In the heart of academia, Rachel Mann seemed to have it all—a tenured faculty position, a thriving career, and intellectual acclaim. But in December 2006, everything changed. A profound healing crisis shattered the foundations of her carefully built life, propelling her into a spiritual initiation that would awaken her deepest calling. In this intimate and powerful reflection, Rachel shares the remarkable story of how loss, pain, and Spirit aligned to lead her from university halls to the path of shamanic healing.
What was the defining moment that led you to leave your tenured faculty position at the University of Virginia to fully embrace your calling as a shamanic healer?
In December 2006, at the age of 45, I was hit with a huge healing crisis on every front—work, health and relationships. It was as if Spirit was set on bringing me to my knees to finally get me to pay attention and step up to meet my calling to be a shamanic healer and spiritual teacher. To explain what happened that day, I must give some background.
Back in high school, during the Cold War, I became interested in Russia and the Soviet Union. This led me in the 80s to earning an MA in Russian Studies and a BA in Soviet Studies. I continued from there to get a PhD in Slavic languages and literature with a major in folklore and a minor in anthropology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Suffice it to say, I was deeply schooled in the humanities and social sciences. Trauma from war, dictatorship and emigration was a running theme throughout my studies, although at that time, it was not the household word it has become in the last two decades.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991—the year I completed my PhD—academic teaching positions in Russian language and literature were being eliminated. On top of this, I was no longer interested in getting a tenure track position in the field because my intellectual and research interests had expanded out to interdisciplinary perspectives on violence and peace. This had been spurred on by a healing journey that started in my early 20s as I grappled with the impact on my life of my extremely abusive, narcissistic mother. Indeed, many times, starting towards the end of graduate school and into my professional career, I considered getting a PhD in psychology. But I resisted this calling even as the feeling grew over the years that I should be in therapeutic work and step out as a spiritual leader and teacher.
Nevertheless, after marrying a native Virginian living in Charlottesville, I ended up starting what became a successful academic career in the integration of rapidly developing digital technologies and the Web in teaching. Throughout those 15 years, I collaborated with wonderful colleagues on many creative projects in the field. As a faculty member in the Slavic Department, I also had the creative freedom to develop and teach interdisciplinary courses in what had become my areas of expertise—the external and trauma-based causes and conditions of violence, the traumatic impact and healing of racism in the US, as well as on Native American peacekeepers and the emerging therapeutic and spiritual movement of shamanism in the West. I integrated into these classes experiential and self-reflective activities adapted from Buddhist and shamanic spiritual practices. It was cutting-edge and exciting work back in the early 90s!
This spiritual leaning had been with me since young childhood, a propensity I shared with and that was fueled by my mother, whom I often refer to as a “spiritual maverick” for her generation (she was born in 1932). At a young age, she introduced me to Buddhism and the Seth Material channeled by Jane Roberts in the 70s when I was young. I read the latter when I was 11 years old and knew it was all true. My mother was also very psychic and would often share with me how she saw ghosts—a quality I admired and thought I did not inherit. That was to change!
It wasn’t until 1993 at the age of 32 that I sought out a spiritual teacher. This transpired because I developed severe, chronic pain in my body and a constant feeling of dread and fear that doctors could not diagnose. Physical therapy wasn’t working, nor conventional talk therapy. One day, I was shopping at an organic foods market, and I stopped to look at a community bulletin board. A flyer caught my eye: “Experience somato-emotional release. Bodywork for energetic healing.” Something prompted me to tear off a little slip of paper with the phone number.
A few days later, I was lying on a massage table in a quiet room overlooking suburban woodlands. A petite, brown-haired woman named Janet gently placed her hands on my clothed body. She began at my feet and moved slowly upwards. My conscious mind began to fade as the gentle pressure of her touch coaxed my body to relax. At first the sensations were pleasant. The incessant chatter in my mind faded into the background. Suddenly, I became extremely cold, and my body involuntarily started to shake. The exposed skin of my face and arms tingled with a sensation like the touch damp air. I gasped involuntarily as in my inner sight and sensing, I saw and felt the moisture of a light fog around me. I was suddenly, vividly aware of an impression of a bleeding gash in my solar plexus. What happened next was completely unexpected and ultimately life changing. I was experiencing the death of a French Holy Warrior named Jean on a field of battle somewhere in the Middle East during the Middle Ages. It was clear to me that this was a life of mine.
As the session progressed, I spoke with him and helped him deal with a deep despair that came over him in those moments as he went through something of a life review and was shown the faces of all the men, women and children he had murdered in the name of Christ. It plunged Jean into believing he was irredeemable and would not go to heaven, but to hell. Yet, I was also shown how profound was his love for His Lord Christ, as he called him. It was this that had fueled his actions. I found myself loving him even though he had killed so many. I recognized the greater meaning of his life and its relevance to my own concern since childhood about war—how his revelation had translated in my life to being an anti-violence peace educational activist.
As the session progressed, I explained to him that Jesus understands and forgives all—a belief I myself hold from the time my parents took our family to the Episcopal church when I was very young. As a ran and transmuted Jean’s physical, emotional and spiritual suffering through my own body-psyche-soul-spirit complex (BPSSC), he finally was able to accept this message of unconditional love and forgiveness. I felt his soul and spirit leave his body and go upwards to the Heavenly Realms.
When I rose from the table, I was free of pain and dread. It was miraculous and life changing. I realized that energy healing was the key to recovering from trauma and building a positive future. I contacted Janet the next day and told her that I wanted her to teach me everything she knew.
She sent me to my first Native American teacher, the Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo, who still lives in Vermont. She offers the wisdom of her Tsalagi (Cherokee) lineage, as well as of the Tibetan Buddhist Nyingma and Drikung Kagyu schools of Tibetan. Venerable is recognized as a reincarnation of a gifted lama. I went to my first retreat thinking I was going to study Buddhism. But it was the Cherokee teachings and practices that blew open my heart. I spent the next 3 years in Venerable’s Peacekeeper program and continued over the next 10 years to research Native American spirituality. In addition, I went to workshops by two western-based shamans, Martin Prechtel and Bradford Keeney, who wrote about their spiritual journeys with indigenous teachers around the world and translated them into classes in the West.
So it was that in my 30s and early 40s, three streams of my life began to converge: 1) My healing journey from PTSD and narcissistic abuse; 2) Research and study of western shamanism and Native American spirituality; 3) Interdisciplinary research and teaching on violence, trauma, peacebuilding, and spirituality. As a result of these emerging themes and the creative work I had developed, for two years prior to the healing crisis of 2006, I had been fruitlessly trying to figure out how to stay in Academia while leaving behind the administrative part of my career.
Clearly, the Spirits had another plan. Despite the therapy and healing work I had been doing for myself over 15 years and thus getting more emotionally healthy, the chronic pain worsened and lifelong problems with insomnia were actually worsening, no matter what I tried. In addition, in the mid-00s, I started having middle of the night panic attacks. By 2004, I was radically sleep deprived. I had long resisted taking pharmaceutical medications. In desperation, three years before the healing crisis, I succumbed to taking a drug called lorazepam at night to help me sleep.
Fast forward to a Thursday in late December 2006 on a cold, grey day. I ran out of the prescription and called in a refill. However, I was so busy trying up things at the end of the semester, I didn’t make it to the pharmacy. Add to this that since August, I had been embroiled for 4 months in a legal case on behalf of the university against Peter, an employee of mine whom I had terminated for serving alcohol to an underage drinker on the premises of my technology center. For several years prior, I been trying to get him fired because of how bad he was at his job and his abuse of me. Peter filed a grievance after the decision, due process given to employees.
Upon getting out of bed early on that fateful Monday morning, I found my beloved, feisty calico cat, Bea, on the floor of the kitchen, trembling and terribly sick. Upset and scared, I dropped her off at the vet on the way to work. When I arrived, my boss called and said, “The hearing officer decided to reinstate Peter. He will return to work and report to you again.” I couldn’t believe my ears! This employee had shown active hostility towards me even before his termination. Surely, it would be worse if he once again reported to me. It would truly be a nightmare.
I continued through the day worried about my cat and reeling from the news. Around 2pm, the vet called and told me that Bea was actively dying from congestive heart failure. There was no hope. They told me to come immediately so we could put her to sleep before she suffered more. I tied up loose ends at work and rushed to the hospital. I sat in that cold room holding her in my arms. She was slightly sedated but clearly having trouble breathing. I rocked and rocked her. I told her how much I loved her and how grateful I was for her presence in my life. Finally, I called the vet into the room, and, sadly, we helped her cross the Rainbow Bridge.
I was devastated. What a terrible day it had been.
That night, quite miraculously, I fell right to sleep at 10pm. Two hours later, I woke up and was surprised to feel the presence of Bea in her spirit form. I heard her say to me, “You need to step up and do what you know you are meant to do. If you don’t, you will get sicker and die young. If you think you can wait, it will only be harder.” I knew exactly what she meant. It was as if she had opened my inner knowing about my calling with a flash of lightning.
I never fell back to sleep and early the next morning, I went to my doctor’s office. I told him, “We need to do something about my sleep. This has to stop.” He stepped out of the room to get a prescription pad. In precisely that moment, after 5 days off the lorazepam, I got extremely cold, started shaking and became very nauseous. Then it felt like all my nerve endings blew out. I had gone into a full-blown drug withdrawal because of accidentally going cold turkey off the drug.
Within a few days, I realized that I was so sick from the withdrawal that I could not possibly work. As a faculty member, I was lucky to have paid medical leave. My doctor put me back on lorazepam and tapered me off over the next two months. With time to recuperate, rest and restore, I was able to sleep again.
Four months later, I gave notice that I was leaving my job. It took another year for my body to return to balance after the drug withdrawal and stress. I am thankful to the Spirits for sending my beloved Bea to deliver that all-important message. It was a radical wakeup call.
While on leave, I had been supporting my recovery with an American shamanic healer in Charlottesville whose work was anchored into the beautiful mesa practice of the Q’ero medicine people in Peru. She was also a faculty member in the Four Winds Healing the Light Body School—one of the largest and most well-known shamanic training schools in the West. She said to me, “Go study with Alberto Villoldo. He will be able to help you.” Thus, I became a student of shamanism and shamanic energy medicine. I quickly started to work with clients in 2007 on the strength of the fact that I also had training in the treatment of trauma with psychodrama and had developed methods of my own through the experiential teaching I had been doing.
I believe my healing gifts were inherited from my mother’s line. Once in the early 90s, she told me that she had shut down her abilities to foresee the future because the material she saw was too frightening. One such time was when, in her mid-30s, she foresaw her mother’s death. Then again, four years before she died in 2001, in a rare admission that she had done anything wrong (narcissists rarely do), she told me that she had attended a channeling. She shared what the Spirit had said: “You are a gifted healer. Why have you wasted your gifts?” Much as Bea had admonished that if I didn’t step up to answer my soul’s purpose and calling to be a healer, I would get sicker and die younger, my mother’s mental and physical illnesses I recognize as a direct result of her blocking hers. Indeed, she often misused them to manipulate me. shamans often tell stories of how they became very, very sick and even came close to
The way my own healing crisis unfolded is not unlike what many indigenous shamans, past and present report: often they become extremely sick and nearly die, or they get hit by lightning or have some other catastrophic accident. As they hang between life and death or go into a trance state, they tell how the Spirits made very clear that will die or even become crazy if they do not meet the calling. The most famous story is told by the great Sioux spiritual leader, Black Elk, who as a child went into a coma and had his great vision. He was told he needed to bring back their message to his people. Instead, after recovering, he hid it until the elders began to recognize in what had become his erratic and strange behavior that something had happened.
Over the 18 years since that crisis, I have never looked back. It was the best decision of my life. Since then, I have supported over 3000 people from all around the world on their healing journey and have taught Awakened Heart Shamanism, an integration of the wisdom and practices of the Lineages of Light of the Q’ero, Native American teachings of peacemaking, the practices of loving kindness and mindfulness from Vipassana Buddhism, psychodrama for survivors of trauma, and my interdisciplinary research on violence, trauma and peace.
A message I can give to those who are feeling the longing in their hearts to step up to be in service to others and the planet with their wisdom and gifts of healing is to do it before it comes to a crisis, as it did with me. Don’t doubt yourself! Trust where you are being led! Do it now! With the world in chaos and crisis, and so many in need of help, there’s no time to lose!
How does your Shamanic Somatic-Emotional-Energy Transformation modality integrate traditional shamanic wisdom with psychodramatic, somatic, and transpersonal healing methods?
Shamanic Somatic-Emotional Energy Transformation (SSEET) is a unique modality I developed integrating all my research, trauma training and personal experience as a healee and in therapy. It is founded on 4 practice pillars that I use in both single healing sessions and across the 1-1 Mentoring-Coaching Program:
- Spiritual & Transpersonal Trauma-Informed Counseling
A session starts with the client stating what they want to shift or change in their lives. In the process of a psychodynamic conversation, I guide them to make linkages from real-world challenges to their soul-based, transpersonal dimension, meaning and purpose. This elevates the process from simple “talk therapy” into a spiritual domain of understanding and expression. In turn, the process begins to activate the natural pathways of transformation within the client and readies them for the energy healing.
