Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation - Sandra Ingerman MA, Hank Wesselman Ph.D. 2010

About the Authors

Sandra Ingerman, MA, is the author of Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self; Welcome Home: Following Your Soul’s Journey Home; A Fall to Grace; Medicine for the Earth: How to Transform Personal and Environmental Toxins; Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide; How to Heal Toxic Thoughts: Simple Tools for Personal Transformation; and How to Thrive in Changing Times. She is also the author of lecture programs for Sounds True, including The Soul Retrieval Journey, The Beginner’s Guide to Shamanic Journeying, Miracles for the Earth, Shamanic Meditations: Guided Journeys for Insight, Vision, and Healing, and Soul Journeys: Music for Shamanic Practice.

Sandra teaches workshops internationally on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods. She has trained and founded an international alliance of Medicine for the Earth teachers and shamanic teachers. Sandra is recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods into our modern culture, addressing the needs of our times. Sandra is a licensed marriage and family therapist and professional mental health counselor. She is also a board-certified expert on traumatic stress with additional certification in acute traumatic stress management.

For information on Sandra’s work, to see her articles on shamanism, and to read her monthly column “The Transmutation News” you can visit her website at sandraingerman.com. “The Transmutation News” is translated into seven languages besides English.

To find a local shamanic teacher or shamanic practitioner who has trained with Sandra, please visit shamanicteachers.com.

Hank Wesselman, PhD, is an environmental and evolutionary biologist who did his undergraduate and masters degree in zoology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Hank served in the U.S. Peace Corps in the 1960s, living among people of the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria, where he first became interested in indigenous spiritual traditions. He went on to receive his doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, and in that capacity he has conducted research with an international group of scientists for much of the past thirty-seven years, exploring eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley and Ethiopia in search of answers to the mystery of human origins. His expeditionary fieldwork has allowed him to spend much of his life with tribal peoples rarely, if ever, visited by outsiders, among whom he first encountered traditional shamans.

Hank is also a shamanic practitioner and teacher, now in the twenty-eighth year of his apprenticeship. The books in his autobiographical trilogy—Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker —have been translated into thirteen languages and reveal the nature of his initiation into the shaman’s world, documenting his investigations into a hidden reality that most of us have heard about but few have experienced directly. In addition to his scientific papers and monographs, Hank is also the author of The Journey to the Sacred Garden, a book with CD; Spirit Medicine (with Jill Kuykendall), a book with CD; The Spiritwalker Teachings (with Jill Kuykendall), a six-CD set with booklet; and Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf (with Raquel Abreu), a story for children.

Hank has taught for the University of Hawai’i at Hilo’s West Hawai’i campus, the University of California at San Diego, California State University at Sacramento, American River College and Sierra College in Northern California, and Adeola Odutola College and Kirigi Memorial College in western Nigeria. He currently offers training workshops at many internationally recognized centers such as the Esalen Institute in California and the Omega Institute near New York.

Hank and his family live on their farm in Honaunau on Hawai’i Island. Visit their website at sharedwisdom.com.

Acknowledgments

From Sandra Ingerman

There are so many people to thank for their support in helping bring this work into the world.

I want to give thanks to all the wonderful people at Sounds True I have gotten to know and work with. I am deeply grateful to all the support Tami Simon has given me and my work over the years. And I thank Kelly Notaras and Haven Iverson for their editing guidance. Mitchell Clute was the producer for the audio. I thank him for being such a delight to work with.

I give thanks to my agent Barbara Moulton for her continual support and friendship.

Love and appreciation is also offered to Hank Wesselman for his partnership in writing this book. To Tom Cowan, Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, José Stevens, and Alberto Villoldo: thank you so much for the great wealth of your contributions.

And many thanks to The Shamanic Transmissions Band (we had great fun coming up with this name): Sylvia Edwards, Julie Kramer, Gail Mesplay, John Mullen, Woods Shoemaker, and Kappy Strahan. It was such a privilege to make music together, to join our hearts and spirit together and to infuse the audio for journeying with an abundance of love, light, and joy.

I am in deep gratitude to my husband, Woods Shoemaker; my parents, Aaron and Lee Ingerman; and to my friends and community who love me and support me through the joys and frustrations of writing. Thank you for all you give to me. I thank my students and clients who continue to inspire me. I give thanks to the spirits for the continual teachings of how to live a life filled with joy and meaning and the teachings of how to help others do the same. I give thanks for my life.

From Hank Wesselman

I would like to express my deep gratitude and great affection to Sandra Ingerman, a friend and colleague of almost thirty years whose invitation to co-author this book has created an unprecedented opportunity to collect our thoughts about the new spiritual complex that is taking form at the heart of a new subculture that has been emerging in the Western world over the past several decades.

I also offer gratitude to Michael Harner, whose shamanic teachings helped me enormously when I was still very much embedded in the earlier stages of my initiations. Others who have provided wise guidance and compassionate support across the years include Kahu Nelita Anderson, Lokiriakwanga (Atiko, son of Akiru of the Dassanetch tribe of southwestern Ethiopia), Papa Henry Auwae, Daniel Bianchetta, Larry Dossey, Barbara Marx Hubbard, John Kaumbulu Kimau, Muthoka (son of Kivingo of Kikoko, Kenya) the kahuna nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, Eva and Mason Maiku’i and the other members of the Hawaiian Spiritual Warrior Society (Na’Ao Koa O Pu’ukohola Heiau), Kahu Morrnah Simeona, Lili Townsend, and Sandra Wright.

