Marc Mangus’s life took a transformative turn after a devastating car accident in 2011 left him with chronic pain and a cascade of health challenges. His journey from despair to healing led him to explore alternative therapies, indigenous practices, and ultimately shamanic wisdom.
Through years of study and personal transformation, Marc found a path to living pain-free and now dedicates his life to guiding others on their own healing journeys. In this interview, Marc shares his remarkable story, insights from his training with indigenous wisdom keepers in Peru, and the profound lessons of living in harmony with spirit and the Earth.
Can you share how your car accident in 2011 shaped your journey toward holistic and shamanic healing?
I was commuting home and stopped at a stoplight at dusk. I glanced in my rearview mirror, saw a Mercedes G-wagon behind me, and assumed it would stop. It ran into the back of my car without slowing down. It crushed the frame of my car and pushed me into the two vehicles in front of me. I blacked out momentarily and when I came to, I was staring at the roof of my car lying flat. The impact had broken the driver’s seat and I was thrown into the back seat. The first responders were already there and used the jaws of life to extract me from the car. The hospital was only a mile away so it was a quick trip.
There was a junior resident on duty and after assessing me and giving me pain medication, they did a neck x-ray and sent me home. I was later to find out that I had 12 discs in my back that were herniated or injured. I also learned that soft-tissue damage in back and neck injuries is often misdiagnosed. This began what turned out to be a 12-year journey with debilitating chronic pain and continuous injury to my body from the medication prescribed. The course of treatment was to send me to a pain clinic and give me opioids for the rest of my life.
By 2013 I was in so much pain that I couldn’t work and went out on disability. If I took all the meds they prescribed I would be a zombie with no quality of life, so I was always rationing my pills and taking just enough to get by. I ran out of money and couldn’t get another job, and was feeling like I was losing everything. Things were so bleak that I became suicidal. This was the lowest point in my life. Some inner knowing urged me to keep going and take ownership of my health.
I began studying everything I could about alternative healing modalities and I tried everything – chiropractic and spinal decompression therapy, acupuncture, neuro-muscular massage, you name it. I was making improvements but they still involved a lot of suffering. I was also gaining weight because it hurt so much to move and I was emotionally eating. I was researching voraciously this whole time and began studying indigenous cultures and how they lived, dealt with pain, and their lifestyle with food.
What role did your near-death experience in 2015 play in transforming your approach to health and wellness?
One day I went from feeling normal to having a stomach ache to losing consciousness in the space of 20 minutes. I collapsed in the bathroom and had to go to the ER with blood loss. It turned out I lost 6 pints of blood in 45 minutes. The cause? The pain medication I was taking ulcerated my stomach. I stayed in the hospital for 10 days with two transfusion lines in each arm giving me blood platelets. After release, I was readmitted a week later for more transfusions. I was so weak that I had to sleep in the living room because I couldn’t climb the stairs or even bathe myself. Even walking was a chore. This of course exacerbated my weight problem.
This is when things began to shift for me. I began researching “food as medicine” and how indigenous cultures used plant medicine to heal themselves. I studied, took online classes, and began taking herbs and trying natural pain-relieving methods. I made some incremental improvements that helped my weakness, but my pain was still intense. I even took on a remote tech job to bring in some income and was able to work for a while.
In hindsight I now know I still wasn’t “getting it” and I was still prioritizing my overall wellness after working a job and living the kind of life I thought I was supposed to, accumulating material things as a way of being safe. In 2018 I fell in the kitchen and reinjured my back and had to stop working and go on disability again. Spirit was trying to show me that I needed to change my lifestyle without killing me. At this point I finally started to “get it” and I put my full attention into my recovery.
I began reading everything I could about plant medicine, both the psychoactive kind and the medicine for nutritional support and healing. I read everything by Alberto Villoldo, Don Miguel Ruiz (Sr./Jr.), Heather Ash, and many others. I took a course on natural eating called Wild Fit by Eric Edmeades. I started eating in a “plant first” way. I wasn’t completely vegan or vegetarian but I started to eat far less meat and processed food. In 2019 my marriage of 20 years ended and I moved to Oregon to help my sister take care of my aging mother. It turned out that it was for my healing as well. I had nothing to focus on except getting better.
What finally made you turn the corner in your healing journey and begin healing?
In 2021, I was getting better but still suffering from chronic pain that made working a remote job during COVID very challenging. I got an email about a Gathering of the Shamans in Sedona that May and decided to go. I couldn’t afford it but something was compelling me to go. Alberto Villoldo, Stephen Farmer, Don Jose Delgado, Heather Ash, and other shamans were there doing workshops and ceremonies. I had been reading about indigenous practices for years at this point but I had never been involved with any in person.
I was amazed and uplifted by the lectures and the ceremonies and then on the last day, I attended an “ancestral healing” workshop by Stephen Farmer. He led a guided exercise to connect with our ancestors, specifically one ancestor who had the same challenge as we currently have.
The idea is that this ancestor would help us clear this energy. My paternal grandfather Thomas Clayton appeared during the meditation. Stephen then asked for the energy of Archangel Michael to be with us to fuel and bless this exercise. I felt an intense heat behind me that didn’t burn and I saw my grandfather clearly in front of me smiling and clasping both of my hands.
What was the challenge I presented? My pain of course. I had already through my reading started thinking of Pain as a teacher and an archetype. Many indigenous cultures believe that pain appears in our lives to give us messages we can act upon to bring about our transformation and healing. I had been thinking this way for about a year. During the exercise, I felt the energy from Archangel Michael and the love from my grandfather begin to shake my spirit to its very core.
I felt my identity shatter for a moment and I felt connected to the “all that is.” Stephen led us back to ourselves and everyone began waking up or coming back to normal consciousness. I looked around the room and saw that everyone had experienced something profound, not just me. My head was swimming with thoughts of what had just happened. I slowly got up and walked outside put my bare feet on the red Earth of Sedona and lifted my face to the Sun.
I realized at that moment that I was completely out of pain for the first time in 12 years. It was like someone flipped a switch. It was gone. It hasn’t returned. I am living pain-free to this day. I still have the same bottle of pain pills I brought with me on that trip, enshrined in my bathroom cabinet as a reminder. I knew then that everything is energy and anything is possible. That was the beginning of my shamanic initiation.
How did your time in Peru with indigenous wisdom keepers influence your understanding of healing and spirituality?
It was at that weekend gathering that I learned about the 6-month training program from the Four Winds to become a Master Practitioner of Energy Medicine. It so happened that there was a class starting the next month and I joined.
It turned out to be the most profound undertaking of my life, mostly due to performing the practices so many times with the other students, friends, and family. The teachers were amazing, don’t get me wrong, but the impact on my life was learning that I can be a “hollow bone” for my clients and hold sacred space for them as they do their work directly with Source.
I had dozens of opportunities to integrate my shadows and do my work as well as the other students and teachers who worked with me. I learned through the teaching that my wounds were my power to connect to others and help them unlock their own inner healer. The shamans call this “the journey of the wounded healer” and I was on it. This is when I received my calling to be a practitioner and help others as I continued to effect my own healing.
At the end of class, there was an optional trip to Peru where you could stay up to 6 weeks and travel to the various sites in the Sacred Valley including Machu Picchu with the Q’ero P’akkos (shamans), the wisdom keepers with an unbroken line going back to the time of the Inka. I went through all of the initiation rites again at the sites with the Q’ero, traveled, lived, and ate with them. I saw what an amazing model of manhood they were for me to emulate. So kind, loving, and in a state of wonder about the world.
As much as I learned from them, I was powerfully changed by the land as well. The high Andes mountains, the Q’ero call Apus, are spiritual guardians of the land. To awaken in their presence was an incredible honor and a blessing. We also visited Nasca and felt the energy of the massive geoglyphs. I felt like I was awash in a sea of healing energy the entire time I was in Peru. Though I had never been there before, I felt as if I was home.
Can you explain how shamanic practices can address both physical symptoms and their deeper spiritual causes?
The Q’ero believe that disease and injury are physical manifistations of the energy of the Spirit and that whenever they appear, they are there to show us some unhealed part of ourselves. There is no healing the body without healing the mind, and being in harmony and reciprocity (Ayni) with everything. In fact, Ayni is the central guiding principle of their lives, as it is now mine. I realized at some point that I didn’t have a weight problem, or a pain problem, I had an Ayni problem. I was out of balance.
All the shamanic practices we learned are designed to guide the client to see where they are out of balance and offer them help and gifts in order for them to effect their own healing. The Q’ero p’akkos are not “healers” in the strictest sense, they are guides, facilitators, and Hollow Bones. The client does the work, the shaman holds space along with the lineage of all the shamans that have come before and the archetypes of the Medicine Wheel.
For example, the Illumination ceremony is designed to assess the energy centers (chakras) of the luminous energy field (LEF) and see if they are spinning clockwise and are healthy. If they are not, we are trained to “unwind” the dark energy (hucha), and add light from the Wiracocha, the 8th chakra shared by all of humanity, and then restore the proper spinning and direction of the chakra as needed. This ritual can also lead us to detect hardened, crystallized dark energy, fluid energy that moves around the LEF, energetic cords connecting the client to unhealthy relationships, and in some cases even dark entities that may be parasitic. It all begins with the Illumination.
The role of the shaman is to always ask the Spirit to “show me” and follow the guidance. We are not “doing” we are “being” – holding energy and providing space and an anchor for Spirit to do its work. For me, especially as I was learning, I found that whenever I started to think “I need to figure this out” or “I need to do something” it blocked the energy from Spirit. When I surrendered and extended trust, the energy would flow and healing could occur.
What advice would you give to someone just beginning their healing journey?
Be accountable for your healing. Do lots of research on healing modalities, but also listen to your intuition and inner guidance. If something feels wrong for you, it probably is. Don’t just do it because some expert tells you it’s the right thing to do. Everyone has their path with many milestones of learning, trauma, and forks in the road along the way. Trust the process. Surrender to Spirit and allow it to work in your life. One big realization I had is that the natural tendency most of us have to isolate ourselves when we are in pain is the exact opposite of what we need to do to heal.
Being in community with others who are on their healing journey, being outside with your bare feet on the Earth and your face in the sunlight is incredibly healing. Our Mother Earth, Pachamama, is always there to heal us, to guide us, and to support us if we only allow her to. Living with Ayni as my focus has resulted in me living a pain-free life. I take no medication and I am pain-free. I have also harmonized various other health challenges I had. This path is available to you too, as it is for all of us.