- Somatic-Emotional & Energetic Awareness & Release
In the beginning of a session, I guide the client in exploring the energetic and physical sensations and imprints related to heavy and positive present and past emotional experiences and processes. This triggers a response in the body-psyche-soul-spirit complex (BPSSC) that opens personal, ancestral and past life, as well as the Light Body itself. It creates an energetic pathway that I follow into the BPSSC through inner vision, sensing, feeling and subtle seeing.
During the energy healing, I may then have the client follow the promptings of their feelings and sensations to stimulate bodily and energetic releases. They may dance, shake, curl up in a ball, among other processes, in addition to vocalizations. This somatic awareness and movement facilitate the release of crystallized energies in the Light Body and trauma stored in the BPSSC, as well as limiting beliefs, soul contracts, cords, and entity attachments. I may use methods like body doubling—speaking and experiencing the client’s energy and body as a mirror and channel for their process. Or I may move, sing, vocalize and speak on behalf of the beings in the room or the client. This can be done at the beginning, during or after the energy healing itself.
- Shamanic Energy Medicine
The energy healing begins with cleansing and cleaning the Light Body and the chakras of heavy and crystallized energies. These are the surface imprints that develop from traumatic experiences such as the loss of a beloved in divorce, a breakup or death, accident, or prolonged abuse. They also build up from acute or chronic emotional states such as grief, depression, fear, anxiety, frustration, and sadness, among others. There can also be cords connecting us in unproductive, draining and unhealthy ways to people in our lives, as well as “energy darts” from our own self-criticism or someone else’s negative thoughts or words directed at us.
Once I complete the cleansing of the luminous field, I then do the deeper work that reaches deeper layers of the BPSSC. The first step is wound extraction, which in my opinion, is the central and most important feature of shamanic energy medicine. I journey in a light and open trance into the deep subconscious, or the Lower World, as it is referred to in shamanic circles, to find the actual event, whether from this or other lives, or even from ancestors. Rotating a Vogel crystal over the solar plexus or another chakra that leads to the originating trauma creating the heavy inner and outer patterns, I see, feel, sense, hear and know what happened. As I chant a healing song, the crystal sucks out the experience out of the BPSSC. It is gone, very literally. The space that remains is then seeded with the retrieval of lost, positive soul parts and/or archetypal energies and gifts that will support the client in coming into peace, balance, wholeness, authenticity and empowerment.
Other interventions may be needed, such as extracting entities from the luminous field or the subconscious. They can include lost spirits looking for connection, deceased loved ones or ancestors who cannot let go after they die and/or who want to continue to control or feed off the person, or the constellated energies of anger, fear, hatred, grief, or any other heavy emotional state. They can also be elemental beings who have been driven out of their homes and are seeking someplace to hide and find energetic food that is a match to their needs. They are very rarely truly “evil.” Usually, they are simply lost souls or miasmic constellations in the astral field of human imbalances in mind and emotions.
- Psychodrama for Trauma Transformation
Psychodrama in its classical form as developed by Jacob Levy Moreno is when a group of people use role playing and spontaneous dramatization to explore and transform a client’s or a group experience. In one version of this process, the client tells the story of a particular experience, process or trauma that is causing them difficulty or which they want to explore, and they choose people in the group of 2 or more people to play the roles of living or deceased individuals or even archetypal beings such as animals, Spirit Guides, angels, and others. In the process, there is usually a shift in the client’s self-awareness, understanding of what happened, and their inner state.
In the SSEET process, I may use this outer method, in which the client and I take on various roles important to the story and act them out. Or I lead the client into an inner engagement with parts of self, important people, helping spirits or beloved family members, animals, or other dimensional, archetypal beings as a way of creating self-awareness or an actual shift in the BPSSC. This can be done before, during or after the shamanic energy healing.
In a 90-minute shamanic energy healing session, I cannot necessarily use all of these methods, although I will engage them organically to support the presenting process. In my 1-1 Mentoring-Coaching Program where I work with clients over 9-12 sessions spread out over 4-6 months, some sessions will draw on Spiritual and Transpersonal Self-Inquiry, Psychodrama, and other shamanic tools such as ceremonies, shamanic journeying to harness a client’s highest destiny, reading the archetypes using cards, as well as other techniques.
SSEET is, therefore, a holistic method that engages every dimension of human experience from the physical and energy bodies, to the mind and emotions, the soul and spirit. It is multidimensional and intensively transformational. SSEET creates dramatic changes in a client’s inner and outer experiences over a short period of time as compared to talk therapies and other modalities. Heavy blocks are released, old traumas removed leaving the client feeling free, liberated, sovereign, authentic, empowered, and joyful.
