a Luminous Energy Field (LEF), whose source is located in infinity, surrounds us. The LEF acts as a matrix that maintains the health and vibrancy of the physical body.
Today, Alberto Villoldo is a best-selling author and founder in the world-renowned Institute of Energy Medicine, The Four Winds Society. In all of his teachings and writings, Alberto shares the experience of infinity’s easy ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age and disease.
Over the course of two decades with the shamans in the jungles and high mountains of the Andes, Alberto Villoldo would discover that we are more than flesh and bone, that we are a
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 25, 2023
This audiobook was OK, however I didn’t find what I am seeking.
May 5, 2023
Almost every human being I know is looking for something, they want something in life and when they get it, they look for something else.
Many also, not finding what they want, get sick, give up, and even some commit physical or spiritual suicide.
How to heal? psychologists, coaches and even spiritual teachers. This book tells us about another way: shamanism.
Shamans heal by removing a part that has stuck to the human being, a spirit, a force, I don't know. But the fact is that yes, some people are cured.
Could it be that the past chains us in certain ways of thinking and feeling that do not let us move forward?
Without being a great book, the cases it mentions are interesting.
Many also, not finding what they want, get sick, give up, and even some commit physical or spiritual suicide.
How to heal? psychologists, coaches and even spiritual teachers. This book tells us about another way: shamanism.
Shamans heal by removing a part that has stuck to the human being, a spirit, a force, I don't know. But the fact is that yes, some people are cured.
Could it be that the past chains us in certain ways of thinking and feeling that do not let us move forward?
Without being a great book, the cases it mentions are interesting.
December 15, 2023
Za vse, ki jih zanima šamanizem: v tej knjigi so zbrane zgodbe pacientov, ki jih zdravi Alberto Villoldo. Šaman je napisal sicer že kar nekaj knjig, na koncu pa nam razkrije še en delček svojega življenja. Pot šamana je drugačna zgodba od običajnih ljudi, pa tudi ljudje, ki ga poiščejo, večinoma dojemajo svet drugače. Zanimivo branje o delu šamana.
June 25, 2022
Found this to be an interesting listen. I'm currently in a 3 year shamanic practitioner training, so it was helpful to hear more client stories and another teacher/practitioner point of view.
April 16, 2023
I resonated with the healing stories and the power of spirit; this has spurred me to learn more. I will definitely be reading more of Dr. Villoldo's books.
June 26, 2025
Dr. Alberto Villoldo, yani yazar, şamanik enerji teknikleriyle hayatlarına dokunduğu 12kişinin gerçek hikayesini hem onların kendi penceresinden hem de Alberto'nun penceresinden anlatıyor. Enerji tıbbı ile iyileşmeyi seçen kişilerin gerçek hikayeleri, geleneksel ve batı tıbbının yanında insanın bedenine, doğaya inanması ve iyileşebileceğine olan güveni en büyük yardımcısı diye düşünüyorum.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews