Gerry Starnes embarked on his career journey in 1977, delving into counseling and school psychology, primarily aiding at-risk youth. Witnessing the limitations of traditional therapeutic models, he embarked on a decades-long exploration, seeking a more inclusive approach to healing accessible to all. This quest led him through diverse teachings, from journal writing methods to energetic healing modalities like aikido and shamanism. Gerry founded workshops like Conversations Within, delved into Trance Dance facilitation, and established shamanic journey circles. His commitment to healing trauma led to co-founding the Ravens Grove Foundation for Healing, emphasizing complementary techniques for trauma and PTSD. Currently, Gerry shares his wisdom through statewide classes, workshops, and retreats, blending contemporary shamanic practices with traditional personal development. His journey remains an ongoing exploration of holistic healing methods. MysticMag has the pleasure of chatting with Gerry.
What can you tell us about your life journey Gerry?
(I was born just more than a month after the Korean War armistice – the same year as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, and Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of human DNA. One might say that it was a very good year!)
Like many people, much of my early history is unremarkable other than the way in which I eventually had to struggle against it in my own search for who I am, rather than who I was taught I should be. Considering the trajectory of human development and spiritual evolution, that seems inevitable.
My father was very conservative. He was raised in a broken home and with little parental involvement or support, but he did his best. He became very authoritarian, replacing the almost complete lack of rules with which he grew up with a rigid code of right and wrong based on his understanding of religious dogma.
I have to say that he really did not like to have the philosophical discussions with me that he thought he should. I learned how to “play the game,” yet I was much better at debate – conceptual judo – than he was. He taught me to play chess, but when I consistently won, he stopped playing altogether. To me, that says a great deal.
After I completed a college post-graduate degree in a program that combined psychology, education, and special education, I went to work in a residential treatment program supervised by both a psychiatrist and psychologist. It seemed to me that with that level of support, the treatment should work. In a word, it didn’t. After a few years, I left that program very disillusioned.
I then began to investigate energy healing/energy medicine, taking every course and workshop that I could find from a broad array of teachers. I did that for about 20 years. During that search, I discovered what I referred to as a “thread of efficacy” – that is, they all “worked” to one degree or another, though none of them was the best or most consistently effective modality. So, I learned from many teachers and gained a great deal of experience. But there was just something missing.
In the mid-1990s, I was introduced to shamanic practices. As I learned more about the shamanic worldview and approach to life and healing, the greater awareness I had that it offered a large enough container to hold most of the healing practices I had learned but didn’t have a broad enough conceptual structure to fully hold its entirety. It also offered more consistent access to that “thread of efficacy” that other modalities did not.
Since then, most of my teaching, healing, and writing has centered around the concepts that I learned and continue to learn to this day.
Your workshops span different levels of shamanic journeying, catering to beginners and advanced practitioners alike. What led you to create this structured approach, and how do these courses differ in guiding participants through their journey experiences?
I don’t think that there was a time that I knowingly created a structure for classes or programs, especially early on. The content grew organically from an understanding of the needs of the people that I encountered who were interested in learning. Eventually, though, there came a time that there was enough material that the pattern of how people learn – fundamentally learn – became clearer.
People encounter new information such as shamanic or any other spiritual practice at different times in their lives. While people often express a resonance with the fundamentals of these practices and worldviews, most often they need a certain level of experience to understand them fully enough to explore them seriously. Eventually, they need to embody them.
As a child, you might have had an “imaginary friend” or encountered what we might now call the Spirit of a particular place. At the time, you most likely assumed that everyone saw them or felt them. They seemed perfectly normal to you. However, as you grew older and attended more to ordinary life, these experiences may have faded into the background of your everyday experience. Or maybe not.
The approach I take to teaching shamanic practices, such as journeying, draws upon these deep memories and experiences. People are ready to revisit them at different points in their lived experience. It is a process of relearning what was already there. That Is easier for some people than others. And the process is additive – that is, what you learn is based on what you already know, the experiences you already have had.
Leaping ahead is more than a little challenging. How can you journey into a possible future unless you at least know the fundamentals of journeying and the nature of time? Once you do, though, you become ready for an entirely new arena of learning. What I hope to do is to provide information and experience to support the broad range and scope of need.
Your program “Spirit Paths: The Quest for Authenticity” has been highly regarded as “life changing.” Could you elaborate on the core principles or teachings from this program that resonate deeply with participants seeking personal and spiritual growth?