How did you develop SSEET?
In 2007, when I finally began to support clients with shamanic energy medicine, I had many robust tools in what I call my “Medicine Basket of Love”, not the least of which is the foundational energy healing process taught by Alberto Villoldo in the Four Winds Society Healing the Light Body School. He adapted what he had learned from many medicine people, healers and spiritual teachers in his journeys in Central and South America, particularly from the Q’ero, ancestors of the ancient Inka in Peru.
To be clear, I am not a licensed clinical practitioner. However, during the 15 years of my mainstream academic career, from 1991-2007, I did interdisciplinary research on violence, trauma, peace, and spirituality. The fields I delved into included history, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and the social sciences. I was also lucky to find colleagues at the University of Virginia who were exploring similar subjects through a multidisciplinary and experiential lens.
Through what was then called the Center on Violence and Community at the University of Virginia, I availed myself of training on the integration of trauma awareness into mainstream settings called Action Against Trauma. I also participated in conferences on topics such as “Re-Imagining Peace after Genocide” and “Grassroots Activism and Rebuilding Peace Post-Civil War.” I studied psychodrama for survivors of trauma through Therapeutic Spiral International. Hence, although I was not responding to the call of my heart to get a PhD in psychology, I was effectively schooling myself in alternative methods for trauma treatment.
This was furthering and informing my journey to heal the imprints of my mother’s mental-emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse. After that first energy healing session, over the next 10 years, when I was under the hands of healers or in meditation, I experienced many lifetimes and had many vivid encounters with global trauma, past and present. I was being taught by the Spirits how to channel this pain and suffering, both personal and collective, through my own body-psyche-soul complex. It was both an energetic and somatic process. In a light trance, I would shake, tremble, and even collapse as images, impressions, messages, and visions would move through me in a transformational arc. Early on, it seemed that I had a gift for healing trauma in this way. All it took was that first session to activate it. It was a very intense and deep type of “training”! To explain it, I often invoke words by the great psychotherapist, Carl Jung as an analogy:
It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distill within the vessel of my scientific work the things I experienced and wrote down at that time…The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided….I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat of its fires reshaped my life. That was the primal stuff which compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into the contemporary picture of the world.
In your experience, how does healing individual trauma contribute to collective peacebuilding and ending cycles of violence?
When we work dynamically and energetically in the holographic, multidimensional space of the BPSSC, we are effectively shifting the experiential matrices of our family (including ancestors), communities, nations, and humanity. In Awakened Heart Shamanism, ancestors include all the lives we have lived. Jung described this very effectively in his delineation of the personal and collective unconscious. While his teacher and colleague, Freud viewed the unconscious as only personal, Jung, through his own experiences, came to understand that we are interconnected and that there are impersonal, collective dimensions of human experiences, roles and identities.
Shamanic energy healing quite literally reveals this truth. When I journey into the deep layers of the psyche—the subconscious psychological and energetic matrix of my client which I refer to as the body-psyche-soul-spirit complex (BPSSC)—to extract the wound, I am often led to further heal the ancestral pattern going back even hundreds or thousands of years. I will see, feel, sense, hear and know them and recognize how a traumatic event or process has been carried through transgenerationally. I may also see a major collective trauma or negative set of beliefs that have arisen out of distorted personal and cultural beliefs and practices. We humans are masters at forgetting our original spiritual instructions to live in harmony and balance with others and Mother Earth—to grow more and more into compassion, peace and love. We can fall into fear that then morphs into violence from subtle to overt towards self or others. This is the classic story of Adam and Eve! It is an archetypal journey for us.
In my own healing journey, when in meditation or under the hands of energy healers, I often would have experiences and be given visions of ancestors, past lives, groups and communities, as well as of humanity. In one such process, I found myself channeling the consciousness of a French Holy Warrior dying on a field of battle in the Middle Ages. I was able to experience his anguish and torment as he was thrown into a life review and recognized how his murder of so many had been wrong. As I lay on the massage table under the hands of my healer, I was able to engage with him, recognize the love that had driven him, though misplaced, and give him forgiveness. I then felt his soul and spirit leave his body.
In another example, I was shown a scene of a battlefield soaked with blood and heard Mother Earth’s voice compassionate voice saying she understood the folly of it all, even while she was healing the lost souls who died there. I have seen and experienced many lifetimes of violence—this has been part of my soul gift in this life—to be the portal to transmute what I call the “bloody stream” of humanity’s consciousness and history through time.