Thanks also to my literary agents Barbara Moulton and Candice Fuhrman, to my business manager Richard Taubinger, and to Haven Iverson, our editor and guide at Sounds True.

And of course, aloha nui loa to my wise, beautiful, and compassionate wife, Jill Kuykendall, and to the wonderful children we created together: Erica and Anna Wesselman. There are as well my allies and friends, advisors and teachers who live on the other side of the mirror . . .

To all of them, to the countless participants in my workshops, and to my students in the university and college classes that I taught across the years, my gratitude with magnitude.

Also by Sandra Ingerman

Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self

Welcome Home: Following Your Soul’s Journey Home

A Fall to Grace (fiction)

Medicine for the Earth: How to Transform Personal and Environmental Toxins

Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide (book and drumming CD)

How to Heal Toxic Thoughts: Simple Tools for Personal Transformation

How to Thrive in Changing Times: Simple Tools to Create True Health, Wealth, Peace, and

Joy for Yourself and the Earth

Audio Programs:

The Soul Retrieval Journey

Miracles for the Earth

The Beginner’s Guide to Shamanic Journeying

Shamanic Meditations: Guided Journeys for Insight, Vision, and Healing

Soul Journeys: Music for Shamanic Practice

Also by Hank Wesselman

Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future

Medicinemaker: Mystic Encounters on the Shaman’s Path

Visionseeker: Shared Wisdom from the Place of Refuge

The Journey to the Sacred Garden: A Guide to Traveling in the Sacred Realms (book with CD)

Spirit Medicine: Healing in the Sacred Realms (with Jill Kuykendall—book with CD)

Little Ruth Reddingford and the Wolf (with Raquel Abreu—book for children)

Audio Program:

The Spiritwalker Teachings: Journeys for the Modern Mystic

(with Jill Kuykendall—six-CD set with booklet)

About the Contributors

Tom Cowan has been a shamanic practitioner for more than twenty-five years. He has studied with and taught for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. He is the author of several books on shamanism and Celtic spirituality including Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit; Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life; and Yearning for the Wind: Celtic Reflections on Nature and the Soul.

Tom is a minister in the Circle of the Sacred Earth and is on the board of directors of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners. He offers shamanic training workshops and spiritual retreats in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, Ireland, Scotland, and England. He lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley. His website is riverdrum.com.

Carol Proudfoot-Edgar has taught shamanism since 1992. In addition, her specialties include Bear Medicine, Spirits of Place, and developing women’s circles and Teachers. For twelve years she has led a group of women physicians in integrating shamanism into both their personal and professional lives. She has been a teacher for the Department of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In addition, she considers one of her primary roles to be that of ceremonialist.

Carol is an explorer who perceives her work to be that of assisting individuals to probe beyond the known realities and to venture outside the usual parameters for contextualizing and manifesting the future. Carol says that through such explorations, “Spirit can meet us, and together we can construct a web of compassion and joy” that can hold and support the divine nature of every being and element on this great Earth planet.

Since 1995, Carol has been involved in developing nonprofit organizations that will coordinate the efforts of individuals seeking to bringing change that is grounded in shamanic consciousness. She is especially interested in using technology to further coordinate work around the globe. Her websites contain a broad range of her shamanic material and listing of Circles working together: shamanicvisions.com, shamaniccircles.org.

José Luis Stevens, PhD, is the president and co-founder of Power Path Seminars, an international consulting firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is an international lecturer, organizational consultant, and executive coach to professionals in a wide variety of fields. He uses his knowledge of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to advise and assist leaders to make difficult life decisions and to develop life strategies.

José and his wife, Lena, have completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol maracame (shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico; in addition, they currently study intensively with Shipibo healers in the Peruvian Amazon and Incan shamans in the Andes. José often speaks on the subject of the indigenous wisdom of shamans and how this knowledge applies to the modern world. He is on the board of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners and is co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange.

José is a licensed psychotherapist with more than thirty-five years of experience specializing in understanding personality. He is the author of ten books and numerous articles, including The Power Path: The Shaman’s Way to Success in Business and Life; Transforming Your Dragons; Secrets of Shamanism; and Praying With Power: How to Use Ancient Shamanic Techniques to Gain Maximum Benefit and Extraordinary Results Through Prayer. Learn more at thepowerpath.com.

Alberto Villoldo, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and psychologist who has studied the spiritual practices of the Amazon and the Andes for more than twenty-five years. While at San Francisco State University, he founded the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory to study how the mind creates psychosomatic health and disease.

Founder of The Four Winds Society, he instructs individuals throughout the world in the practice of energy medicine. Alberto has written numerous bestselling books, including Shaman, Healer, Sage; Yoga, Power, and Spirit: Patanjali the Shaman, and Courageous Dreaming. See his website, thefourwinds.com, for more.

About Sounds True

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