I would have to agree that the Spirit Paths program, as well as the book and online versions, can be life changing. Its development was based on two essential observations. The first, is that the human developmental process is on-going through the entirety of life, and it has fairly specific and predictable phases. The Spirit Paths program walks participants through these stages specifically and clearly through an expansive and organized structure. That structure reinforces what people already know or even have experienced, depending on their personal lived experience.
The second derives from participating in and presenting workshops for decades: the observation that substantial change happens over an extended period of time. Classes and workshops presented in a day, weekend, or even over several weeks have a limited effect. It takes time for participants to embody the learning, and I believe that is crucial to long-term change.
Spirit Paths points out that, while it seems that we have only one “mind”, we actually have five which interact so fluidly that it seems there is only one. Structurally, the physical body is home to its own awareness, its own “mind.” The more expansive energetic body is host to two minds, the mental and emotional awarenesses. It is difficult to consider one without the other, and neither of them are confined in the physical brain.
For example, it is difficult to have a thought or memory without an accompanying emotion, and the emotion can actually cause physical reactions in any part of the body because its expansive form contains and surrounds the physical body. Trauma therapy often refers to body memories, which is an accurate description of this phenomena. Simply put, a physical response can be stimulated by a memory of a traumatic experience.
Over five or six months, including two workshops each month and homework in between, participants systematically examine the habits and programming stored in this system of five “minds.” In order, they are the physical, mental, emotional, tribal, and spiritual minds. These minds build upon and interact with each other in an expanding structure of awareness. Each month participants are encouraged and supported to focus on one of these minds – systematically, and in order – to see what their programming includes and how these minds interact with each other.
They are then encouraged and supported to take that learning and internal knowledge and put it toward creating the life that they choose, rather than what they have inherited or learned to be.
“Renaissance: Your Path to Renewal” encompasses workshops like “Phoenix Rising” and “Dreaming Destiny,” focusing on substantial life changes. How do shamanic practices aid individuals in navigating life transitions or overcoming deep-rooted fears, and what unique techniques do these workshops offer to address these challenges?
Both of these programs grew from the same roots as the Spirit Paths program, specifically the first observation that human development is continuous and generally predictable along the arc of that development. There is a point in that curve – around the ages of 38 to 45 years – during which time everything seems to either fall apart or be significantly challenged. This is so predictable that I can often guess how old people are when they tell me what their struggles are; and conversely, when I know a person’s age, I can tell them what is likely going on in their lives.
One of my teachers referred to this passage as “Realization of Betrayal,” during which people feel that everything they thought would make them happy simply didn’t. They did everything they were told to do in order to be happy, but it simply didn’t work. In short, they feel betrayed. The same is true, though, in cases of severe loss. I have renamed this stage “The Hollow Within” because it does not have to be a betrayal per se and because it feels that way: empty or purposeless at the core.
The Phoenix Rising workshop series and program addresses the struggle people encounter during this stage and provides some structure and practices to better understand what is happening and how they can turn the corner. Dreaming Destiny is a workshop series that offers the next step by looking into how people can create a new vision, a new possible future, by using some very basic tools that are rooted in shamanic practice and quantum physics. These two programs, in particular, are a great fit to bundle into one course series.
In a broader sense, in my work with individuals experiencing difficult life events, including naturally occurring changes in their personal evolution, those who experience the most difficulty are also those who do not have a firm connection with Spirit – or “that which is bigger than they are.” On the other hand, those who do can lean into that support and generally better navigate change.
Personally, my desire is to help people find that mooring through all the work that I do and offer. My approach resonates most strongly with a shamanic worldview. It’s important to know, though, that there are many other ways to connect to that broader wisdom and support.
In your healing and coaching sessions, you incorporate various modalities like energy medicine, curse healing, and soul retrieval. How do these practices interplay to support clients on their journey toward integration and wholeness?
I have learned over time that it is all energy medicine. The body is essentially dense, slow-moving energy. Healing processes such as Reiki work on the energetic flow and balance of the physical body. Others operate more directly on the ethereal, faster-moving energy field. However, they are all connected and interrelated.
In fact, at the most expansive, fastest moving, and most highly energetic vibrational level, our energies are all connected. That is how healing at a distance can possibly work, essentially.
Back to the question, though, curse healing (also sometimes called curse removal) operates at the intersection of the energy body and the physical body. Intrusions into a person’s field can alter the relationship between the two that cause the physical and energy bodies – and sometimes the mental field – to get out of balance. It’s analogous to a virus in your computer. Something hidden in the code causes the operation of the computer to falter or even fail. Curse healing is a way to address the intrusion, which can be seen as an extraction of sorts.