I have experienced the same processes and had the same experiences as I have used shamanic energy medicine to heal my clients’ traumas. Working in this field of personal to collective experience, I am raising the client’s vibrational frequency to one of enlightenment, illumination, love and peace. This then reverberates out to all the people and beings who are interconnected, from family on out to humanity through time. In the holographic matrix of reality, linear time—past, present and future—is an artifice. Through shamanic energy healing, we work in eternal time and, as such, are actually changing the past and creating a new future.
Therefore, the more deeply and persistently we heal our own trauma, the more we shift the collective consciousness.
What are some of the biggest challenges people face when transitioning through major life changes, and how do you guide them through those transformations?
Major life changes include many things: the end of a relationship through breakups, separation or divorce; the loss of a job or a change of career; becoming an empty nester, a loved one’s illness or death; moving from one home to another; or one’s own illness and/or impending death; graduating from school, among others. Sometimes these transitions are more inner than outer—such as a person realizing that they need to make a change in their inner life or in their work, relationships, spiritual life, and/or finances. Though all outside appearances may not seem to be shifting, an inner pressure or unfulfilled longing can begin to intrude.
Change is a constant in nature and in human life. We cannot escape it.
When we experience inner and/or outer pressures to change, we are feeling the movement of the destiny line orchestrated by the soul prior to incarnation into new experiences, explorations, and/or life stages. The soul map is not fated, nor fixed—we all have free will once we are here. But it does stimulate us through signs and synchronicities, intuition, dreams, and/or visions when transition is needed or coming, whether personal or collective (such as war, climate events, diseases like COVID, etc.).
Living in a physical body in a physical world can be very hard. It is often difficult to accept and embrace change—or even to glean what change is needed. Even the subtle intimations of potential shift can be troubling and cause physical, psychological and energetic discomfort and outright imbalances such as mental health crises and physical illness, as was the case with me. We may not understand why it is happening or what it means. We may want to hang onto the old and resist the new. We may be afraid of what we may lose and not be able to see over the horizon to the more positive and life-enhancing experiences coming!
Probably most of us have experienced how funerals and weddings cause everyone to act out and become, well, weird! Long-held hurt and grievances against one another come out. This is one way to understand how less obvious transitions can bring to the surface old traumas and outdated beliefs about self, life and the world. It is as if there is an opening of a Pandora’s Box shining a light into what has been forgotten or suppressed. Or, if someone really desires to make a radical change in their life, they may find themselves coming up against blocks, some understood and others obscured, though felt. Many of my clients have a desire to step up and offer their wisdom leadership, healing and intuitive gifts in service of others as healers, spiritual entrepreneurs, thought leaders, authors and creatives in all domains.
I work in a powerfully effective transformational space with clients. This is facilitated by the fact that I have opened Sacred Space and called in Spirit-God-Creator, Soul-Higher Self, Star Beings, the Cosmic Consciousness of Mother Earth, Elemental Beings of Light, Angels, Archangels and Ancestors in the Light—all by whatever name. They literally arrive and a portal between dimensions—a power center—open. The veil between the worlds, an artifice of our physical, ego consciousness, is lifted so we are working across the bridges of the BPSSC. Every dimension and level of our being are engaged. In this regard, SEET differs dramatically from conventional, mainstream talk therapies.
Shamans across cultures and time have understood that change can be demonstrably made easier and focused on the highest possible outcome by working with ceremonies and rituals using sacred song, sound, scent, movement, and energy healing that break down these artificial barriers between us and the interdimensional matrix of reality.
This is why I created SSEET. I partner with my client to energize their intention for change and then work within this sacred container. We talk and unpack their hangups, fears, stories of trauma, challenges, wishes, longings, and desires within this transpersonal container and link them to their deeper meaning and purpose. This uplifts the hardships, past and present, into a higher vibrational frequency that begins to change the inner balance between body, psyche, soul and spirit.
Using shamanic energy healing, ceremonies, and the other foundational practices of SSEET, we then work together to transmute the traumas that are creating the blocks, both subtle and overt, holding them back. We examine and dismantle old beliefs that no longer serve them and release them in ceremonies of fire and water, or through somatic processes. This not only happens in sessions with me, but with the homework I give them through the online program portal where they have access to meditations, visualizations, ceremonies, and audio and video wisdom teachings. They are empowered to step up and do their own inner work outside of sessions to amplify the benefit of what we do together.
Through my Shamanic Coaching-Mentoring Program, I help clients who want to step up to be in service to others figure out what they are meant to do. They come away with a clear understanding and vision of how to manifest it with courage, confidence and purpose.
How do you see the role of sacred activism in today’s world, and what steps can individuals take to align their spiritual path with meaningful social change?
We are living in the time of what the Q’ero medicine people of the Andes in Peru—descendants of the ancient Inca and my teachers—call Pachakuti, a cosmic transformation of human consciousness into higher levels, and a transition from an era of darkness into one of light. There is both great promise and peril as humanity navigates this death and birthing process into what could be a new world. I say “could”, only because human beings have free will. As such, there always remains a possibility that there will not be critical enough mass to continue the shift to our highest destiny, our highest potential.
Nevertheless, I still believe that we are already well on the way, despite all present appearances of growing authoritarian movements, Russia’s war on Ukraine, among other wars and violent conflicts around the world, including Palestine-Israel, more and more extreme weather, mass shootings, and escalating attacks on those who are scapegoated and labeled as less deserving of life and land. I have seen and hold in my own mind and heart visions of a Great Peace coming for future generations. Where humanity has finally learned the hard way that domination, oppression, and violence, from subtle to overt, solves nothing, does not provide safety and prosperity, and only creates greater suffering. We will come to know deep down to our bones that we are interconnected in a dynamic web of life and, as such, that harming others—including our Earth Mother and the many beings with whom we share her bounty and who feed us—ricochets back onto us in the present and poisons our children’s future.
Though there will always remain outliers who want to reach for the cudgel and sword— those who, out of fear, wish to invade, abuse, steal, and hoard—the vast majority will hold a different awareness, as well as access to and knowledge of both ancient and new processes, technologies, techniques, and tools for de-escalation, healing, resolution, and reconciliation. Indeed, I believe that our systems of governance, guidance, and the distribution of resources will be set up in ways radically different from what we have today. No one will lack.
This is our highest destiny line—our most beautiful future. When will it really take hold? Perhaps 7 generations hence, or more. Right now, that may seem like a long, long time. But, in the way of the medicine people and shamans through time who understand that past, present, and future are one, it is really all being created in the now. We are already there.
And you are part of this great movement. You are a Sacred Activist for Peacemaking in service of ending violence. You have been called to the medicine of personal and global healing.
In the fall of 2019, before COVID had shaken us to our roots and Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine—two profound turning points and opportunities in the 21st century for us to wake up—I was given a message from those I call my Guides, Guardians and Teachers in higher dimensions. They told me that it was time to specifically call forth those, who, as they put it, “carry the medicine.” They carefully chose this term from the way it is used by many Native Americans as descriptive of the gifts of healing and prophecy found in their healers, spiritual leaders, and teachers.
I experience it as a feeling of power, or what I prefer to call soul force, in my belly. It is the potent inner fire of the healer—a pulsing, natural energy. Though everyone has access to it, in some, it is more obvious and apparent, perhaps even from birth, due to their mission in life. As has happened with many shamans around the world, it can be triggered or awakened by a near-death experience or a cataclysmic accident, such as being hit by lightning. Sometimes the depth of our personal trauma awakens it. The deep inner work of healing our wounds can also activate and feed it. This force of spirit within can be ignited by spiritual study and initiation into a wisdom lineage where this medicine has been passed down for generations.
I want to speak now directly to your readers: I am here to inspire you to this medicine calling. Perhaps you are already there or perhaps you are new to it. That is why you have picked up this book. You have a sense that you have healing gifts and that you need to step up and claim them in service to others in multiple ways and arenas—whether as hands-on healers like myself, doing transformational work in your family, workplace, community, or even on the global state.
I know some remarkable people who carry the medicine out in the world. One trains people in the military on how to minimize and recover from war trauma. Another works in the UN to bring new ideas based on ancient cosmologies and technologies on bridge-building and collaboration. Another was activated by having three near-death experiences into research on NDEs and bringing it out into the world as an author and speaker. Another collaborates with scientists and doctors on the use of entheogens to heal trauma and addictions. And a number of my clients are psychotherapists and even ministers who are integrating core shamanic principles into their work. They all share the worldview that unaddressed, unhealed trauma is at the root of humanity’s entrainment into violence. They may also reach to other spiritual wisdom streams such as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and others. And I know there are thousands, if not millions of others in every walk of life and every spiritual, religious, and secular setting working on the frontlines of human suffering and potential.