Soul retrieval is different because it involves the intersection of the energy field with time. Think of yourself as a crystal ball of energy upon birth and moving forward into time as you grow and develop. When that crystal ball encounters power, and it loses, the ball can be fractured. With enough such encounters, pieces of that ball can be splintered off and thus become stuck in time and space. Essentially, soul retrieval is traveling into the past, finding places where fragments of the otherwise intact soul might be located, and eventually returning them to the present – reuniting them, in a powerful way.
Curse healing and soul retrieval are two specifically shamanic healing practices that I never encountered until I began to dive deeply into shamanism. They are conceptually very simple, though in practice, it takes training and mentored experience. As one of my students once said to another, “Gerry can teach you to do these things in 20 minutes. But how to do it clean takes much longer.” The reason for that is that the healer interacts directly with the client’s energy field – their soul in a very serious way – and that can have some significant implications for both.
All of these may likely be involved in spiritual coaching. Everyone has energetic wounds of one sort or another. Helping people to determine their life direction and purpose always involves helping them to identify and address what is in their way or holding them back. And because “healing is teaching and teaching is healing,” it is all interrelated. I don’t believe in or support the “fix me” model of healing. As I have said elsewhere, I am always working myself out of a job. People can be shown how to do much of this work for themselves. Actually, I find that essential for authentic personal growth.
Your foundational principles emphasize humility, authenticity, and the inherent wisdom within individuals. How do these principles guide your approach when facilitating group workshops or individual sessions, and what role do they play in fostering personal empowerment and healing for participants?
The shamanic concept of being a “hollow bone” that Spirit blows through is a core principle of teaching and healing. It recognizes that the primary source for both is something larger and more powerful than the teacher or healer. There is little to no room for an egoic sense of self-importance in this work. For me, the moment I begin to believe – or even think – that “I” am doing the teaching or healing, I have gone off track.
My work, therefore, is to continually clear myself of anything that might interfere in the clean transmission from Spirit to the client or student – to be as clear a bone as I can be.
The question of authenticity can be a bit more fraught because at one level, it can easily lead to judgement of oneself or someone else. I hope to encourage people to get to know themselves well enough that they can recognize when they are pretending or when they are acting from a sense of self-awareness. Being who you are in the moment is synonymous with authenticity. See?
However, that sometimes leads to a dilemma. Unlike what some people assume, “being authentic” does not always mean being “good.” People who are genuinely mean are being authentic when they act in a mean way. To do otherwise would be inherently inauthentic.
So, if you want to be a “good, strong, spiritual person,” and you sense that you are not, you may not be in alignment with who you want to be, even though you are currently authentically who you are! It’s important to be truthful with yourself to determine when you are pretending to be that and when you have become it.
By the way, I am not a supporter of “fake it until you make it.” To me, that is an inauthentic prescription for failure. People subconsciously resist being fake for any reason. I greatly prefer, “rehearse it until you become it.” As the director and lead actor in your own life story, you can authentically try out different approaches to life until you find what fully resonates with your core sense of who you want to be.
As to the last question, yes, I am certain that everyone has direct access to a vast wealth of knowledge and guidance. That people feel they must seek access to that wisdom through an intermediary speaks only to the idea that they do not yet know how to reliably do so themselves. Most people have learned to distrust themselves in that regard, or they delude themselves that what they believe actually is true. What you believe and what is true may not be in alignment.
The best evidence may be that when people are presented with something that is “true,” they feel a sense of resonance with the energy of it. There is a deep sense of “Yes.” You can see it in other people, if not in yourself. You might say something that is in resonance with the person, and they instinctively nod, or their body agrees.
This is not about the mind or one’s cognitive understanding. I’m referring to body wisdom. The body knows and feels the resonance, not logic or reason. That is where many people get it wrong. They seem to believe that what is true will always align with what they have determined is true.
So, yes. Everyone has access to a greater wisdom than they generally know. Yet, we all have to be taught how to access it directly and to discern whether it is accurate or not. Among the things I hope to do in working with individuals and groups is to help them learn how to do both.
Once more, I am always trying to work myself out of a job. I do not want people to rely on me – or anyone or anything – to live a happy, powerful, and fulfilled life. It’s too much responsibility.
If you would like to find out more about Gerry Starnes, please visit https://www.gerrystarnes.com/services.html