I call them Sacred Activists for Peacemaking.
All are needed to continue to magnetize a destiny line to a Great Peace with both practical action and spiritual wisdom. This pathway to a better future has been building momentum year after year, generation to generation, decade after decade. There is a clear map from the 18th century to the present, with a quantum leap made as a result of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the work of M.K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. These peacemakers and events made it virtually impossible for us to ever again to deny or justify oppression and war, as much as some still try. Though this bloody stream continues to manifest, it is within an entirely different framework. Humanity has become more awake, more conscious, and conscientious. We have also become braver in remembering our history of and calling out tyranny.
To heal and end the transgenerational cycles of trauma and violence that are at the root of these ills, we can no longer solely rely on mainstream political, societal, psychological, and medical solutions. They have long been proven to be not enough. No. We must also engage with the mystical and energetic dimensions of reality that are right at our fingertips. We need to address multidimensional levels of human experience and consciousness—body, mind/emotions, soul, and spirit. Spiritual practices, tools, and wisdom that awaken higher consciousness, heal wounds, and build the fires of compassion, love, and peace must be brought to this pressing work.
This defines Sacred Activism for Peacemaking.
My personal activism is in part done through offering to the world the teachings, tools, and practices of Awakened Heart Shamanism, a vibrant, earth-rooted, mystical, healing, and spiritual pathway and way of living that brings together all of who I am, and everything that I have studied—my academic research on trauma, violence, and peace, the mystical cosmovision and tools of the Q’ero medicine people of the Andes, the practices of awareness and lovingkindness of Buddhism, and heart-opening songs and chants adapted from the Cherokee. In the spirit of my beloved teachers, Awakened Heart Shamanism brings us into communion with the unconditional love-light of Mother Earth, All Our Relations, the Cosmic Mother/Father, and the Great Beings of Light, Goddesses of land, waters, sacred sites, and Mountain Spirits, and gives us resilience and peace, and supports us in our journey as Sacred Activists for Peacemaking. They are all here to help us through the great transition of Pachakuti. They are here to show us how healing is Sacred Activism for Peacemaking & Ending Violence.
How will you know if this calling and path is for you?
Perhaps you have instinctively climbed to the top of high mountains, or descended into the darkness of caves, or stood on the edges of oceans, rivers, and lakes to find peace. Mother Nature is your refuge, your temple, and your healer. Maybe you intuitively create personal ceremonies using prayer, stone, fire, water, flowers, or other elements. Perhaps you have long collected feathers, crystals, rattles, and drums. Maybe you wish you could speak to or actually have heard the voices of animals, birds, trees, and plants, mountains and streams, oceans, stars, the moon, and sacred sites, among others. Do you have an unexplained and unusually spiritual understanding about the lives and travails of friends and family, or about events unfolding in the outer world that comes to you through empathic, intuitive, more subtle, and non-ordinary ways of seeing, hearing knowing, feeling, and/or sensing? Have you been on a journey to heal personal and even ancestral trauma and have a sense, perhaps still yet to be fully articulated, that you have developed therapeutic and energetic gifts and wisdom to offer others and the world through the spiritual and healing pathway called shamanism?
If you answered one or more of these questions in the affirmative, you are not alone. In my shamanic healing work, I have spoken to hundreds of individuals who fit this profile, no matter what religious or secular tradition or belief system they were raised in or follow.
It doesn’t matter if you are already well-rooted in shamanic practice or are only beginning to listen to your deepest intuition that this may be your path. Awakened Heart Shamanism and initiation into the vision of Sacred Activism for Peacemaking can deepen what you already do and know, or it can invite you into a new beauty way based on healing service to others, humanity, and Mother Earth.
And now, because Awakened Heart Shamanism, like all shamanic pathways, provides vital maps for how we heal, how we live, and how we navigate the constellation of body, mind-emotions, soul, and spirit, I share with you here how you can journey through this book from the first to the last page. I want you know what you are getting into, where you are going, and how along the way, your highest destiny will be magnetized so that you can fulfil of your mission and purpose in life.
The time is now! Let’s go! There’s no time to lose!
Rachel Mann PhD is a shamanic healer, spiritual teacher, coach-mentor, Sacred Activist for Peacemaking, and social scientist. For two decades years, she has supported 3000+ clients worldwide with shamanic healings, teachings on Awakened Heart Shamanism. Her work is trauma-informed and spiritually grounded. She can be found at rachelmannphd.com or contacted at [email protected]
